Courson predicts clock will block voucher bill

Reporter Sarita Chourey of the Morris News Service posted this afternoon a news item that quotes Senate President Pro Tem John Courson predicting a stall in the progress of this year's House voucher bill.

South Carolina Senate President Pro Tempore John Courson predicts the school-choice bill passed by the House in March will run out of time this year.

At the end of March, the S.C. House approved H. 4894, which would give income tax deductions to parents of children who are home schooled or attend private school, as well as make low-income and disabled students eligible for partial scholarships to attend other schools.

"The problem with any legislation that comes over from the House at this late date (is) we've got the appropriations bill," said Courson, a Columbia Republican, who grew up in Augusta.

"By the time we complete that, we'll be basically almost 90 percent through the legislative session. So any bill that has a lot of controversy attached to it, I think will be very difficult to get out of the Senate this year."

I'm not familiar with the Morris News Service, and its article strangely attempts to place Courson among the Aiken County legislative delegation, but the content representing Courson's observations seems sound.

The regular legislative session is scheduled to end June 7. Senate rules allow a single senator to stall a bill, which could further hinder the school-choice bill's passage.

"I think it needs to be thoroughly vetted, and I would intend to do that," said Courson.

Most of the votes against the bill came from House Democrats, including Rep. Bill Clyburn of Aiken.

Clyburn said his chief objection to the bill, which the House passed 65-49, was that it would siphon away $37 million from the state.

"Our constitution guarantees an education for our boys and girls," he said. "And there are so many complaints coming from the public school system ... about the (funding) shortage for basic student costs, and we're still not where we ought to be. And yet we'd take away $37 million."

But his delegation colleague, Rep. Bill Taylor, R-Aiken, celebrated the bill's passage in an email newsletter. "Education is not a one-size-fits-all proposition; each child is educationally unique in how they learn," wrote Taylor. "In my view, this is not a battle between 'Choice' versus public education as opponents try to frame the argument; both have their place and both need support."

Well, lucky for everyone, there appears to be a real school choice bill making its way through the Senate today, so those in favor of school choice needn't lose heart.

Support for public schools elevated Courson in Senate

According to the account rendered in The State newspaper this week, Sen. John Courson became Senate President Pro Tempore thanks in part to his long-time support for public education in South Carolina.

Reporter Gina Smith writes:

Longtime Columbia state Sen. John Courson was elected to the top post in the state Senate Tuesday, but the political musical chairs may not be over.

The 67-year-old Republican defeated Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler, R-Cherokee, by a 27-17 vote for the job of Senate president pro tempore, one of the most powerful in the Legislature.

Courson succeeds the Senate’s longtime leader Glenn McConnell. McConnell was sworn in Tuesday by S.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Toal as South Carolina’s new lieutenant governor, replacing Ken Ard who resigned last week.

While Republicans control the Senate — holding 27 of 46 seats — Democrats supplied Courson’s margin of victory after Republicans senators split between Courson and Peeler.

Democratic senators, who voted 18-1 for Courson, had expressed concern that Peeler, the Senate’s Republican leader, can be too partisan. Courson, chairman of the Senate’s Education Committee, also appealed to Democrats for his history of supporting public education and the University of South Carolina.

See, a lawmaker can support public education and still be successful.

Congratulations to Senator Courson, and to the 700,000 public schoolchildren who look forward to his good service in his new office.

Hicks: Where would state scores be without NBC teachers?

This week's edition of the Free Times of Columbia takes up the topic of national board certification and the stipends paid to educators who earn that credential.

It's a topic of discussion again because, just as we've seen every year for the past six or eight years, lawmakers looking for more ways to undermine and dismantle public education are trying to eliminate those stipends.

I have to give tremendous credit to the Free Times for covering the issue. The state's major newspapers, ahem, seem to have a hard time grasping and giving coverage to the matter.

To offer a little general background, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has been around since the mid-1980s, thanks to an effort begun in those days to improve educator quality. Great goal, right?

