The renovation was hard work and costly. The Austens put a lot of heart, soul and money into it. But in October of 2000 the couple sold the house and moved with their family to a new one in Hollywood.

The reason? The Austens were unable to get their two children, now in the first and third grades, enrolled at Buist Academy, a respected magnet school in downtown Charleston.

The Austens turned to Charleston Catholic School, a costly private alternative that gave them diversity and academic excellence. They had to sell their home to afford it.

The family now has a new house in a great neighborhood, but Amy Austen drives 40 minutes each morning, to transport her children downtown to school. As president of the school's Parent Teacher Organization, she has afternoons when she chooses to stay downtown, letting her children do their homework at Brittlebank Park, so she can return to the school for meetings that night. Jon Austen makes a 40-minute commute to his office on Charlotte Street, near the old house.

Amy Austen compares the situation to when Hurricane Hugo ripped the roof off her house more than a decade ago. She got a nice new kitchen but had to deal with the damage and heartache first.

"Not getting into Buist was like another Hurricane Hugo for us," she says.

Their story is not an unusual one in the Lowcountry, where property is costly and the performance of local public schools has been poor.

This dynamic has led many, even some who were formerly opposed to the idea, to support further exploration of school choice in the state. School choice is a generic term that covers a lot of ground. It can mean anything from charter and magnet schools, to interdistrict and intradistrict transfers, to the controversial idea of vouchers and tuition assistance.

Any way one looks at it, school choice means an alternative to the traditional method of staffing, funding and filling classrooms. For many South Carolinians, who have grown tired of residing near the bottom of the country in educational scoring, it is an idea worth trying.

"We've outgrown the whole public school system. It needs to be changed," Amy Austen says. "I don't think the government schools can keep up with the needs. I think maybe private institutions can do it better."

VALUE OF COMPETITION

Gov. Mark Sanford has traveled the state in the past few months, unveiling his legislative agendas for the coming year, most of them dealing with the economy.

But up to this point the governor has been fairly quiet on the issue of education reform, an agenda item that figured prominently in his campaign. A major component of that reform was school choice.

While the state's budget crisis has dominated much of his, and the public's, attention recently, Sanford is expected to soon roll out a detailed plan on school choice. Chances are it will resemble closely the plan he promoted during his campaign.

At the time, the governor proposed a detailed, multilayered agenda that suggested radically increasing the amount of choice offered in South Carolina. In short, the plan called for:

-- Offering mandatory intradistrict open enrollment and voluntary interdistrict open enrollment.

-- Changing the state's charter school statutes to eliminate the racial quota provision, allow for multiple charter school authorizers and remove the restraints on charter school fiscal autonomy.

-- Facilitating home schooling by allowing parents to form collaborative groups, by instituting a sales tax credit for home-school educational materials and by opening academic extracurricular activities to home-schooled students.

-- Instituting more private school choice by establishing "academic passports" for students attending failing schools, which would allow a student to transfer to another public school or to a private school and give the student $3,550 a year to help pay for tuition; by establishing corporate tax credits for education passports; and by instituting disability scholarships.

It is a fairly wide-reaching plan that, if successful, would change the face of education in South Carolina. But some question whether the change would be a positive one.

Most people fall into two camps when discussing school choice. On one side there are people, such as Sanford, who say competition in any arena is good. On the other side are people who argue that enabling this kind of choice simply means abandoning schools rather than fixing them.

"It comes down to a philosophical belief in the market system," the governor says. "Either you believe that competition is good for something or you don't. But I can't think of one instance where competition doesn't improve a product."

Few could argue that South Carolina's schools are not in need of improvement.

In the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, South Carolina's fourth- and eighth-graders improved to the national average on math scores, but eighth-graders remained below the national average in reading.

The eighth-graders ranked in the bottom half of the nation on reading, scoring the same or better than only 17 states.

State Superintendent of Education Inez Tenenbaum supports some forms of school choice, but she worries that in a race to address the state's shortcomings in education, more problems will be created.

"Just saying we are going to offer more school choice does not address all of the issues," she says. "School choice is not a panacea. You can't introduce competition without the money to fund it."

Sanford says that in order to turn the long-standing problem around, the state will have to make drastic changes in the way it educates its children.

"And the answer is not pouring more money into the system," he says. "Look, we are never going to have as much money as Connecticut. They are a richer state. The only way to outflank them is to approach this through a market plan."

VOUCHERS

Perhaps the hottest button on this hot-button issue is the concept of vouchers, or as they are called in Sanford's plan "academic passports."

Vouchers allow students to take a certain portion of the money earmarked for them in a public school and use it elsewhere. Specifically, Sanford's plan allows for $3,500 of the state's $7,900 per student to be used.

The governor's idea is patterned closely on one enacted in Florida in 1999. "Opportunity Scholarships," as they were dubbed in that state, allow students enrolled in failing schools to transfer to other public schools or use a voucher for tuition and fees at private schools.

In the 1999-2000 school year, two schools in Florida were designated as failing. Of the approximately 900 students in these schools, 57 enrolled in private schools and 83 moved to another public school. Since then, Florida has had no failing schools.

