Governor wrong to say investment in education not buying progress

I’M NOT SURPRISED when some loudmouth holding forth in a barbershop moans that he’s sick of paying taxes for schools because they never get better. After all, the poor guy just doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about.

You can’t make the same excuse for the governor of South Carolina. The chief elected official of our state, who has a staff to help him run down and analyze facts, should know better.

So it’s particularly alarming when he goes on live television and tells us that even though “in the last 30 years we’ve raised K-12 funding by over 130 percent,” the money’s not doing us any good.

In his State of the State address last Wednesday, he cited as evidence the fact that “last August, we learned that our state’s SAT scores once again ranked next-to-last in the nation — the third consecutive decade that we’ve either ranked last or next-to-last every single year.”

He further noted that “not a single school district in South Carolina met the new federal guidelines for adequate yearly progress,” and that “almost a full third of our eighth-graders tested below basic on the PACT test.”

Pretty devastating stuff, unless you know that:

• Our SAT scores are not only getting better every year, they’re getting better faster than anywhere else. The 38-point improvement in our average scores over the past five years is not only the largest gain in the nation, but four times the national increase. We haven’t caught most of the nation because we started so far behind. But we’re getting there, so we’re doing something right.

• “Adequate yearly progress” is not based on any kind of objective national standard. It’s a measurement of whether each school is meeting its own particular state’s standard. And South Carolina’s standards, according to four independent national studies, are among the toughest. The Princeton Review said our testing system is the 11th most demanding. We could do great on AYP if we set our sights low, but which would you prefer — better AYP ratings, or better-educated kids? We’ve set stretch goals. When the Education Accountability Act was passed in 1998, we expected it to take a good 12 years to reach them. We’re moving steadily forward.

• On those PACT tests established by the EAA, our students have made significant improvements across all grade levels, subjects and demographics.

To sum up: We set tough goals in 1998 — standards that we expected large swaths of our students not to meet right away. But we also committed ourselves to helping them eventually meet those goals. And they are doing better, by almost any objective standard you choose.

So it’s particularly distressing when the governor picks and chooses and misrepresents the facts to give the impression that our recent investments aren’t paying off. They are.

I don’t think he did this on purpose. I believe Mark Sanford is an intellectually honest man who wants the best for this state, regardless of the political consequences. But he evidently hasn’t been boning up on education as hard as he has on the costs and relative benefits of other parts of state government.

When I asked him about that the day after his speech, he admitted that maybe he didn’t have “perfect knowledge” in this area. He said that while his own conservative/libertarian impulses make him suspicious of the notion that increased government spending can be the answer (or at least part of the answer), he was open to arguments to the contrary. “I like going where the facts lead,” he said. I believe him. So here are some more facts. Some I just knew (as the governor should have known). The rest I got from a fact sheet prepared by the much-maligned state Department of Education a full two weeks before the governor’s address:

n• Education Week ranked our state No. 1 in the nation for improvement in teacher quality in 2003 and 2004, and rated us seventh for our improved academic standards and accountability.

• Thanks to the investment we’ve made in full-day kindergarten, the number of S.C. children scoring “ready” for first grade is at an all-time high. The biggest improvements have been among minorities and the poor.

• Only 10 states out-performed South Carolina fourth-graders on the Nation’s Report Card, based on standardized tests done by the federal government.

• We rank third in the nation in the number of nationally certified teachers — thanks to cash incentives offered to teachers willing to undergo the grueling process of obtaining that status.

• Our eighth-graders met or exceeded the average in the Third International Math and Science Study, which stacked our kids up against those from 38 nations.

• High school exit exam scores have climbed by 3.8 percentage points over the last three years.

• On the nationally standardized TerraNova test, our kids now exceed the national average in reading, language and math.

• Only three states have seen their averages increase over the past five years on the ACT college entrance exam. We’re one of those states, despite the fact that the number of our kids taking the test doubled during that period (which normally lowers averages).

There’s more, but you get the idea. Oh, and a word about that “130 percent” increase over 30 years: That occurred at the exact time that we were actually trying to educate black kids for the first time in our history, never mind that we were also finally trying to educate everyone to where they would have options beyond working in a mill.

The governor’s right that money isn’t the entire answer, and that structural change is necessary. I agree, if you’re talking about meaningful structural change such as that discussed in the above editorial. (If the governor’s willing to take on district consolidation, no one will cheer louder than I.)

But don’t argue that the additional money we’ve put in over the last few years hasn’t moved us forward. The facts just don’t support that.

Write to Mr. Warthen at P.O. Box 1333, Columbia, S.C. 29202, or bwarthen@thestate.com.