Stavrinakis's Amendment 26 tabled

Note: Following is an encapsulation of actions taken and remarks made by legislators during today's debate. While this note does reflect remarks made by these lawmakers, it is not a full and verbatim transcript of the remarks.

Rep. Leon Stavrinakis's Amendment 26: No poor child is going to escape any "failing" school in South Carolina and go to any private school as a result of this bill.

We're going to take a nice vote now, to give the same tax deduction to public school parents that we're giving to parents of home schools and private schools.

White moved to table; Stavrinakis requested roll call.

Vote: 64-45, tabled.

Anthony's Amendment 25 tabled

Note: Following is an encapsulation of actions taken and remarks made by legislators during today's debate. While this note does reflect remarks made by these lawmakers, it is not a full and verbatim transcript of the remarks.

Anthony's Amendment 25 eliminates the PASS test and uses another test that can apply to private schools as well as public schools.

White moved to table; Anthony requested roll call.

Vote: 56-55, tabled.

Smith's Amendment 23 tabled

Note: Following is an encapsulation of actions taken and remarks made by legislators during today's debate. While this note does reflect remarks made by these lawmakers, it is not a full and verbatim transcript of the remarks.

Rep. James Smith's Amendment 23 seeks to establish accountability.

Smith: This is an important amendment. We want to spend state dollars responsibly and accountably. We expect that of our public schools. Without this amendment, we're spending $37 million without accountability.

We ought to want high standards, demand excellence and performance, whether in our public education system or this new system.

There's no accountability for performance, no standards for what is taught. We will be doing a disservice to these students.

We're making the decision to spend $37 million when we just passed an appropriation bill that failed to meet the base student cost.

If we know today we're funding the base student cost at less than what the law demands, we admit we're not funding a minimally adequate education, what the law requires.

We've set a standard of passing bills that are facially unconstitutional. Our Constitution states as follows, No money shall be paid for public funds nor shall the credit of the state...be used for the benefit of any religious or private institution.

It's pretty clear. That's exactly what you're doing with this bill.

Members, I think this is important. We take an oath to defend the Constitution.

If you're going to do that, at least adopt this amendment. I understand if you think it's okay to spend public dollars on private schools, but at least make sure you do it in a responsible way and implement Education Accountability Act standards.

Rep. Brian White moved to table the amendment; Smith requested roll call.

Vote: 64-47, tabled.

History repeats: The State on vouchers, 2007

It's possible that our leaders will pull out their warmed-over voucher bill this week for debate in the House.

Haven't we been here before?

We have. The State newspaper published the following editorial on March 27, 2007, almost five years ago to the day:

LET’S SAY THE city police have abandoned some neighborhoods. When residents complain, instead of sending the police back in, the city council tells them to hire private security guards and send the city the bill. The council also tells residents in the gated communities who already pay for extra private security details they can stop paying property taxes.

When critics point out that companies won’t go near the most dangerous neighborhoods, city leaders assure them that more will open up shop now that government money is available to pay them. If all this means there’s less money for the city police, well, so be it.

Ridiculous, right? Every member of the city council would be kicked out on the street in the next election — if they weren’t tarred and feathered first.

Yet this is essentially what the House will be asked to do this week when it comes to public education.

That’s right. It’s time for the voucher showdown in the House. That might seem odd, since there have been no committee votes, no subcommittee hearings on the bill to subsidize private schools by providing vouchers to poor kids who attend “failing schools” and largely illusory tax credits to everyone else.

Because the legislation will be offered as an amendment to the 4-year-old kindergarten bill or the public school choice bill, we can’t tell you the exact details of the voucher/tax credit plan that will be proposed. In fact, most House members probably won’t find out until just minutes before they have to take a vote.

Details are important, because some ways of subsidizing private schools are more wasteful and more antithetical to public accountability for tax dollars than others. But every proposal that has been made public is bad policy that would do nothing to improve the public schools that most students will always attend, and could do them great harm, by further eroding public support and involvement. The versions that have been made public so far wouldn’t even help the middle-class families who are struggling to pay for private school or to home-school their children, because fewer than a third of South Carolinians pay enough income taxes to benefit from tax credits.

