If the views of the two candidates to replace Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, R-Charleston, ever become embedded in public policy, U.S. public education as we know it would become weaker and less effective. What prompts this grim observation were troubling remarks that the candidates - Democratic S.C. Education Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum and U.S. Rep. Jim DeMint, R-Greenville - made during their joint appearance Saturday before the S.C. Parent-Teacher Association.

Tenenbaum decried what Democrats depict as a $6 billion shortfall in federal school payments to public schools nationally. At first glance, this may seem a reasonable position. Congress mandates that the states have special education for physically and mentally disabled children, for instance, but has never paid its full promised share of the added cost.

But Tenenbaum's fundamental stance on the federal role in public-school funding, of which her remarks Saturday were an offshoot, is troublesome. Her campaign Web site promises that "she will fight to make the federal government pay its fair share [of the cost of school improvement], which will also stop costs from being passed along to S.C. property owners in the form of higher taxes, as they are currently."

She appears to have bought into the pernicious thinking, rampant since President Bush and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., teamed up in 2001 to craft the No Child Left Behind act, that the federal government should take a much larger role in public school funding. Public school funding has always been - and should remain - a state and local responsibility.

Moreover, property taxes should remain - as they have been for more than 200 years - the bedrock of the state-local public school system. Why? Because that tax is tied directly to the value of land and the improvements on it - real wealth. Federal payments for any purpose, including public schools, are instruments of debt because the federal government is broke.

DeMint, to his credit, understands this. His offense Saturday was spreading the equally pernicious notion that the key to public school improvement are federal subsidies that encourage competition from other forms of schooling - federal tax credits for parents and businesses that donate money to schools.

Unless DeMint is willing to force non-public schools receiving such subsidies to adhere to the same school-improvement standards as public schools - the S.C. Palmetto Achievement Challenge Tests, for instance - and to accept the subsidies as the full price of tuition, this idea is hollow, even meaningless. As he says, more money for public schools doesn't necessarily buy better results, but South Carolina already has a strong school-improvement program that tax credits or other subsidies for private schools would only undermine. Besides, as he should know, the last thing the federal government needs is another tax giveaway that exacerbates the deficit.

What's needed in the 2004 campaign to replace Hollings are hard doses of academic and fiscal realism in both camps. That way, voters can make valid judgments about which candidate has the better take on public education.