At least one prominent S.C. Republican, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, is willing to speak the truth about the public schools. It's wrong for Gov. Mark Sanford to talk of subsidizing private schools, Graham says, when the General Assembly can't get it right on public school financing, which is "inherently discriminatory."

The senator referred to the many small rural S.C. school districts where real property is worth so little that the school mill levy doesn't raise much money. The state makes a half-hearted effort to close the funding gap through the Education Finance Act, which contains a wealth-based distribution formula that redirects money from relatively wealthy districts, including Horry County Schools, to poorer ones.

As Graham rightly notes, the money that poor S.C. school districts receives from the General Assembly is a pittance in contrast to need. A school district budget per pupil that might be adequate in a middle-class school district is woefully inadequate in a poor one.

Kids from impoverished families are harder to teach than middle-class kids. There is no tradition of learning in their homes, and they enter schools with small vocabularies. The S.C. Constitution requires the state to correct this imbalance, and that can only be accomplished with money. This argument is the basis of the lawsuit, ongoing in Circuit Court in Manning, that eight rural school districts have filed against the state.

Graham believes suing the state was the right thing for the school districts to do. "If I had a child in a school district that was chronically underfunded because the funding mechanism was inherently flawed," he told a group of journalists in Columbia earlier this month, "... I would complain. I would go to court."

Why is Graham alone among the state's political leaders in shining a light on this problem? Sanford, in contrast, is focused on giving future state and local revenue, via tax credits, to S.C. parents who want to put their children into private schools.

The governor and other supporters of the Put Parents in Charge Act spread the truism that private school subsidies would not harm public school finance. But Graham notes, "I'm not too sure about that. That does, I think, undermine public education in the long term."

How can he help but be right about this? Consider: Public education consumes more state and local tax dollars than any other public purpose. (This is as it should be, considering the importance of an educated populace to the future of our communities.)

If you divert future tax dollars into the pockets of parents disaffected with the public schools, that prospectively deprives the state and school districts of future money they'll need to finance public schools adequately. The pie, over time, grows smaller.

Put Parents in Charge Act supporters insist, with some justification, that public schools on average aren't as good as they should be, considering how much money the taxpayers invest in them. But the poor school districts that Graham so valiantly defends drag down the averages precisely because the state doesn't trouble to give them enough money to be successful.

Sanford seems destined to be remembered as an education governor after he leaves office in two - or six - years. Will he be remembered as a governor who, to use Graham's verb, undermined the public schools by creating a new revenue stream for private schools? Or will he be remembered for leading the charge to get public schools right? If Sanford listens to his friend Lindsey Graham, it will be the latter.