Post & Courier uncovers ALEC's reach in SC

Reporters Robert Behre and Stephen Largen have outdone themselves with an investigative report on the influence of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the South Carolina legislature, and by extension, on the public policy governing the lives of millions of South Carolinians.

With extensive background reporting, complete narratives, examples and facts, Behre and Largen set a

Read More

Equalization schools highlighted in Charleston

Having served briefly on the United States Supreme Court, Governor Jimmy Byrnes foresaw in 1951 that a number of low-level federal lawsuits would likely make their way to the nation's highest court within a few years and, given the Court's composition, might result in an order striking down the fifty-year-old "separate but equal" principle in public accommodations.

Byrnes made no secret of his

Read More

McCampbell School honored in Graniteville

Aiken reporter Rob Novit can unearth some real gems in his coverage for the Aiken Standard, and this is one of them.The Leavelle McCampbell school building received a historical marker on Saturday, with the event taking place in the school's 90th year.

Among the dozens of graduates and others in attendance was Minnie Ferguson, 94. She is living history, having started first grade at the school

Read More

Bamberg trustees address lunch money problems

I can understand the need to allow students to charge their meals. Children in poor, rural counties are likely the children of under-employed South Carolinians.

If Governor Nikki Haley finds a spare minute in her day -- I know it must be crowded with national media requests and fashion photographers, all clamoring for an audience with her grace -- she might give some thought to improving the

Read More

Congratulations to the South Florence NJROTC

High achievement is always happy news.For the second year in a row, the NJROTC Academic Team at South Florence High School scored in the Top 10% of all NJROTC units in the nation during the annual National Academic Exam.

More than 1700 teams competed.

Following stiff competition against several other local NJROTC units, the South Florence Academic Team felt prepared and challenged the rest of

Read More

Greenville News supports public school choice

The headline tells the tale: "Open enrollment is a good idea."

That's the verdict of the editors of the Greenville News, and it accompanies an editorial that lays out in flat facts the case for supporting public school choice, the substance of a bill sponsored by Senator Wes Hayes and now before the Senate for consideration.

This is not the private school voucher bill adopted by the House in

Read More

Supreme Court upholds public education as a right*

Next time I hear an American politician declare that we should be more like India, I'm going to shout AMEN.

Tucked away in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal last week was this nugget by Tripti Lahiri and Diksha Sahni:India's Supreme Court upheld a law Thursday that supporters say can transform access to education for hundreds of millions of poor children but critics claim infringes

Read More

Finn: Romney will push vouchers, despite flaws

Former deputy Secretary of Education Chester Finn predicts that we'll soon see an education plan from presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who heretofore hasn't bothered to let Americans know what he might do regarding public education if he were to assume the presidency.

Further, Finn predicts that a Romney plan will lean heavily on vouchers, mainly because every other conservative

Read More

Privatized bus drivers vote to unionize Dorchester

Hurray for exercising one's federal rights to organize with one's co-workers into a union, and negotiate the terms of one's own life, livelihood and career path.

This is called taking control of one's own destiny, and Dorchester's bus drivers deserve recognition for their courage and tenacity.

It happened a week or more ago, but it's worth the attention still, as our lawmakers seem dead-set on

Read More

Fairfield hires Charlotte firm for supt search

Hope that Broad Superintendents Academy experience isn't part of the search criteria. From reporter James Denton:After more than two hours in executive session Tuesday night, the Fairfield County School Board voted unanimously to hire a firm to spearhead their search for a new superintendent.

Board Chairwoman Andrea Harrison said Wednesday that the Board had selected Coleman Lew and Associates

Read More

Zais re-election campaign visits Orangeburg

I read, then re-read, this article in the Orangeburg Times and Democrat last week, and came to the same conclusion each time: State Superintendent Mick Zais traveled to Orangeburg and told educators he was there to hear about their successes, but delivered news and statistics to them that could only have dampened their spirits.

