LET'S PUT THE CHILDREN FIRST

The South Carolina General Assembly has convened this month amid reports that our legislators will be addressing the way education is funded in our state. After forty years of “fixing” South Carolina’s schools, let’s hope they will seize the opportunity to think comprehensively and to truly change the culture in our school districts where half of all students entering high school drop out, and so many of those who remain chronically fail.

One of the advantages of South Carolina’s last-in-the-nation performance in education is that it provides the political impetus to think “outside the box.” Too often our goals in education, while well-intentioned, have been far too modest. For example, a former State education leader pledged that our State’s education performance would eventually rank among the upper half of states. But what does it mean to rank among the top 25 states, when our nation’s performance in math, reading and science ranks at the bottom of the world’s industrialized nations? Aren’t we aiming too low?

We need to acknowledge that while our legislators can provide powerful incentives for excellence, money alone is not the answer to what ails schools, including those in South Carolina. This has been proven many times, but nowhere as dramatically as in Kansas City, Missouri.

In 1985 a federal district judge, concerned about segregation and low-performance among minority students, ordered the state and the Kansas City school district to spend nearly $2 billion over 12 years to build new schools, integrate classrooms, and bring student test scores up to national norms. The money on a per-pupil basis was higher than any of the 280 largest districts in the country.

But rather than focusing on the individual needs of students and intensive tutoring to remediate problems, the money bought higher salaries, 15 new schools, an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a 25 acre wildlife sanctuary and zoo, a robotics lab, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, field trips to Mexico and Senegal, and taxis to replace school busses. After twelve years, test scores were no higher and there was more, not less, racial segregation.

In South Carolina some of our districts with the highest per-student spending have highly competitive administrative salaries, comfortable and modern district offices, and shameful school facilities for teachers and students. As with most bureaucracies, when money is targeted at organizational framework, there is a tendency for administrators to spend money on themselves first, and what little remains trickles down to teachers and students in the classroom. Our current system also results in many rules and regulations that tie the hands of principals and teachers. These rules and regulations result in a lot of uniformity among schools, but often don’t encourage excellence.

To ensure that education spending is directed to the classroom, where it is needed, many are proposing a concept called Weighted Student Funding. This is a per-student, rather than a per-district, approach where all students are assigned a foundational, or base, educational dollar value. That value is “weighted” higher, if need be, based on the relative difficulty to educate the student. In this way, economically disadvantaged and Special Education students would receive a greater amount to address their needs.

Once an appropriate amount of educational aid is assigned to a pupil, the student carries that money to his or her school directly, in the form of “real dollars,” and school-based budgeting is done annually based upon the total generated by all students who attend that school. With students free to choose among an array of schools, including charter schools, this mode of funding encourages excellence because schools are accountable to families for their performance, rather than merely to administrators for compliance with rules and regulations.

Many of South Carolina’s dedicated teachers recognize what needs to be done to improve the performance of their students, but their hands are tied by a command and control system that looks more like a totalitarian regime than the United States of America.

Even our students recognize the problems. I recently received student essays from a Midlands area high school in which one student concedes that “the only way for a district to get higher test scores is by rigorously challenging students in its schools.” The same student acknowledges the problem of social promotion, while another states that “our government is putting the money into the hands of irresponsible leaders who care more about themselves than helping our state get out of the position that it is in.”

By shifting funding from large, impersonal district bureaucracies to principals, teachers, and students, we can ensure that our education tax dollars are being used where most South Carolinians want them used, for the benefit of our children.

Every year in the life of a child is precious, and parents and their children do not have five or ten years for our Legislature to address the crisis that currently exists in our schools. Let’s encourage our legislators to put aside half measures and compromises and instead ensure that every family in our state has access to schools that work for children, and not just for those who oversee them.