In recent days, a trio of bills has been promoted by Gov. Mark Sanford's office and the state Chamber of Commerce that appears to represent the extent of the governor's education agenda in 2003. Sadly, they ignore the issue that looms largest on education's horizon: compounded budget cuts and their impact on public schools.

One bill requires school districts to build smaller schools, which the governor calls "neighborhood schools," and to break existing larger schools into smaller units called "schools within schools." A second bill requires all state teachers to assign conduct grades to students on regular report cards.

Of the three proposals, these two are unnecessary, as districts already have the freedom to implement such measures if the district deems them important and devotes funding to them. In Irmo-Chapin, for instance, there already exists a school-within-a-school model, and many of the state's schools would already qualify as "neighborhood schools" as the proposed bill defines them.

In districts -- or even individual schools -- where administrators believe conduct is an issue, report cards already include conduct assessments, without state mandate.

Ultimately, the first two bills represent solutions in search of a problem. The governor has crafted a "restructuring" of public schools merely for the sake of restructuring, which has never been an adequate reason for taking any action. Since his proposals include no new funding, he seeks to saddle school districts with yet another costly but unfunded mandate.

The third proposal carries the title, "South Carolina Education and Economic Development Act," and its chief focus may be to ensure that students graduating from South Carolina high schools are prepared to take minimum-wage jobs in the state's service sector.

The bill proposes that the state reorganize its entire high school curriculum around future employment options rather than traditional academic achievement. It establishes a new "coordinating council" that will include the head of the state's Employment Security Commission, and "ten representatives of business and industry, one of whom the governor shall appoint as chairman." In scope and reach, this council would exist parallel to the state's Education Oversight Commission.

In essence, this bill proposes to turn the state's schools into employment training facilities in which core subjects such as English and mathematics are regarded as job skills rather than traditional academic pursuits. Interestingly, the Chamber of Commerce, which drafted this language, proposes to make private schools and home schools exempt from this new focus on employment training.

Indeed, it is important that high school graduates who do not intend to pursue further studies are able to enter the work force. That is precisely why South Carolina high schools already offer a vocational education curriculum, serving thousands of students annually. No additional bureaucracy, no additional oversight by business and industry, and no additional intervention by the governor will improve those students' skills -- but adequate funding for their education might.

Taken as a whole, these proposals for education range from doing nothing to doing the wrong thing, but they do not include adequate funding for doing any of what we know to be the right things: reducing class size, improving teacher quality and boosting student achievement.

To a narrow constituency of those outside public education, these bills may represent action. But to students, parents and the education community, mere action without good purpose -- and action without adequate funding -- undermines the mighty work that educators and students have accomplished together.

Funding is the issue; what has emerged from the administration and its allies to date amounts to window-dressing at best. If Gov. Sanford and others seek to have a positive impact on public education in South Carolina, they might begin with setting a priority to fully fund our schools to maintain our progress of recent years.