EOC asks for more teacher loan funds

Let's see: South Carolina sponsors a student-loan program that specifically targets students who intend to become teachers. The program's default rate is miniscule: only one percent.

Its annual allocation is $4 million hasn't been increased in the past four years, despite the fact that nearly 300 applicants have been denied loans because the program lacked funding -- a paltry $1.3 million, out of multi-billion-dollar budget.

Two weeks ago, South Carolina's House adopted a plan that represents a foot-in-the-door to dismantle public education through funding starvation.

So today, the state's Education Oversight Commission issued a report that requests additional funding to this tremendously valuable student-loan program.

Question: What are the chances that our anti-public education lawmakers and governor will approve an increase in appropriations to help worthy and qualified students attend and afford college to become education professionals?

That's a tough one, isn't it?

Reporter Seanna Adcox explains the history of the program and the EOC's report here:

A state education committee wants legislators to put more money into a teacher loan program meant to encourage students to stay in South Carolina and teach in needy public schools.

The Education Oversight Committee also recommends redefining such schools amid climbing poverty rates and believes students should be better informed about the program.

The loan program created in 1984 provides a maximum of $20,000 toward a student's college degree in education — up to $2,500 yearly for college freshmen and sophomores, and up to $5,000 for juniors, seniors and graduate students. The amount is forgiven within five years of teaching in a needy school or a hard-to-fill subject — sooner if both definitions apply. Students must pay the money back, with interest, if they don't do so after graduation.

Last school year, the state Student Loan Corp. doled out nearly $4.7 million in loans, averaging $4,182 each, to 1,114 education majors. The program used money from repaid loans to add to the Legislature's $4 million allotment, which hasn't changed since 2009-10, according to an annual report the oversight committee approved Monday.

More than 300 applicants were denied loans because of a lack of funding. An additional $1.3 million would have covered all eligible applicants.

The independent, nonpartisan committee made up of business leaders, educators and legislators chose to recommend in its 2013-14 budget recommendations to legislators that they increase funding to cover all of those eligible.

"We're turning down so many students we don't have funds for," said committee member Dennis Drew of Isle of Palms, a former teacher and founder of The Sunshine House early childhood centers.

Dennis Drew was one of former Governor Mark Sanford's several consecutive education advisors, so it's refreshing to hear him advocating for students who want to become educators.

The House's budget plan for 2012-13 put no additional money into the program. The Senate is working on its plan, which will be debated on that chamber's floor in May.

Nearly two-thirds of all public schools are deemed in critical need. Under state law, schools meet that definition if at least 70 percent of their students live in poverty, teacher turnover averages at least 20 percent, or their state report card scores are in the bottom two tiers. Of the 785 schools in critical need last school year, 669 qualified based solely on the poverty rate.

The committee recommends legislators increase the poverty threshold to 80 percent of students qualifying for free- or reduced-price meals. That helps focus the program on schools most in need, said Melanie Barton, the committee's executive director.

Rep. Joe Neal, a committee member, said he supports targeting schools most at risk, but he worries about the consequences.

"Schools failing most dramatically in the state are also those with high levels of poverty. Those schools tend not to do well, even though there are some exceptions," Neal, D-Hopkins, said after the meeting. "My only concern is what will that do to the marginal schools? Do we deprive them of that resource?"

The overall number of applicants has plummeted 56 percent in the three school years since 2008. Officials speculate that fewer students could be choosing a career in education following the Great Recession and resulting budget cuts, which led to thousands of teacher layoffs across the state.

A third recommendation from the committee is to put a state agency in charge of the program, which can set goals, communicate with colleges and market the program to students. Many students simply don't know the option exists, Barton said.

That could improve the program's diversity, she said.

Last school year, 77 percent of applicants were women and 80 percent were white. The number of loan recipients attending South Carolina's historically black colleges continues to decline, to just nine at South Carolina State, down from 42 students at that school and three others in 2007-08.

A diverse teaching force plays a role in motivating some students, Neal said.

"They need to see teachers who look like them," he said. "Clearly if we're going to have a teaching force that reflects South Carolina, we need a loan program that enables people from different groups in this state, particularly minorities, to actually do so."

The default rate on the program — those who didn't teach and didn't pay back the money — has been 1 percent. Last school year, more than 6,500 teachers employed in South Carolina's public schools were loan recipients, according to the report.

If the EOC continues to issue reports and requests of this sort, noble and necessary as they are, the commission may find itself written out of the budget altogether. It has happened before -- though its funding was always restored at the last minute, thanks to pro-public education members of the state Senate.

Come to think of it, the Senate is due to take up its own budget debate in the coming weeks, so maybe we'll hear more about this loan program before the session ends in June.