On the 2003 school report cards, 46 South Carolina schools were rated unsatisfactory and 150 schools were below average, according to the Education Oversight Committee.

Critics of vouchers say the concept takes not only money but also attention away from public schools. The national PTA and Parents for Public Schools organizations are against them.

"Vouchers would divert public resources, not just money but also people's commitment to schools," says Jim Hunter, the president of Charleston County Parents for Public Schools. "There's a lot more to what makes schools successful than just money."

He says vouchers would let schools and communities off the hook for institutions that need improvement.

"I also question whether it would actually provide a meaningful opportunity to students who are not presently having good public education opportunities," says Phyllis Gildea, the president of Charleston County's PTA.

Vouchers often allot a relatively small amount of money, which critics say would barely make a dent in private school tuition. That's one reason many private school officials say vouchers would be used primarily by parents who already could afford a private education.

When asked whether her family would have taken advantage of a voucher program to enroll their children in Charleston Catholic School and remain downtown, Amy Austen says she is unsure.

"We might have given it a try," she says.

CHARTER SCHOOLS

School choice goes beyond the voucher debate.

Many of those who oppose that initiative approve of alternatives such as magnet schools or charter schools. The idea of greater freedom in curriculum decisions and school level accountability seems appealing.

"What I would like to see is funding for public education at a level that supports choice," says Charles-ton County Superintendent Maria Goodloe, "so public schools can create equitable options for parents."

Sanford's plan calls for mandatory intradistrict open enrollment and voluntary interdistrict open enrollment, subject to certain restrictions: adequate space, availability of appropriate services, the child's ability to meet eligibility requirements; the child's admission not creating a need to modify the curriculum; and parents being responsible for transportation.

Between 1993 and 1999, the percentage of school districts nationwide allowing intra-district transfers, or those within a given district, increased from 13.8 percent to 24.7 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In the South, it rose from 10.4 percent to 22.1 percent, even as the percentage of districts with magnet school programs dropped from 7.7 percent to 7.3 percent.

A report from the center says the increase may explain why the percentage of children attending their assigned public school declined from 80 percent to 76 percent during that period. The 1999 data suggest "that more students attend chosen public schools when more choice is available," the report states. The proposal to allow interdistrict transfers, which would let students transfer between districts or from a failing school to a private school, would break new ground.

Many parents are turning to these new choices in the public school system.

Treesha Sheppard chose to enroll her two children at the Charleston Development Academy this year because the school could offer smaller classes, more one-on-one time with teachers and more opportunities, such as field trips to the Gibbes Museum of Art. All this comes for the price of a regular public school, free for taxpayers.

"I was impressed with the mission of the school," said Sheppard, who works as a teacher assistant at the charter school.

A charter school is a public school that continues to get public funds for students, but instead of being under the control of the local school board is run by a group of parents, teachers and community members. Typically such schools have flexibility not given to traditional schools, which is intended to encourage educational innovation.

The Center for Education Reform, which advocates school choice, reported nearly 2,700 charter schools operating in 36 states and the District of Columbia in January and serving more than 684,000 students.

South Carolina has 19 charter schools. Five of those opened in Charleston County this school year. The largest of those, James Island Charter High School, converted from a traditional high school. It was the state's first public high school to do so.

Sanford recently dropped into the school to talk about the need for more schools like it. The governor says one of the state's biggest impediments to increasing the number of charter schools is that local school boards are the sole authorizing authority.

Groups looking to start a charter school must send applications to both the Charter School Advisory Committee in Columbia and the local school board. The committee makes sure the application is correct and then gives the local board the OK to consider the bid's merits. This has to change, Sanford says.

"We have to have multiple authorizers," he says. "What happens if a certain school board is simply opposed to the idea? If there is only one authorizer, then that group is out of luck."

The governor points to nearby North Carolina, which enacted its charter school statute the same year as South Carolina. North Carolina, which has multiple authorizers, now has more than 100 charter schools.

A bill in the House, sponsored by Rep. Harry Stille, D-Abbeville, would create a statewide charter authorizing committee.

Whether the bill will get any play in the upcoming legislative session remains to be seen.

"It's hard to say," says Speaker of the House David Wilkins, R-Greenville. "Some people will push hard for it, and some won't. But I can tell you this: There is an awful lot of support in the House for the concept of school choice. So we will be listening to all the ideas."

Though she may disagree with some of Sanford's plans, James Island Principal Nancy Gregory says his proposals have merit.

"The concept and what he's going after is going to drive schools to look and hold to a standard of excellence instead of hiding behind excuses," she says. "I think he's on the right track, and I believe it can't do anything but make us stronger."

What people have to realize, Gregory says, is that parents and students also carry a responsibility when it comes to choice. Parents can't take their children out of one school and place them in another and expect a "miracle transformation," she says.

Parents need to be willing to be committed to the school, Gregory says, and they need to help their child step up to meet higher expectations.

Click here to return to story:
http://www.charleston.net/stories/113003/sta_30choice.shtml