Supporters say they’re trying to “rescue” poor kids from failing public schools, but that’s at best an illusion. All they’re doing is throwing tax money at private schools, no questions asked. Here’s what that means: The best private schools won’t accept students who truly need to “escape,” because they’re too far behind to meet those schools’ standards. The taxpayers will subsidize some schools that manage to discriminate on the basis of race or social class or who knows what without acknowledging it. Some fly-by-night schools will pop up to take students the good schools won’t accept, but with limited state requirements, they’ll probably do a worse job than the public schools those kids “escaped.”

Even if every private school in the state did an outstanding job, most students would continue to attend the public schools. But with “choice” available to everyone, the Legislature would feel no obligation to do the hard work of improving our public schools. And it does require work, not just a blind faith in the power of competition, and it requires tools that the Legislature has refused to give to principals and teachers.

Our state constitution requires us to make sure every child has the opportunity to get a good education. The way to do that — and in so doing to make South Carolina a more prosperous and attractive state — is to improve our public schools, not to give up on them.

Anderson Independent Mail weighs in against vouchers

The headline tells the tale: "Here we go again."

Editors of the Anderson Independent Mail, hometown newspaper to Rep. Brian White, chairman of South Carolina's House Ways and Means Committee, have issued their position on the newest-and-unimproved version of the voucher-and-tax-deduction bill sure to arise in the next couple of weeks.

Funding private education with public money via tax credits or other means has been a divisive issue in South Carolina for almost a decade. It continues to rear its head in each legislative session, usually aided by the same lawmakers who bring it up every year. And each session, it fails.

The current session should end on that same note.

Elegant simplicity.

The latest version, sponsored by Rep. Brian White, R-Anderson, and Rep. Eric Bedingfield, R-Greenville, was advanced by Ways and Means by a vote of 16-8, the Associated Press reports. Sixty lawmakers have signed on as sponsors. Parents will be able to take a $4,000 tax deduction per child for tuition paid, $2,000 for home-school expenses and $1,000 for parents who send their children to a public school outside the district.

The proposal won’t come up for consideration until after the budget debate, White said, and then just in negotiations after the Senate passes its spending plan. But it’s all been said before. The biggest difference in this plan is merely an accounting change: tax deductions rather than tax credits.

Donors to new nonprofits that give scholarships to poor and disabled students can claim tax credits for those donations. Yet few students will be helped by parents’ ability to claim tax deductions if paying for school up front isn’t possible, or if their child fails to qualify for a scholarship to help the donors’ tax liability. The two highlights of the proposal add up to just one thing: less money for public schools.

Only thing missing is the reference to the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right-wing organization that incubates bad ideas and distributes them to state legislators in the form of "model" legislation.

It's like buying a term paper: All you have to do is change the title, the page numbers, maybe edit the footnotes, and slap one's own name at the top. Voila!

Over the years millions of dollars in out-of-state money rolled in — and will likely continue to roll in — to advance school choice via contributions to political campaigns.

It’s not about advancing education. Why should out-of-state donors care about South Carolina’s children? Apparently some lawmakers don’t; why expect a stranger to?

When funding for public education is diverted to private education, we all lose. Why is it so difficult for some lawmakers to grasp that an educated populace, regardless of whether the taxpayer has a child in the system, is vital to the state overall, both economically and with respect to business development?

Instead of looking for ways to take money from the public schools — after already sending our per-pupil spending to levels of more than a decade ago — we should be looking more closely at ways to help public-school students thrive. While that doesn’t mean more money is the answer, it insults us all when political motivations are disguised as being “for the children.”

White’s proposal is somewhat cheaper than past versions, according to the AP, but one glaring omission in his plan is there is no proposal on how to pay for it, nor how to make up the estimated $37 million reduction in state revenues in one year alone.

If the people funding all this legislative push to further damage public education ever deign to visit South Carolina, let’s be sure to show them the truth: overcrowded classrooms, demoralized teachers and thousands of students who are tacitly being told they’re not as important as they — and their parents — always hoped.

Thank you, editors, thank you.

One more thing and then we’ll descend from this familiar soapbox for the day. Democrats, reports The State newspaper, “argued that the legislation lacks accountability. Republicans countered that parents would hold the schools they choose accountable on their own.”

Unlike in public education, however, teachers and administrators in private schools don’t have to listen. And, despite any personal convictions about education, by law they don’t even have to care.

Cobb-Hunter raises equal-standards argument in voucher bill

Although House Ways and Means Chairman Brian White told WJBF yesterday that he has enough votes to pass his $37 million voucher-and-tax-deduction bill from the House, Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter has raised concerns about using public dollars without public accountability.