EOC: Goals 2020 in jeopardy without 'new sense of urgency'

An opinion-editorial was published in the Charleston Post & Courier on Friday by Barbara Hairfield, social studies curriculum specialist and Teaching American History Grant Project director for the Charleston County School District.

Hairfield is also vice chair of the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee, which makes her the highest ranking educator on that body, as state law prohibits the Education Oversight Committee from being chaired by an educator.

That simple fact tells a great deal about how lawmakers view public education -- and educators -- in South Carolina, and it provides appropriate context for Hairfield's column.

She begins by ringing an alarm.

In mid-February, the state received an urgent wake-up call when the S.C. Education Oversight Committee (EOC) released the annual progress report on its 2020 Vision.

One reason why local news broadcasts didn't lead with this "urgent wake-up call" in mid-February and since then may be that an urgent wake-up call is delivered to South Carolina's people three or four times a year, or more, on the same topics. Urgent wake-up calls have been issued by education authorities for generations, and the responses to them have been so uniformly apathetic that it hardly warrants a press release to mark each new warning.

Why is this? Let's go back to the start: Lawmakers tell us precisely where public education ranks among their priorities when they establish business representatives as chairs of the state's highest authority overseeing standards and accountability.

And when they build a state budget by lining up their priorities first, including corporate tax breaks, then backing public education into the budget using whatever revenue is left over, dividing that revenue by the number of public schoolchildren, and calling that the base student cost.

When lawmakers makes public education policy and funding their last budget priority, their attitudes toward it spread out across the land like butter on a hot stove.

In its 2020 Vision, the EOC has set targets in four key areas--reading proficiency, graduation rates, workforce readiness, and at-risk schools--to ensure that by the year 2020, South Carolina students will have the knowledge and skills to compete in the global economy.

Remember Goals 2000, the initiative kicked off by former President George Bush -- the original one, without any initials -- at a conference chaired by Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, convened in 1990 at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville? Then, the objective was to meet various education standards nationwide by the year 2000. Bush invested some money in it during his term; Clinton invested some more money in it during his two terms.

But we didn't meet those goals. We all got caught up in one side of the equation -- standards and accountability -- but we neglected the other side: ensuring that every child had opportunities to learn in small classes, with qualified and committed teachers, in safe and secure environments for teaching and learning. Doing both cost too much money; we only chose to afford the standards and accountability, so Goals 2000 went by the wayside.

When Bush's son, George W., took the presidency in 2000, he established a whole new set of goals, based on standards and accountability, and using punishment rather than investment to improve the quality of education. Under his scheme, known as No Child Left Behind, he declared that every child would be proficient by 2014. Oops.

Well, that never was going to happen from the start, but it made a great slogan, and it went a long way toward accomplishing Bush's ultimate goal, dismantling public education and privatizing it, moving public services into the private sector where public dollars could pump up private profits.

Now, as even South Carolina has applied for a waiver to get around the mandates of NCLB and its 2014 deadlines, we've conjured up a whole new program: the 2020 Vision.

Prediction: By 2020, we will have declared this initiative unaccomplished, and we'll draft some new set of goals or objectives with 2025 in the title, or 2030, or 2040, or 2050.

Why? Because, like Uncle Albert said, if you keep doing the same things, you keep getting the same results. Want different results? Do different things.

The things to do aren't rocket science. But they do cost a lot of money, and they do include shrinking class sizes, and they do involve getting private sector profiteering out of public education, and they do involve empowering education professionals to do their jobs.

And, like a lot of states, South Carolina is nowhere near ready to do these things.

So, we have reports like this one from EOC vice chair Hairfield:

The stark data from the report revealed that South Carolina is not making measurable progress in many educational areas. Pockets of excellence do exist, but the state as a whole is static. Simply put, South Carolina is not going to meet the educational goals set for the year 2020 if the state does not set the stage for dramatic and sustained improvement.

All South Carolinians need a new sense of urgency about this limited progress. With a renewed commitment and a laser-like focus on educational improvement, our state must commit the needed resources and take purposeful and strategic action. We cannot afford to be complacent any longer.

Former Governor Dick Riley said the same thing in 1977. It took him eight years to pass an additional one-cent sales tax to support education initiatives, and within a decade, legislators had figured out ways to supplant their old funding mechanisms with this new one-cent stream alone -- and they stick to that attitude today. What the penny affords is what the penny affords.

New sense of urgency.

When educators have replaced the corporatists and retired businessmen in South Carolina's legislative chambers, there will be no need for a new sense of urgency; there will be results.

