SIX YEARS AGO, South Carolina students first sat for the Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test. The youngest of those children are in ninth grade today. They are the first complement of our public school students to have taken the exam in third through eighth grades. For those young people, the introduction of this test may seem a lifetime ago. But in the long history of our state, we remain in the earliest days of what must be a sustained movement toward excellence.

The release of 2004 PACT scores last week shows the wisdom in this long-term, comprehensive, standards-based approach. Students in grades three through eight were tested in math, science, social studies and English/language arts. That results in 24 statewide scores, 21 of which were up in 2004. Only the scores for fourth-grade math and sixth-grade science and English/language arts saw declines.

Other results saw some impressive gains. Third-graders overall turned in the best results, with 86 percent of them meeting state standards in English/language arts and 83 percent in math. Third graders meeting the state social studies standards rose 11 percentage points to 72 percent.

There was progress in the important area of closing the achievement gap. African-American third-graders bettered the statewide improvement in social studies by 3 percentage points, and those living in poverty exceeded the statewide improvement by 4. In fifth-grade English/language arts, black students exceeded overall improvement by 5 points and children on free or reduced-price lunch did so by 4. If South Carolina is ever to live up to the promise of equal educational opportunity for all, students in those groups must continue to improve more rapidly than the state average.

Certainly for the individual students and schools involved, the higher scores represent individual accomplishment. But the implication for our state is much greater — and certainly more meaningful than the decline reported the week before in the narrower SAT test. The architects of this standards and accountability system sought to craft a movement toward school excellence that would outlive the whims of any political season. It is a testament to these founders’ wisdom that their movement has held out until today, and is producing results.

Those founders were, by-and-large, outsiders to the legislative process. They were our state’s business and economic leaders. They saw the great drain that an inadequate school system places on our state’s economic future. These caring individuals took the time to research, craft and launch a statewide movement for improvement. Their successors in the leadership of South Carolina’s business and political communities today must be equally committed to funding and sustaining long-term educational improvement.

We must not sacrifice our students’ progress and potential to political whims of the moment. That includes the particularly foolish notion that draining public school dollars to pay for tuition tax credits would somehow represent progress. What South Carolina and its students need is a stronger, better-funded commitment to the proven route of standards and accountability for better schools and better outcomes. If state leaders stay the course on this well-conceived plan, 2004’s gains on PACT scores will prove to be but incremental steps toward a brighter future for all those who grow up, learn and live in South Carolina.