A MEETING last week between State Education Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum and Gov. Mark Sanford was not -- as some might have expected -- a donnybrook. The two are basically cordial people, and their best manners were on display at the session, one of a series the governor is holding to look at state agency budgets.

If there was anything maddening about the discussion, it was the way it often focused on tiny fractions of state educational spending. "What does that get?" one Sanford staffer inquired of the $174,000 devoted to the state Teacher of the Year program. The answer includes a $25,000 bonus for the overall winner and $10,000 bonuses for the state finalists who don't win the top honor. The awards amount to merit pay for teachers -- the successful adoption of a private sector principle for public sector employees.

An extended discussion concerned the state operation of the school bus fleet. There's no doubt the crummy condition of state school buses and the cumbersome requirements of running them are a burden. Solutions to this drain on the state budget are not easy to envision.

Gov. Sanford correctly noted that local districts have little practical stake in helping the bus system operate at maximum efficiency since there's little direct benefit to their bottom line. Ms. Tenenbaum and other state education officials say private companies have expressed some interest in running urban routes on a contract basis, but say those companies are not interested in bidding for routes in the state's far-flung rural districts. Privatization, at least statewide, does not seem to be the immediately workable solution.

However, Gov. Sanford's chief of staff, Fred Carter, correctly noted that most of the solutions to the school bus crisis that can be envisioned right now probably aren't the answer.

"Isn't it true that it's going to have to be something innovative, something creative, something other than an approach with bailing wire?" he asked.

Absolutely. Whatever that is will have to be safe, effective and efficient. And if there is a better way to get kids to school than the system we have now, it is long past time to try.

Arguably the most important information presented at the session went by with virtually no discussion. It is the growing disparity between the academic performance of affluent or white children and that of poor or black children. This national phenomenon, known as the achievement gap, grew worse for some key students in South Carolina between 1999 and 2001.

When you look at all of the top scorers on the Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test, those students who are white or whose families have the means to pay full price for school lunch have improved their performance. Those gains have not been matched, on average, by students who are black or who qualify for free- or reduced-price lunches, a key indicator of poverty.

That is a monumental budget issue for the state. The good results for some students show the benefit of at least a decade of educational reform that didn't come cheap. Abandoning expensive, statewide educational initiatives, such as a requirement that all high school students complete more courses to graduate, is a non-starter.

The results show a critical need to invest in programs to help lift the lowest performers. These children need the preparation of programs such as First Steps and Head Start. They need individual academic plans and tutors. They need meaningful, structured after-school activities. Their parents need encouragement and support to take on the increasingly difficult task of being a teacher's partner in discipline and education. The school can't do the job alone. Unfortunately, generations of inadequate preparation have left many parents ill-equipped to be their children's best teachers.

The federal government has required that our state and all others erase the achievement gap with the legal mandate that all students nationwide perform at a B-level by 2013-2014. And despite the high immediate cost of remediation for these hardest-to-teach kids, it's the most efficient use of state resources long-term. South Carolina has proven incapable of rehabilitating adults in large numbers once they go wrong. Now, we don't have enough money to pursue the old, more expensive strategy of just throwing them all in jail.

Solutions to this crisis were not evident at last week's session, which was only an information-gathering meeting. However, it seems clear already that Ms. Tenenbaum will ask for a great deal more state money to be devoted to K-12 education than Gov. Sanford, or the Legislature, will be inclined to give next year.

That's too bad, because South Carolina is in need of some bold, innovative solutions to this crisis. We need the kind of results that aren't going to be achieved with bailing wire.