In reading proficiency, the goal is that by 2020, 95 percent of all students in grades 3 and 8 will be reading on grade level. Analyzing state and national assessments, South Carolina is not on target to meet this goal. In addition, the percentage of all students who read on grade level actually decreases as students move through school. As reported on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the nation's report card, South Carolina currently ranks 39th in fourth grade and 38th in eighth grade reading proficiency.

The report also reflects sobering statistics on South Carolina's achievement gaps among students of different ethnicities. For example, 2011 NAEP results for South Carolina's fourth graders show that the number of African-American students reading on grade level trails the number of white students by 30 percent.

South Carolina also is not having dramatic, needed improvements in graduation rates, a second area addressed in the 2020 Vision. This goal is that by 2020, 88.3 percent of students will graduate on time. In 2011, South Carolina schools are still 15 percent below that target, and no demographic group -- white, Hispanic, African American -- will meet this goal if current trends remain.

So, what are state lawmakers willing to invest to achieve these goals?

Yawn.

Workforce readiness is the third 2020 Vision measure.

And why is that? Because the corporate community owns our legislature and its various properties, including the Education Oversight Committee, which by law must be chaired by a businessperson.

Workplace preparation was once the responsibility of the private sector. Get a job in a bottling plant, and you'll be trained in the bottling plant how to do that job. Work in a mill, and the supervisor would demonstrate the task. Then the private sector figured out that if it owned government, it could own public schools, too, and use public schools as its own training program at public expense.

Hence, "Workforce readiness is the third 2020 Vision measure."

The fourth accountability measurement is the number of schools rated "at risk" based on the standards for academic achievement and graduation rates. The goal is that by 2020, no school in South Carolina will be "at risk," but as of 2011, the state still has 69 schools that fall into this category.

The message revealed in the 2020 Vision progress report is a critical one for all South Carolinians. Improving education will take every person in this state stepping up to the plate and sharing in the responsibility.

That statement is true to a degree; it does take every person supporting a system of public education, whether or not they have children enrolled in our schools.

But that statement sidesteps a major issue that can be resolved by restating it thusly: "Improving education will take the necessary and unprecedented commitment of our lawmakers to make public education their first and highest budget priority, and to empower education professionals, through policy and resource allocation, to govern and deliver our system of public education for the benefit of every child."

Hairfield understands this intuitively, and she says so:

As an educator, I ask other educators to recognize that we cannot rectify this dire situation alone. True educational transformation will require all of us -- educators, parents, students, business and elected leaders -- working together to achieve educational excellence.

But as vice chair of the state's authority overseeing standards and accountability for the legislature and its corporate owners, she can only go so far.

What's left is a plea for help.

We face a large challenge, but rising to meet the challenge is the right thing to do for South Carolina's children and our state's economic prosperity. Now is the time for us to renew the promise of providing all children in South Carolina with a world-class education, so that our state and citizens can succeed in the global economy.

Educators, I suggest, are at the table. Fewer of them than necessary, overburdened and underappreciated, but present, willing, and waiting for those with power to show up.

Haley: I don't want to pay for your kid's education

If it weren't for simple mathematics, Governor Nikki Haley might've succeeded at portraying herself as a compassionate conservative. Unfortunately for her, thanks to hundreds of thousands of fine math teachers across the land, Americans -- even we South Carolinians -- can comprehend simple arithmetic.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said her proposed budget for 2012-13 increases money for public schools, but a closer look shows her recommendations would actually decrease state funding by nearly $80 million.

"You'll see education gets an increase," she said in releasing her first executive budget last month.

The Republican governor is partially correct, but only by disregarding some pots of money. Her proposal represents an increase in recurring money for K-12 schools, when factoring in all state revenue sources - chiefly, the penny of the state sales tax that goes directly to education programs.

However, Haley's budget proposal does not include anything funded this school year with one-time money.

That includes $56 million legislators added to the budget to boost the so-called "base student cost" to $1,880 per student - money they added over her veto. Superintendent Mick Zais has asked legislators to at least maintain that key funding source, which primarily pays for teacher salaries, by funding the $56 million through recurring sources, plus adding $15 million to account for student population growth.

By doing neither, Haley's budget would reduce that per-student amount to $1,766 - in a year the state formula calls for it to be $2,790.

Educators call it disappointing.

This is not new. Educators have been disappointed for a decade now.

If a condition lasts a whole decade, can't we call it chronic? Are we suffering chronic disappointment in our state's leadership? Are our state's leaders guilty of chronic neglect of public education?

And what a stirring demonstration of commitment to the rule of law in South Carolina! The Education Finance Act and its formula for a base student cost, adopted in 1977, dictates that this year's appropriation should total $2,790, is absolutely ignored.