What message does it send, when educators are invited to give their

Read More

Mills helped define state's economy, history

This item from the Anderson Independent-Mail, by reporter Jennifer Crossley Howard, is as fine a requiem for South Carolina's used mills and mill workers as any I've seen, and it deserves an audience across South Carolina and beyond our borders.J.L. Gaillard uses three words to explain why he lived 90 years on a mill hill. He leans back in his armchair, widens his eyes and smiles.

“I was

Read More

Re-enactments bring history to life

South Carolina has a colorful history, and I'm glad to see that re-enactments are being used to help teach our history to children in public schools, as in the case of the Battle of Anderson, as reported by the Anderson Independent-Mail.Early Friday morning, the tents were set up and the camp fires were burning. The large bronze rifle was primed to fire, and the cell phones were all tucked away

Read More

TAP creates a stir at Pickens board meeting

A Pickens County school budget workshop offered an opportunity to look more closely at state TAP programs last week.

If TAP is an acronym, I cannot tell it; there is no explanation of the word on the state Department of Education's website, though there is a concise description of the program:The SC TAP System was based on a model launched in 1999 as an initiative of the Milken Family Foundation

Read More

Central's Daniel High School has new principal

Word comes from Pickens County that Daniel High School in Central has a new principal:Danny Merck has been named principal of D.W. Daniel High School in Central.

Merck will officially begin his new duties July 1 and will succeed Sharon Huff. Huff has been named assistant superintendent of instructional services for the School District of Pickens County.

Merck has served as assistant

Read More

Lawmakers acknowledge inequity in school funding

In South Carolina, good ideas are rare to emerge from our State House -- no sense denying the truth -- but every good idea is chained at the waist to two or three bad ones.

Here's an example, as reported by WTLX:A bi-partisan group of South Carolina legislators wants to create a uniform education funding system that boosts funding for most students while cutting property taxes for businesses and

Read More

Fashion magazine photographs our present leader

I keep looking for some information in all of this coverage that benefits the children of South Carolina, especially the 700,000 children who attend South Carolina's public schools. But I don't find any.

On her recent media tour to Manhattan, I found chuckle-lines about her stiletto heels being useful in our state's political environment. I found trivia about our state's beverage on "The Colbert

Read More

California teacher is National Teacher of the Year

Rebecca Lynn Mieliwocki, a seventh-grade English teacher from Burbank, California, has been selected as the 62nd National Teacher of the Year.

Mieliwocki and all 2012 State Teachers of the Year will be recognized by President Barack Obama in a ceremony at the White House on April 24. Mieliwocki is known for unconventional teaching practices, developed over her 13 years of teaching—the last 9 of

Read More

The self-mythologizing of Nikki Haley

Let's imagine, for a moment, a fashion magazine photo spread featuring the bare legs of former Governor David Beasley, the upswept coiffure of former Governor Carroll Campbell, the smoky come-hither glance of former Governor Mark Sanford.

Across the partisan divide, let's imagine former Governor Jim Hodges squinting icily at a sunset from the bow of a yacht, or former Governor Dick Riley

Read More

State of the State speeches demonstrate bandwagon effect

Found a clever note by Andrew Ujifusa in Education Week magazine that illustrates what happens when strange new ideas take hold in the political imagination.For the slackers and malingerers who failed to watch every governor's State of the State address this year, the Education Commission of the States performed a nice public service recently by tallying up how often, and in which states, certain

Read More

How many millionaires pay less in tax than you?

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-21155563-1']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];

Read More

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

Read More

WSJ praises South Carolina's factory system

What do these items have in common: rice, indigo, cotton, textiles and tires?

They're all products that South Carolina has used to turn cheap labor into high wealth for our state's evolving aristocracy. As the wealth bubbles created by each of the first four swelled and burst, the next took its place: Slaves tending rice gave way to slaves tending indigo, who gave way to slaves tending cotton,

Read More

Zais re-starts his campaign website

Fifteen months into his four-year term as superintendent of education, Mick Zais has decided it's time to kickstart his 2014 campaign for re-election.

I can't believe I missed this last Thursday, but Zais picked that day to re-start the website whose front page identifies it as his "campaign website."

