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EDITORIAL
Judges Can't Fix Schools
Only legislative change can rescue poor districts from minimal standard
If one point is clear in Lee County Circuit Judge Thomas Cooper's ruling Thursday in the school-finance lawsuit against the state, it is that the judiciary can't improve public schooling in South Carolina. Only political action in Columbia can ensure that kids in poor school districts attend school in decent buildings staffed by well-trained teachers. Chances that such action will happen seem slim.
The root problem, as Cooper's ruling makes clear, is that the S.C. Constitution sets the school-quality bar much too low. In allowing children in poor school districts to attend school in dilapidated buildings and to be taught by minimally prepared teachers who are too few in number, Cooper said, Gov. Mark Sanford and the General Assembly comply with the law.
Blame this injustice on the S.C. Constitution's requirement that schools provide children with "minimally adequate" educations - a post-Reconstruction standard aimed primarily at ensuring that S.C. children could read and write. You don't need modern school buildings and well-paid teachers to do that.
Virtually all South Carolinians, of course, aspire to educate their communities' kids to a much higher level than "minimally adequate." But the school districts that routinely exceed that education quality standard, Horry and Georgetown counties among them, have an advantage over poorer school districts.
Their local school mill levies raise enough property-tax money to entice good teachers into their classrooms and to keep class sizes relatively small. As well, their local school bond issues raise enough local tax money to finance modern, well-equipped school buildings.
The residents of the eight plaintiff school districts and their poor peers, however, cannot locally raise the money necessary to move their schools beyond "minimally adequate." The mill levies in poor school districts raise chump change because property values are low and tax bases are stagnant. The school mill levy in Horry County, in contrast, raises millions upon millions of dollars, thanks to the county's strong tax base.
The state "compensates" poor school districts for this local tax-wealth disparity by giving them higher levels of state aid per pupil than wealthier school districts get. But as the eight plaintiff school districts argued in their lawsuit, that state aid doesn't come close to giving their schoolchildren educational opportunity equal to that afforded kids in wealthier school districts.
Unless it's reversed on appeal, Cooper's ruling constitutes a judicial withdrawal from this debate. It will be up to the politicians to fix this disparity. But current officeholders show no inclination to acknowledge - let alone correct - their unfair financial treatment of youngsters born into communities where wealth is scarce. Indeed, the 2006 General Assembly, which convenes Jan. 10, seems set to ratchet down local spending on public schools statewide via property-tax "reform."
Buying into the pernicious falsehood that there is no connection between money and school quality, they seem bent on reverse equalization of school spending - forcing wealthier school districts, over time, back down the education food chain to the "minimally adequate" level. How depressing it is that the same politicians who pay lip service to developing a knowledge economy in South Carolina seem clueless about what it takes to create one.