So the board created a credential -- a certificate -- that required a pretty labor-intensive process to earn. Simply applying costs a chunk of money, two or three thousand dollars or more. It's a three-year process. It requires a ton of research, writing and documentation, even a process of filming an educator's work in the classroom.

And the whole thing is peer-reviewed.

Which makes it completely worth the additional funds that South Carolina's lawmakers chose to invest back in the late 1990s -- hey, that was while Governor Jim Hodges and Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum were our leaders -- in the form of grants to cover the application costs and stipends paid to successful candidates.

Now, here we are:

State coffers may be booming thanks to a rebounding economy, but some teachers across South Carolina could lose out because of proposed cuts put forward by the House Ways and Means Committee.

Last week, the committee voted to halt the funding for at least a year of an annual supplement paid out to public K-12 educators who have successfully completed a grueling, three-year National Board Certification process.

Teachers already enrolled in the program wouldn’t see their supplements end, but new teachers who want to attempt certification would not be allowed to receive the money.

That supplement, doled out in $7,500 and $10,000 annual bumps to some of the top teachers in the state, costs $68 million a year. There’s no projection available for how much more it would cost to add newly board-certified teachers to the program.

Keeping new enrollees from benefiting from their increased credentials comes as the Ways and Means Committee voted for a budget that was nearly $1 billion higher than the last fiscal year’s budget, thanks to increased tax revenue collections.

S.C. Superintendent of Education Mick Zais and some legislators, such as House Education Committee chairman Phil Owens (R-Easley), don’t believe that it makes economic sense to continue the program. Zais’ office, supported by several legislators, contends that there is no direct correlation between the millions of dollars paid in national board supplements and student achievement increases.

In short: no bang, big bucks.

Owens said that he would like to see the $68 million redirected back into baseline student funding, so that all the teachers across the state could benefit “and not just the ones whose lives allow them to go through the [certification] process.”

Owens argued that in South Carolina’s “current economic state” it doesn’t make sense to keep spending money in this manner. He also said that South Carolina’s teacher pay is $300 higher than the Southeastern average.

Let's pause and unpack that last little nugget.

So the information being offered to the media is that the average teacher salary in South Carolina is $300 higher than the average teacher salary across all the states in the Southeast. That's impressive -- is it, really? -- until you take it apart and look at the numbers.

In South Carolina, educators who hold certain jobs and credentials get stipends -- additional amounts of money, above the base contract salary, that reflect the additional roles and responsibilities they accept. Coaches and band directors, for example, get stipends. Some student group advisors, like student newspaper advisors, also get stipends. And our national board certified teachers receive stipends.

I don't know if this is still funded, but at one time, teacher specialists -- master teachers who were hired to travel across various regions of the state, "coaching" teachers in consistently low-performing, high-priority schools -- were paid great "bonuses" equal to half of their base contract salary. (Which, I thought, brought them much closer to what educators in South Carolina should be paid.)

When calculating the "average" salary of teachers in South Carolina, our leaders pack into the formula all of those stipends and bonuses on top of the base contract salary.

What's the base contract salary? That's the dollar figure established by the state of South Carolina in its salary schedule for teachers who hold bachelor's degrees, master's degrees and doctorates, or master's degree plus so many graduate hours, etc. The salary schedule assigns dollar figures to these categories at each "step" of the salary schedule -- I think there are 22 steps -- and these "steps" are supposed to correlate to an educator's years of experience (up to the top step, and then you just stay on that step until you retire).

In an honest world, the state's average teacher salary would include only those dollars paid to teachers as base contract salary. But we don't live in an honest world; we live in South Carolina, where our lawmakers throw in everything plus the kitchen sink -- all the local salary supplements, all the stipends, all the bonuses, every jot and tittle they can pack into the bag.