At the committee meeting, State Representative Gilda Cobb-Hunter, D-Orangeburg, said the plan also doesn't hold private schools to the same standards that public schools are required to meet. She asked supporters, "Why are we still shifting public dollars to private schools but we don't want private schools to be judged by the same criteria?"

Apparently, Cobb-Hunter's question in the committee meeting wasn't answered; no answer was reported by WJBF.

Cobb-Hunter wasn't alone in raising concerns about the bill:

Jackie Hicks, state president of the South Carolina Education Association, says, "We want reforms. Families of children want reforms. So why not focus on reforms instead of taking money and giving it to private schools? Because when you talk about giving each student a $4,000 voucher, then you are taking that money out of the public school system."

Again, WJBF offers no data to respond to Hicks's concern.

One has to imagine that Cobb-Hunter's question has an answer, and that Hicks's concern has a response. Perhaps our media are exhausted of the debate and are waiting for new news to report. Look: Squirrel!

Meantime, WJBF stopped at Covenant Classical Christian School and found two private-school parents, including one who teaches at the school, who are thrilled to get paid for their choice to send their children to private schools.

"Mine! Mine! Mine! All mine! You can't have any!" the wealthy parents said, clutching at their publicly-funded vouchers and racing past the long line of poor peoples' children holding outdated textbooks and broken pencils. "My children are more important than your children! And give me my tax deduction!"

No, I'm kidding. That last bit in italics didn't really happen. The jury will strike that testimony from the record. Here's what WJBF really reported from the two parents who love the voucher bill.

Edye Moran has two sons at Covenant Classical Christian School in Columbia and says families make a lot of sacrifices to send their children to private school. She's happy to hear about the bill. "We believe that, as citizens who pay taxes, we should have the ability to have a choice like this," she says.

Yes, and hundreds of thousands of other parents who also pay taxes wish they had the option of sending their children to traditional public schools whose programs, services, faculty needs and classroom resources are fully-funded; but we live in South Carolina, and South Carolina's lawmakers don't make that choice available to them.

Deborah Bian-Lingle, a mother of three daughters educated in a private school, says, "It's not going to hurt the taxpayer. What it's going to do is assist parents to be able to place their children in the school of their choice."

In addition to teaching French at the private academy whose parents stand to collect huge benefits from the voucher bill, Bian-Lingle is a Richland County GOP precinct officer.

Indeed, it doesn't hurt our taxpayers, except that a smaller General Fund means fewer resources for public education AND every other public service that's funded by the General Fund, which means that local counties and municipalities may have to raise local property taxes to cover the costs of local programs and services; and higher local property taxes will land on the backs of individual property owners, because large corporations don't have to pay property taxes in many case, thanks to the incentive package crafted by lawmakers to persuade those corporations to operate here.

So I guess the voucher bill will hurt taxpayers in the long run, after all. Hmm. It's strange how things look different when you consider the long-term view and others' perspectives.

The State offered a little more detail of the committee debate, but not much more.

The committee approved an amendment requiring that benefiting private schools post online results of students' standardized tests.

Republicans refused attempts to require they use the same standardized tests as public schools.

That's the only way to get a true performance comparison, said Rep. Michael Anthony, D-Union.

Why wouldn't private academies want to use the same standardized tests as traditional public schools, if we're going to be funding private education at those schools? Is there something to hide?

Educators need full restoration of salaries before bonuses

This is embarrassing.

A salary is compensation for work. A bonus is a reward.

For four years, South Carolina's electeds have frozen -- withheld -- restricted -- effectively cut educators' salaries. Educators went on working, prices went on rising, cost of living went on growing, so the real value of educators' pay went on shrinking.

Now, despite South Carolina's uber-regressive tax policies and thanks to deep budget cuts in recent years, it is enjoying a windfall revenue surplus of nearly a billion dollars.

Time to restore those frozen salaries, right?

Sure, that would be logical, so that wouldn't be our lawmakers' first instinct. In South Carolina, we finally come around to doing what's logical, rational and good a century or two after everyone else. We're not what you call "early adopters" of good ideas. Bad ideas, on the other hand, get us out of bed in the morning before the roosters.

That is the only thing that explains today's news that a proposal to give state workers and educators a one-percent "bonus" has floated to the top of the pool.