An untrained monkey can observe that Haley's budget shows public education is not a priority for her. It reinforces the position that many educators put forward in 2010, in actively supporting Sen. Vincent Sheheen for the post Haley occupies, that when data demonstrates a woman hasn't supported public education in the past, we might reasonably predict that she won't suffer a blissful epiphany once ensconced in the chief executive suite. Better candidates deserve our active support.

Yet educators remained divided then -- oh, I don't like politics; it's so dirty. And, we can't get involved in partisan bickering and make people angry at us; there's no telling what they'll do in retaliation when they get into office. And, let's face it, we're a conservative state; best to ask for what you want, be thankful for what you get, and work with everybody.

Result: Governor Nikki Haley.
Base student cost: $1,766.
State of the education professions: Demoralized.
Quality of public education: Suffering.
Value to long-term right-wing agenda: Priceless.

Here's a prediction: When educators organize, educators win.

Legislators say there's no chance they'll restore the base student cost to $2,790, which would cost $553 million, but they could provide some increase.

"Some increase." This is laughable. A base student cost of $1,800 would represent an increase, and it would still leave us at education funding levels somewhere near 1996, the year that Bill Clinton was re-elected to the presidency.

The extra $913 million projected for 2012-13 follows several years of budget cuts due to the Great Recession.

It's due to a surplus from the fiscal year that closed June 30, along with more money coming in this fiscal year than legislators budgeted, plus continued growth. However, required increases - including property tax relief, health care and reserve funds - gobble up most of it. And those surpluses from the current and last fiscal year are what's considered one-time money. Former Gov. Mark Sanford long railed about using that to pay for long-term expenses.

Yes, we need property tax relief, because high taxes on beachfront property discourages wealthy retirees from relocating here to shelter their nest eggs; it's the primary reason we've seen in-migration drop off so precipitously in the past two or three generations.

Haley has long complained that more money needs to go toward the classroom, rather than administration.

As Zais points out, that's precisely where the "base student cost" - considered a bellwether for state support - goes, in the form of salaries: "We ought to try and at least maintain funding for classroom operations."

"While the governor and I disagree on the dollar amount directed to the base student cost, we're in complete agreement that recurring dollars should be used to pay for recurring expenses," Zais said.

Sophistry: the tool of confidence men, fortune-tellers, magicians and pickpockets.

Try this: While the superintendent and I disagree on the need for public education funding, the Constitution and I are in complete agreement that the legislature is specifically empowered to raise the revenues necessary to fully fund the state's essential obligations and institutions.

Haley's budget also does not annualize the $20 million in one-time "hold harmless" money sent to districts to cover shortfalls due to an adjustment to a state funding formula. And it reduces lottery money to K-12 schools by $11.3 million, in order to fully fund lottery-funded college scholarships.

Items Haley highlighted when releasing her $5.7 billion budget plan include further tax cuts - reducing revenue from state and corporate income taxes by $140 million - and the addition of about 100 law enforcement officers. She would put $75 million of one-time money toward encouraging counties to take over the maintenance of some state roads.

The conservative South Carolina Policy Council says Haley is right to insist that education by funded only with recurring money.

"If increasing base student funding is a priority, it should be treated as a priority, not a benevolent afterthought," said spokesman Barton Swaim, who formerly worked for Sanford. "All this confusion highlights the fact that our funding structure doesn't make sense. Our K-12 education system isn't underfunded - it's funded inefficiently."

Translation: It isn't that we're not feeding our children enough, it's that we're feeding them a little bit from four major food groups, three times a day, when one Flintstones chewable a day would be more efficient.

On the plus side of the equation, Haley would give the statewide public charter school district an additional $10 million.

"The problem that I think we've had in the past with government is we tend to just look at the dollars that go into education."

Yes, I can see where that's a problem. When citizens can look at a budget document and see how many or, har har, how few dollars go specifically to public education, it tends to impede the governor's ability to undermine, dismantle and privatize public education and other services. Apparently, parents want their schools to be funded at ever-increasing levels, similar to the annual increases in cost-of-living, inflation and the forces of the free market. It's as if they take to heart that old saw from the King James: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

I don't want us to do that anymore. It's not what we get; it's how we spend it," she said, adding that's why she put more money toward charters.

Hm. Sage advice. It's not what we don't have, it's how we manage the void.

I can see Haley telling a poor family at Thanksgiving: It's not important that you have no turkey and dressing with all the trimmings, it's important that you have a whole afternoon free, since you won't be napping from turkey overload.