Which means, friends and neighbors, that the resulting figure is waaaaay inflated beyond a real average teacher salary in our state. When anyone tells you that our average teacher salary is $300 higher than the Southeastern average, back them up and ask how South Carolina fares in that ranking when you take out all the condiments and fixin's. You might find that the sumptuous barbecue dinner they're trying to sell you is little more than a dry chicken leg and a hush puppy. Better to know that up front.

Currently, the state spends $1,880 on each student annually, despite state law requiring a number closer to $2,700. The committee’s budget plan would increase that amount to close to $2,100. The Legislature would have to vote in a special law, called a proviso, to circumvent the higher amount; it has consistently done so in recent years.

Owens, in lock step with Zais,

Well, that tells us a lot, right there...

Owens, in lock step with Zais, has argued that a better way to reward good teaching is to implement “pay for performance” raises open to all teachers.

Democrats in the House have pledged to fight the issue on the floor. And if it should get to the Senate, Owens should expect an even chillier reception.

Sen. John Courson (R-Columbia) chairs the Senate Education Committee and has already vowed to fight against dropping the annual supplement.

“We are currently number three nationally in the number of National Board certified teachers,” said Courson, who sees the supplement as an integral piece of the state’s economic future.

And thank God for that. It's nice to say we're third in the nation for some good reason, isn't it? Usually, it's some rotten ranking, like third in the nation in cardiac incidents related to pork fat.

Courson worries that if the supplement disappears, there would be an exodus of some of the state’s best-prepared teachers for greener economic pastures.

You think? North Carolina pays national board certified teachers a 12 percent differential above the bachelor's degree; it only pays a 10 percent differential above the bachelor's degree for teachers with master's degrees. If I were one of those teachers in any one of our counties bordering North Carolina, I bet I'd be keeping an eye on opportunities across the border.

Jackie B. Hicks, president of the S.C. Education Association, wonders how the Legislature paid for the supplements during the lean times of the Great Recession, but now wants to cut them.

Excellent question. We found the money when times were bad, so why cut off the stipends now, when our state is "surging"?

We are "surging," aren't we? I mean, I heard Governor Nikki Haley say we were "surging," so I figured that meant we were well on the road to recovery. Apparently, the Obama administration's economic policies are working overtime for South Carolina, so good that we're "surging." At least, that's what Haley said. "Surging."

Hicks responded tersely to sallies by Zais and Owens that there’s not been direct student improvement due to the money spent on the certification supplements with a question.

“Where would South Carolina’s scores be without them?” she asks.

Hicks, while not satisfied with the state’s standardized testing scores and national rankings, said she thought they would be lower without the teachers that have gone through the certification process. She also wonders how pay-for-performance would work for special education teachers working with some of the most seriously affected student populations, as some of those students have little realistic chance of meeting grade-level expectations.

Spoken like someone with some years of experience in South Carolina's public school classrooms.

And what a powerful final summation from the Free Times editors:

Crystal ball: Cutting National Board supplements might make some fiscal sense, but it makes no political sense. One Republican representative who supports cutting the money said he knew it was going nowhere in the current political and economic climate. That being said, observers are wondering about the future of K-12 education in the state when education is so clearly undervalued by so many state leaders.

Read that again: "when education is so clearly undervalued by so many state leaders."

Ain't that the truth.

Race continues to influence state support for public schools

"And Huckleberry walked up to the creek, gazed through the clear water to its craggy bottom and watched minnows dart in teams between brownish rocks in its bed. He surveyed the width of it from this bank to the other, and turned left and right to see where its gurgling length had come from and was going to. A stem of hay still pinched in his teeth and pointing from the corner of his mouth, he exhaled and said aloud to himself, "It's a creek, by gum. 'Taint nothing but a creek, an' if I's to lay down and take me a nap, it'd still be a creek when I'd git up. Yep, that's a creek."

Such is the obviousness of a creek to anyone pausing to observe it. A creek defies denial.