House Minority Leader Harry Ott says he will try to push through a 1 percent bonus for state workers and teachers in the state budget.

Harry Ott's a good guy. His intent is noble: Get a few more dollars in the pockets of people who are struggling and who are working hard for South Carolina.

But they don't need itty-bitty one-time bonuses. They need their salaries to be restored, four years' worth of withheld step-increases, tout suite. If the post office can't handle the load, UPS delivers.

Ott said the money would come from the state’s reserve funds, meaning it would be one-time money and not carry over to next year. State employees will have to pay an extra 4.6 percent for their health insurance and will most likely have to pay an additional 1 percent toward the state retirement fund.

Here we have a dictionary definition of highway robbery: Those with power and resources rob those without power and resources of all they're worth, for fictitious reasons such as "We can't afford to do it ourselves." Take this out of the legislative chamber and put the same action in the intersection of Gervais and Main streets, and someone would call the police department to come and make some arrests. But since it's occurring inside the legislative chambers, it's legal.

“I believe they deserve (a bonus),” Ott said.

Me, too. Anyone who's spent a week in a public school classroom agrees that educators deserve a bonus. But before we discuss a bonus, they deserve to have their salaries restored -- that's four years' worth of step-increases, joyfully accepted in cash, cashier's check or money order.

I doubt that a one-time, one-percent bonus is equal to four years' worth of withheld step increases.

State workers and teachers would receive a 2 percent raise under a spending plan approved last week by the House Ways and Means Committee. But Ott said he was worried the 2 percent raise would not be enough to cover the increases in health insurance and retirement contributions. Ott said an extra 1 percent bonus would cost the state about $14 million just for state employees. It was unclear how much money would be required to give teachers a bonus.

State Rep. Brian White, R-Anderson and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said he has not decided if he will support Ott’s bonus plan. But he was skeptical of how the state would pay for it.

“Where are you going to get the money?” White said. “Reserve accounts are for reserves.”

Funny that the chair of House Ways and Means should ask where lawmakers should find necessary funding for its obligations and institutions. I consulted the ultimate authority on such matters -- the South Carolina Constitution -- and discovered the answer there in Article III:

SECTION 15. Bills for revenue; other bills.

Bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives, but may be altered, amended or rejected by the Senate; all other Bills may originate in either house, and may be amended, altered or rejected by the other.

What tremendous luck! The men and women who are looking for ways to restore state workers' and educators' salaries are precisely the men and women who are empowered by the state Constitution to file bills for raising revenue.

Whew. I was worried there for a minute, thinking that the Constitution might only empower the city council of Stone Mountain, Georgia, to raise the necessary revenues to pay for South Carolina's essential obligations and institutions -- because, as we all know, the city council of Stone Mountain, Georgia, has absolutely no interest in helping raise revenues to pay for South Carolina's needs -- but the authors of our Constitution used great wisdom to put that power squarely in the hands of our General Assembly.

Sounds like this can be resolved pretty quickly, then. All we need is for members of the House to introduce legislation that restores those salaries, and legislation to raise the revenue necessary to do it, then send both bills over to the Senate for its approval. Done and done.

Okeydoke, who's going to do it?

Will of voters ignored, voucher bills are back again

A legislative update from The South Carolina Education Association on Friday warns educators that, yet again, our elected leaders in the legislature have chosen to introduce another voucher bill. This time, there are two of them, including one sponsored by the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee himself.

The use of public funds to support private schools is the focus of H.4547 (White-Anderson) and H.4576 (Bedingfield-Greenville). While no cost analysis has been performed, these bills will cause a drain on K-12 public education that was funded at 1995 levels in the current budget. With your help, we were able to defeat a similar effort last year, which would have cost the state $64 million per year. We will need your continued support to protect and defend public education from these continued attacks.

Have we not been through this enough?

Did not a poll conducted last year show that 64 percent of South Carolinians opposed using public dollars for private schools?

Does not the South Carolina Constitution prohibit the expense of public dollars for private or parochial education?

So why do we keep wasting taxpayer funds on more hearings, more committee meetings, more floor debates and more ink in support of measures that have been defeated again and again and again. Granted, we in South Carolina have a difficult time giving up a lost cause -- or is that Lost Cause? -- but this is ridiculous. And it makes us all look ridiculous, again and again and again.