BACK IN 1997, Gov. David Beasley invited our editorial board to a meeting to discuss the findings of a special commission that had come up with a bold plan for public education reform — a plan that would become the Education Accountability Act of 1998.

Businessman Larry Wilson, a leading member of the PASS Commission, did most of the talking. The point I remember him making most clearly was the fact that if this strategic shift in our approach to public education were to bear fruit, we would have to stay the course.

No matter how many politicians came along with pet projects to put their own stamp on school reform, he said, their initiatives would have to be rebuffed if they detracted from the goal of accountability. The effort would have to defy the political cycles that had caused our attention spans to be too short. If politicians derailed it, the effort would have been for naught. He and the other business leaders on the panel were determined to hold the schools and the politicians accountable. The point was to make sure the money we spend on public schools is not wasted.

Proponents of Gov. Mark Sanford’s tuition tax credit bill — who want to take us in a whole different direction — like to mock those who say we should “stay the course” on public education. They have this fantasy that “staying the course” means “throwing more money” at the “education establishment” so they can keep on “doing things the way they’ve always done them,” thereby “failing the children.”

It seems that “Put Parents in Charge” advocates are so unplugged from the public schools that they don’t realize that we are already on a course of sweeping public education reform that is producing remarkable results.

So for the benefit of those who have missed out on the last seven or eight years, let’s review. In a nutshell, here’s what the EAA did:

• It called upon the state to draft stringent standards in a variety of subjects and grade levels — not standards based on some pie-in-the-sky theories, but hard-headed goals that would produce not only an educated citizenry, but a skilled work force for the state. The business people on the commission were frustrated with the fact that graduates weren’t prepared for the jobs they had to give, or for further education. They were determined to fix that.

• Once the standards were drafted, the state had to develop a battery of tests carefully tailored to measure whether students were actually learning the skills called for in the standards. Thus was the Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test born.

• After the tests were given and graded, the state would be required to issue report cards showing how each student, each school and each district scored. These report cards went home to parents. Just as importantly, they were made available to everybody else in the state, so that taxpayers could see exactly what they were getting for their investment.

This bold plan had to be sold to the public and to the General Assembly. That would not be easy, because the “education establishment” the PPIC folks talk about were against it. They didn’t like any plan that came from “outsiders” such as businessmen.

But despite many efforts to weaken or kill it, Republicans managed to pass the plan. It passed despite the objections of the so-called “educrats.” By definition, accountability was not, and is not, “business as usual.”

The first year report cards came out, there was consternation in much of the land. As The State reported on Dec. 5, 2001, “South Carolina schools know today how high a mountain they must scale to prove they consistently do a good job educating children. The state’s first school report cards, released Tuesday, show a majority will require a herculean effort to reach that goal...”

Over the next three years, most schools made that effort, and it showed. By 2004, only one district in the state — Bamberg 2 — had a rating of “unsatisfactory.” Eight districts had been in that category the year before. More remarkably, among schools with high numbers of poor students 29 percent were graded “excellent” or “good,” compared to 13 percent in 2003.

Also in 2004, 56 percent of S.C. schools met all their goals on the federal standard of “adequate yearly progress” — 12 percentage points better than in 2003.

That’s what’s going on in public schools today — for those who haven’t noticed. That is the course we’re on, the course this newspaper is defending. It is a significant departure from the way we did things in the past. It is real education reform, not the “status quo.” Remember that the next time tax credit supporters say their opponents are resisting reform and defending failure.

This process has survived a number of shifts in the political winds. It survived a Democratic governor who wasn’t crazy about it, but had to go along since the business community was so committed to it. It has survived being underfunded by the Legislature. It has survived the election, in the same year that it passed, of a Democratic superintendent of education who had no ownership of it to begin with. But she has embraced it and made it work.

And now, irony of ironies, a Republican governor is trying to persuade our state to abandon the concept of accountability. And make no mistake, that is what his plan would do — shift money from our increasingly accountable, and increasingly successful, public schools to private schools that would not have to meet the standards South Carolina has set.

Gov. Sanford has even announced his own committee of “outsiders” to study education reform from scratch. It’s as though, for him, the last eight years haven’t happened. But they have happened, fortunately. And we need to stay the course.

Write to Mr. Warthen at bwarthen@thestate.com.