It is likewise with the matter of race as an influence on South Carolina's historical commitment to support public education: Yesterday, it was true that race was an influence that led our decision-makers to discount state support for the institution. Today, it is true again. And tomorrow, when we rouse from our dreaming, it will still be true -- unless a wondrous work is wrought so quickly in the night.

Still, once in a while, it bears putting down in ink on paper -- so that future generations may unearth and review how slowly did we come to join the modern world -- that voices did rise full-throatedly in support of public education but that those voices were too few for too long, and that the baggage of generations dragged backward the mass of ourselves four or five steps for every one we managed to struggle forward.

So we should thank National Journal for its effort, in the current edition, to point the attention to the nation, again, to quaint South Carolina. Beloved South Carolina. Enchanted South Carolina. Enshrouded South Carolina. Backward South Carolina.

Journalist Ronald Brownstein, here last week to capture firsthand the circus, captured also some observations on the qualities that haunt our present and stymie our collective future. No, his report is not a review of Governor Nikki Haley's first year; it goes much further than that. Titled "The Color Line," it tells ugly truth.

COLUMBIA, S.C.—Race is no longer as overt a factor in South Carolina politics as it was when Strom Thurmond, who is memorialized in a statue looming over the state Capitol complex here, quit the Democratic Party for the GOP after Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Yet race remains embedded in the state’s political DNA. The role of race in South Carolina politics has moved far beyond the civil-rights era’s questions of explicit discrimination. Today, whether openly discussed or not, race is central to the clash between Democrats and Republicans over taxes and spending. In that way, far more than in the days of the backlash against integration, the state previews what national politics will increasingly resemble if it continues along its current trajectory.

Say it ain't so. An entire nation that reflects our dire statistics? Hope would be lost.

The dominant fact of South Carolina politics is racial polarization. In the 2008 general election, Barack Obama won 96 percent of the state’s African-American vote, but John McCain carried 73 percent of its white voters. That wasn’t an anomaly rooted in Obama’s race: In 2004, George W. Bush won an even higher percentage of the state’s white voters (78) against John Kerry.

And in the 2010 governor’s race, Indian-American Nikki Haley carried 70 percent of whites in the Republican’s narrow victory over Vincent Sheheen, a centrist white Democratic state senator. Sheheen, meanwhile, won 94 percent of the black vote. In Saturday’s critical GOP presidential primary, whites will likely cast more than 95 percent of the ballots (although they represent only about two-thirds of the state’s population).

Brownstein seems to be making a point. It's just a guess, but I'll give it a try and say that progressives vote for Democratic candidates and conservatives vote for Republicans.

Was that not his point? Did I miss it?

Sometimes the two parties in South Carolina collide over issues that directly inflame racial tensions, as they did in 2000 over the display of the Confederate flag. The legislation that Haley signed last May toughening voter-identification requirements -- which the Obama Justice Department has moved to block as racially discriminatory -- has produced similar, if less explosive, collisions.

The flag, the flag -- why, o why, was that thing ever pieced together and tied to a stick in the first place? When, o when, will we be able to take the wretched thing down and move past it? It's already been a century and half since it lost any meaning at all. Are we that slow? Must it take another century? Or two? Are we doomed -- doomed? -- to spin out this insipid tale again and again and again until our tongues lose taste in our mouths, until the colors drain from the earth and sky, until all sounds fade out of cacophony into a dull, flat moan?

Must the entire state die and be lowered into a red clay grave of our own digging, with that ragged flag draped over us all into the ground? Is that what it will take?

Brownstein goes on:

But mostly, racial conflicts in state politics now play out through the parties’ differences over the role of government. African-Americans and other minorities overwhelmingly believe that they need an activist government investing in services, such as education, job training, and health care, to help them ascend into the middle class. Most of South Carolina’s whites are comfortable with a governing model that limits taxes while investing far less than most states in public services. “There is a fundamental difference in attitudes about the role of government between whites and African-Americans,” says veteran South Carolina GOP strategist Warren Tompkins.