Conventional wisdom would suggest ramping up such campaign activity after this year's election

Read More

Senate advances choice within public schools

Now this is a horse of a different color: A Senate subcommittee this morning approved a measure that "expands students' educational options within public schools," according to reporter Seanna Adcox.

Notice: This is not the House voucher bill that offers tax incentives to parents who withdraw their children from public schools, or whose children already attend private and parochial schools, or

Read More

Workers being driven out of public service

Those committed to reducing the effectiveness of state agencies, shrinking the rolls of public employees and ultimately privatizing public services are winning their agenda, one retirement at a time.

Today's edition of The State reports that public employees are leaving their posts in droves, buying time and taking early retirement before devastating changes to the retirement system go into

Read More

Charter schools spend more on administration

I thought charter schools were supposed to be the less-expensive, more-innovative alternative to traditional public schools, but a brand-new study from Columbia University says they spend more on administration than on instruction.

I guess this means traditional public schools are more cost-effective at educating children, after all.

Here's the news, published this morning by Education Week

Read More

What educators want: To be heard, empowered

Diane Ravitch's columns are like B-12 shots; they give educators such a boost of spirit.

This week's note is no different. Ravitch compares the data from two recent surveys of educators nationwide, one funded by the Gates Foundation in collaboration with Scholastic Inc., the other conducted by MetLife. In some areas, the data showed widely divergent findings, and Ravitch tries to make sense of

Read More

South Carolina tops Georgia, North Carolina

In teenage pregnancy, that is.

Yes, in a national survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, South Carolina now ranks 11th in the nation in teenage pregnancy. While we're not the highest representative from the South -- Mississippi takes the top spot, thus diverting attention from us again -- we still beat our neighbors to the north and west resoundingly.

It's spelled

Read More

Editors question Haley's motives to publish

One of the benefits of small-town newspapers: Common sense, lack of pretense, no artifice.

Editors of the Greenwood Index-Journal have taken a circumspect look at Governor Nikki Haley's national book tour and observed that not only may Haley have jumped the gun as an author-politico, but she likely has taken valuable time away from the people who elected her Queen to serve her own interests.

Read More

South Carolina software company soon to be Canadian

Did anyone know that South Carolina was home to a $55 million-dollar education software company called Computer Software Innovations?

I didn't.

According to the media in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, it's about to be gobbled up by a much larger Canadian software company called Constellation Software.

Where's Governor Nikki Haley? Isn't she the self-appointed protector of South Carolina jobs?

If we

Read More

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

Read More

Bojangles donates books to honor Upstate teachers

First, congratulations to those teachers who have been selected as Teachers of the Year by their peers in those schools where that is the process.

Second, congratulations to Bojangles for recognizing the value of great teaching and for its donation of books to the honored teachers.

This note in today's Spartanburg Herald-Journal identifies that county's teachers of the year and gives credit to

Read More

Judge rules vouchers unconstitutional in Oklahoma

Last week, a judge in Tulsa ruled that Oklahoma's private-school voucher program for special education students violate that state's Constitution.

This is interesting because of the judge's rationale, explained by reporter Nirvi Shah of Education Week magazine:Reports by the Associated Press and Tulsa World say that Judge Rebecca Nightingale agreed with the school districts that the law violates

Read More

Longer life span linked to more education

Yet one more reason to encourage your children to stay in school, and to go to college, and to get advanced degrees.

A new study from the University of Wisconsin shows that the more educated one is, the longer one may live.

Reports Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times,Americans are living longer, but the gains in life span are accruing disproportionately among the better educated, according

Read More

South Carolina dodges Broad bullet

With huge checks come huge strings.

This is not ancient mystic wisdom; it is modern American reality. When billionaire education deformers come around dangling large sums of cash, it is always best to turn the other way and run, run, run.

Those foolish enough to believe that they can collect these "gifts" in the form of grants and expect no quid pro quo are deluding themselves.

