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Article published Feb 6, 2005
Put Parents in Charge Act: Obligation to our public schools gets sidestepped by politics in a tax-credit gambit

RICHARD W. MILLER
For the Herald-Journal

Let me see if I get this right. Gov. Mark Sanford and his party's Legislature willfully ignore a 30-year-old statute requiring a fully funded base student cost to educate our children. So public schools are under-funded by $377 per child -- a significant portion of the state's required $2,234 base student cost -- in the 2004-05 budget alone.And in spite of the under-funding, we outpace the nation in improving students' scores on standardized tests and rank highest in the nation for improvement of teacher quality.A rational person might argue -- as the Herald-Journal opined a month ago -- that this demonstrates all is sufficiently well in public education, that the combination of tight-fisted budgeting and high expectations has yielded results, however painful to the educators and children involved. Rational people can find the equation's silver linings.But our governor and his ideological kin from distant capitals find only fault. Schools aren't performing? It has nothing to do with their being under-funded, Sanford & Company say. The solution is to give parents more choices.What?Steve Morrison, one of the attorneys representing poor, rural school districts in Abbeville v. South Carolina, recited declarations by former governors during his closing arguments in Manning recently. Gov. Miles McSweeney in 1903 sought improved funding to public schools. Gov. Coleman Blease in 1913 wondered aloud whether budget writers had any sense of shame for their un-deeds.Lawmakers continued, shame notwithstanding. Superintendent James Hope in 1932 warned that their inattention to public education restricted the rights of our children in a democratic society.Gov. Robert McNair lamented in 1969 that our dropout rate approached 50 percent. Gov. Dick Riley advised in 1984 that investment in education was investment in economic development. Riley got further than anyone else, convincing voters to take matters into their own hands to fund the Education Improvement Act.Morrison's history lesson teaches that rational men have witnessed the need for adequate, equitable, better-funded public education for a century and that legislative budget writers have adopted other priorities.That brings us to the present. Blessed with those same willful State House budgeteers who sidestepped funding public schools in the past, today's governor challenges them to speed up their strangling of public education under the banner of choice.Why?Call it the perfect storm. Well-heeled voucher advocates from Michigan, Texas and elsewhere troll the nation for fertile ideological soil. South Carolina's middle class is squeezed by a sluggish economy, but legislatures of the past decade already cut taxes to the bone, leaving no more goodies to distribute. And K-12 public education is the state budget's largest single expenditure -- now around 36 percent -- making it also the biggest target.It's no stretch to imagine the cynical strategy that birthed the so-called Put Parents in Charge Act: Children can't vote their own interests, and poor parents of poor children won't take time to read fine print. So by casting a message promising school choice to poor parents, the Sanford administration can give terrific new tax credits to the wealthy and to corporate interests, reduce the general fund and subsequently shrink the size of government.If some public schools are closed in the process, and some students are shuffled, confused and fall through cracks, it's just evidence that one must break eggs to make omelets.Is it any wonder, then, that this administration ignores the collective advice of U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, Gov. Riley, School Boards Association President Leni Patterson, South Carolina PTA President Chuck Saylors and Spartanburg County District 3 Superintendent Jim Ray, not to mention members of The SCEA, the largest association of education professionals in South Carolina?No. Nor is it a mystery that this administration ignores Keith Ray, Furman University's associate chaplain recently elected to the Greenville County school board. Ray points out that studies of voucher programs in other states show no greater academic performance among their students. He notes that blaming educators for under-funded, low-performing schools doesn't wash and that the voucher scheme drains necessary dollars from public education and other state obligations.There shouldn't be any confusion here. The SCEA and every other rational body in our education community oppose this act because it's poor policy. It seeks to dismantle guaranteed public education in our state. It drains public dollars from public schools, and it favors children in private and parochial schools over public schoolchildren. It benefits parents who already buy private and parochial education.Furthermore, it benefits corporate contributors, it includes no accountability under the Education Accountability Act standards that apply to every traditional public school, and it provides no guarantee that children will have equal access to education.If that's not enough, we oppose it because it does nothing to improve the quality of public education guaranteed by Article 11 of our constitution to all of South Carolina's 670,000 public schoolchildren.Dr. Richard W. Milleris executive directorof the South CarolinaEducation Association.