Of course there is, and that fundamental difference clawed its way out of its own womb on Oyster Point -- the very first site of Charlestonians' footsteps on colonial soil -- and has dragged itself forward through the ages.

It says, this fundamental difference: I - I - I will have the choicest part of this life for myself and my progeny, while YOU - YOU - YOU will have the least and last parts of it for yourself and yours. And to the extent that I - I - I can deprive YOU - YOU - YOU from having any part of life that resembles what is mine, I shall heave and groan to make certain of it, all the days of my life, and the days of my sons' lives, and their sons' lives, and so on and so on, down through eternity, to the gaping maw of the last grave.

At least, that is one interpretation of what Tompkins told Brownstein. Other interpretations may be equally valid.

The Republican skepticism about government here, as in Washington, manifests most importantly as unwavering opposition to new taxes. Resisting tax increases “is the one issue that unifies Republicans,” says GOP state Sen. John Courson. “It is the chewing gum, or glue, that keeps Republicans together.” Courson, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, acknowledges that commitment to low taxes comes with a cost, particularly for the state’s public-school students, nearly half of whom are now minorities. “The revenue stream has not been there to adequately fund public or higher education in South Carolina,” he says flatly.

We cannot afford it. We cannot afford it.

We can afford many things, many other things, many things that might not benefit everyone, but this we cannot afford.

We can afford corporate tax cuts -- we MUST afford corporate tax cuts -- but this, we cannot afford.

It's a matter of not being able to afford it.

But, like others in his party, Courson argues that the answer is not to increase revenue but to trim waste in the education system and to find savings elsewhere, particularly in Medicaid for the poor.

(Crickets.)

As Obama does nationally, Democrats in South Carolina offer the counterargument that the state cannot attract good-paying jobs without investing more in education, training, and infrastructure. That case helped Sheheen unexpectedly win the state Chamber of Commerce’s endorsement in the gubernatorial race last year.

Yet in pressing that argument, Democrats face two huge headwinds among South Carolina’s whites. One is the enduring belief that too many government programs benefit the indolent—a group that in many minds is disproportionately composed of minorities. “It’s all race, it’s just that simple,” says John Land, the (white) state Senate Democratic leader. The second problem is a sharp rightward shift among white seniors, who see little personal benefit in the education or infrastructure investments that Democrats favor. “They feel differently about paying taxes for kids they don’t have anymore,” says Democratic state Rep. William Clyburn, who chairs the legislative black caucus.

Or, "I paid for mine up north. I won't pay for theirs down here. Pass the marmalade, Gladys, tee-time's in a half-hour."

In all these ways, the state crystallizes the dynamics shaping the national debate. National polls show that amid tough times, most whites (especially older and blue-collar whites) are hardening in skepticism of government, while most minorities continue to view it as essential to their opportunity. Mitt Romney presents that backlash as opposition to an “entitlement society,” but that’s too broad. Surveys indicate that most Republicans (particularly the white seniors flocking to the party) are adamant about preserving the biggest entitlements, Social Security and Medicare; what they oppose is transfer payments to people they view as undeserving.

Remember this from the early spasms of the Tea Party in 2009: "Don't steal from Medicare to support socialized medicine." And the disbelieving, confused look in the eyes when you explained that Medicare is, in fact, socialized medicine?

It has always been about yours versus mine. We in South Carolina just hang onto old, dead tropes a lot longer than others. The list of examples is long.

It’s that sentiment Newt Gingrich stokes when he derides Obama as “the food-stamp president.” It almost doesn’t matter whether Gingrich is deliberately sending coded racial signals. As long as the argument between the parties revolves so centrally around government’s role -- and whites and minorities divide so sharply in their attitudes toward governmental activism -- the racial polarization that defines South Carolina politics will increasingly drive our national campaigns as well.

Don't mind my humming.

I believe the children are our future.
Teach them well and let them lead the way.