This year, the

Read More

Voucherites complain House didn't go far enough

Here's the complaint, just as I found it. Read it and weep.There are essentially two strategies in diplomatic negotiations. One is to ask for more than you know you’re likely to get, then to demand a portion of it and claim you’ve “compromised” on your original demand. The other is to make very modest demands and hope they’re met in full. Neither strategy has worked for school choice advocates in

Read More

Poverty, low education correlates to teen pregnancy

How was a study published that addressed South Carolina data, but no major news outlet in South Carolina covered its findings?

Or did one, and I missed it?

As it is, I had to find out from The State Journal, West Virginia's "business newspaper," and from the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette that a study was published by Auburn University that connects high rates of poverty and low educational

Read More

Grade-changing policies attracting scrutiny

It started in January in Beaufort County, where a principal was removed for changing students' grades. Turns out, districts have policies that allow for grades to be changed, but only under certain circumstances.

Now, in Hampton County, the matter of grade-changing is getting additional study -- except in this case, there seems not to be a written policy.

This, from editor Michael DeWitt of the

Read More

Sun-News: New tax proposal offers another fine mess

It's never a good sign when a newspaper editorial begins with a string of county administrators' quotes. This one does, published a couple of weeks ago in the Myrtle Beach Sun-News about a new tax-cut proposal that editors predict will have plenty of unintended consequences.

In other words, it's an editorial about a commonplace, run-of-the-mill legislative product in South Carolina.“The bottom

Read More

This year's voucher bill was no compromise

Call this an oversight: The State newspaper published its annual editorial opposing a voucher bill, but I didn't cross-post it here at the time. So, to keep the record current, here's the text, delivered by editors well before the House committed itself to a costly and foolish endeavor to dismantle public schools.ADVOCATES call their trimmed-down plan to pay parents to send their kids to private

Read More

Darlington finds cheaper bus fuel solution

Again, a good idea comes from the Pee Dee region.

While lawmakers look for ways to privatize the state's school bus system and turn another part of public education into a profit-making enterprise, the leaders in Darlington County's school system are innovating and solving problems within the public school system.

Which seems to prove the old notion once again: Empower professionals to solve

Read More

Calhoun hears concerns over bus privatization

Concerns about the proposal to effectively privatize the state's school bus system were heard at a recent meeting in Calhoun County, according to the Orangeburg Times and Democrat.The proposed state bus transportation bill that would transfer the financial responsibility and maintenance of school buses to the local districts is like “a grenade waiting to go off,” says Jerry Sullivan, Calhoun

Read More

McLeod opposes bus privatization bill

The Newberry Observer reported recently that Rep. Walt McLeod has announced his opposition to the proposal to effectively privatize school buses across South Carolina. Reporter Natalie Netzel explained the bill and let McLeod outlines his opposition to it.The bill known as the School Bus Privatization Act of 2012 would turn over the ownership and purchasing of the school buses from the state to

Read More

Lottery proves to be a regressive tax in South Carolina

Columnist Dwayne Green, writing in the Charleston City Paper, took up recently an issue that catches my attention from time to time, the evidence that poor people who play the lottery the most get the least benefit from it, directly and indirectly.

Green writes, persuasively,What if the S.C. General Assembly announced a new tax that would be paid primarily by the state's poor and minority

Read More

"Examiner" pushes Haley as vice presidential material

I've never heard of the Examiner but it bills itself as a "dynamic entertainment, news and lifestyle network that serves more than 20 million monthly readers across the U.S. and around the world." It calls its writers "examiners," "thousands of writers who are self-motivated independent contributors."

One of these is Anthony Martin, who labels himself a "conservative examiner" and is described

Read More

Haley opts for cant in her vanity project

"Cant" is defined at Dictionary.com thusly:noun
1. insincere, especially conventional expressions of enthusiasm for high ideals, goodness, or piety.
2. the private language of the underworld.
3. the phraseology peculiar to a particular class, party, profession, etc.
4. whining or singsong speech, especially of beggars.

verb (used without object)
5. to talk hypocritically.
6. to speak in the

Read More

The State tracks the money trail to House voucher vote

Following the money led Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to the Nixon Watergate scandal, and the Washington Post to a Pulitzer Prize.

