Obviously, the governor and General Assembly will be taking a close look at the S.C. Department of Education's request for an increase of $457 million in next year's budget. In making the proposal last week, Education Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum cited S.C. Education Oversight Committee research that showed the new federal standards to be among the factors that will force a boost in state education appropriations.

The superintendent told The Associated Press of the EOC study: "It recognizes that education is under-funded." She called upon lawmakers to support the Education Accountability Act it passed in 1998 by providing the revenue needed to carry out its mandates, contending: "If we're going to pass legislation, we're going to have to stand behind our goals."

Considering the state's budget problems, the General Assembly is going to have to make some hard choices in many areas, including education. Short of a new source of revenue, how is a state with consecutive years of shortfalls going to boost the education budget by nearly a half billion dollars?

The EOC study projected that the new federal standards and state requirements would require additional funding ranging from $23 million to more than $500 million, depending on the student-teacher ratio. That's a remarkably wide range. As Gov. Mark Sanford pointed out Friday, a day after the Education Department announced its $457 million request:

"We've had very significant increases in education funding over the past 20 years and yet we still rank next-to-last in the nation in SAT scores, next to last in graduation rates and recently found out that none of our school districts were able to meet the new federal standards for adequate yearly progress. We now spend right at $8,200 per student on public education in South Carolina, so it seems to me that we've got a pretty clear choice -- we can either keep pouring billions of dollars into that system, or we can reform it so that parents have more choices in the education marketplace and more education dollars are actually making it to the classroom."

After months of hearings, the governor is scheduled to unveil his new budget in early January. Clearly, from his recent comments, he still has hopes for some sort of voucher system for the public schools.

But Ms. Tenenbaum also has a point. If the state and federal governments are going to set down educational mandates, they have to be prepared to fund them. They also have an obligation to re-evaluate those mandates to determine if they are living up to expectations or are financially realistic.