Or, telling poor children at Christmas: It's not important that Santa Claus brought you no toys, it's important that you swallow your disappointment at those in whom you previously placed your trust.

Or, telling slaves on our old antebellum plantations: It's not important that you're deprived of freedom, and of learning to read and write, it's only important that you have plenty of time and opportunity to get your work done.

Hilariously, even Haley's own charter-school lieutenant undercut her specious argument:

Superintendent Wayne Brazell said that money would only cover student growth in his statewide district, which consists of charter schools that chose not to organize through their local district.

Remember, several years ago, when local school boards were refusing to approve charters for fly-by-night bands and snake-oil salesmen to open charter schools in their districts -- and siphon precious public dollars from their district budgets -- former Governor Mark Sanford pushed lawmakers to set up a statewide charter school district with its own board of trustees.

So Haley's generosity toward charters in this budget proposal only benefits the charters who couldn't get approved by their local boards and had to resort to the Sanford dodge to open their doors. That's nice. It sends a good message to the children: Play by rules and lose; create loopholes and win! Yay!

The $10 million would be on top of the $25 million legislators added in the current school year, to help make up for the fact its schools get no local taxes. Ironically, since the district otherwise relies on base student cost, Haley's budget actually reduces per-student spending on its schools.

Haley redirected some money that comes in through the penny sales tax added under the 1984 Education Improvement Act. That penny funds specific things such as gifted and talented programs, summer school, student testing, 4-year-old kindergarten, and bonuses for teachers with a national certification. Both Zais and Haley recommend closing that incentive program to new entries.

The penny is expected to generate an additional $42 million over the recurring amount legislators budgeted for this year, to nearly $607 million. However, after factoring in a one-time allocation from a previous surplus, the extra is less than $9 million.

New programs she funds include $2 million toward Teach for America, which puts top college graduates who didn't major in education into low-income schools, and $1.75 million to launch a STEM curriculum, which stands for Science Technology Engineering Math, aimed at preparing students for careers in technology.

Education Oversight Committee director Melanie Barton praised the additions of those EOC initiatives.

"Having successful leaders in the classrooms of our most challenged schools is critical to change the expectations and culture of many of our schools," she said.

This hurts my brain.

The leader of the Education Oversight Committee affirms that "having successful leaders in the classrooms of our most challenged schools is critical." Yet she praises the Haley plan, which (1) reduces per-student spending, (2) eliminates incentives for National Board certification, a program to improve the quality of classroom professionals, and (3) diverts funding from four-year-old kindergarten to pay for Teach for America (aka Teach for A While), a program that "puts top college graduates who didn't major in education" into the most critical classrooms for only two years.

This is praiseworthy? I understand that the EOC isn't really a body of educators -- even some of its "educator appointees" are business people rather than education professionals -- but praising an anti-education budget for its scraps and crumbs is weak.

Haley also added $10 million for technology and $2 million to help failing schools while eliminating money for some university-sponsored programs. She puts $5 million toward leasing school buses, as she pursues legislation transferring bus responsibilities to districts.

"I don't want to buy any more school buses," Haley said.

Well, that's what it's all about: What Haley wants.

I don't want to look at how many dollars we spend, she says. I don't want to buy any more school buses. I don't want to pay for any more textbooks or dictionaries. I don't want to hire any more teachers. I don't want to keep SCETV on the air. I don't want to pay retirement benefits to our public employees. I don't want to provide health insurance to anyone. I don't want to build any more schools. I don't want to read criticism from newspaper editors. I don't want to talk to reporters who print what I say and make me look foolish. I don't want my support for Mitt Romney to count against me. I don't want to learn about Caesar's wife from John Rainey. I don't want Darla Moore to overshadow me. I don't want to hear any more about transparency. I don't want anyone to question me. All I want is to be obeyed.

Her spokesman Rob Godfrey used that as an example for how her budget increases money for K-12: "It doesn't burn tens of millions of dollars on buying buses, which are expensive, which rapidly depreciate, and which we don't need to own anymore," he said.

The state hasn't spent "tens of millions" on buses in years.

Oops.

Yeah, that's right. Scrapped school buses from Alabama and Kentucky and Tennessee don't cost tens of millions of dollars; those states may even pay us to come and take the buses off their hands.

The current budget designates up to $12.3 million for new buses from unclaimed lottery prizes - the first designation for buses since 2007. The education agency has received about one-third of that, said Zais, who added he's fine with decentralizing buses.

Zais did request $36 million to buy enough new school buses to comply with the state's 15-year replacement cycle law, to get buses from the mid-80s off the road. Legislators have ignored that law since passing it.

Of course they have. This is South Carolina, where the law is a mighty rubbery thing.