This Easter weekend, The State newspaper hopped down the money trail to last month's vote on the House voucher bill and found dozens of voucher bunnies collecting their own Cadbury eggs from donor Howard Rich of New York.More than half of the S.C. state

Read More

Recipients of Rich voucher funds identified

The State newspaper performed a public service this weekend by publishing a list of legislators who received funding from Howard Rich, the New Yorker voucher ideologue who has invested millions in buying pro-voucher public policy across the nation.

The list includes members of both parties and in both houses, although a voucher bill has never gotten to the Senate for consideration before this

Read More

'Ed deform' and 'choice' agenda reveal Bizarro Robin Hood

Educator PLThomasEdD, who posts frequently at DailyKos, last week authored a column at SchoolsMatter.info, in which he described corporate education reform as a "Bizarro Robin Hood" universe.

Once I learned more about the "Bizarro" concept, I concluded that Thomas has devised an ingenious way of looking at not only corporate education deform but all the rest of the astroturf foolishness

Read More

Governor vetoes voucher expansion bill -- in Arizona

Sometimes, the day's news leaves the rational reader feeling light-headed, dizzy.

Among red states, Arizona takes a back seat to no one.

In fact, the historian and social scientist in me points out that the population of the Southwest reflects the western-most migration of eighteenth-century South Carolinians. Travel through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Arizona, and

Read More

Brack, Free Times react to House voucher bill

Two sources I consult regular for clear-eyed reporting and commentary on the goings-on in Columbia are Statehouse Report, published by Andy Brack of Charleston, and the Free Times of Columbia.

Neither has disappointed in covering last week's passage of a voucher bill by the House.

From Statehouse Report comes this headline: "Back-door voucher bill defies logic."
If you ever thought the folks at

Read More

Florence 1 grows more agreeable to Apple

It once was verboten to have an open-book test in public school classrooms; we closed our books and opened our minds at test-time.

And, once, students could only use pencils, so as to keep their essays neat and free of ink spots and strike-throughs.

Likewise, there was a time when one couldn't use a calculator during testing, especially for standardized tests like the SAT. One had to know his

Read More

Pro-voucher columns sound strikingly similar

As I read this column by Rep. Christopher Murphy in the Summerville Journal Scene, I thought it sounded an awful lot like the one that Karen Floyd published in the Mount Pleasant Patch a few days ago. Both praise the House for passing its voucher bill last week.

O, I know there's no voucher-on-paper in the bill adopted by the House last week; it's just a shell game that uses public dollars to

Read More

How is Nikki Haley like a potato? Ask Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney, our governor's favorite candidate for president, visited Jay Leno last week -- apparently to shore up his numbers among cranky conservative insomniacs -- and played a little word-association game using a random list of contemporary American politicos.

So reports The State in a recent edition:Here is what Romney said when Leno asked him to say what came to mind.

N.J. Gov. Chris

Read More

Peper finds examples of great teaching in Charleston

There are more than 50,000 great public school teachers in South Carolina. Highlighting each one of them with a column in one daily newspaper would take more than 137 years, but that doesn't mean we oughtn't do it from time to time.

I'm pleased to see that Post & Courier columnist Warren Peper took note of one last week, Mark Nadobny of Moultrie Middle School:When you enter Mark Nadobny’s class

Read More

When is public information not public?

Today, it's Summerville; tomorrow, South Carolina.

The Post & Courier reports that in Summerville, the rules about public information appear to be different from the rules elsewhere in the state and nation.

I reckon we can expect more of this bobbing and weaving as Governor Nikki Haley pushes for a statewide school bus privatization plan. As she seems to define transparency, we'll all have free

Read More

Misperceptions of the South rooted in education

Kristen Rawls of AlterNet published an insightful note at Salon.com yesterday about misperceptions of Southerners. Our region has gotten a bit of media coverage recently, Rawls notes, because of Mitt Romney's inability to win a Southern contest against Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

What does that say about us, if anything discernible?“Doubts on Romney’s Conservatism Help Santorum in the South

Read More

Burke students set examples, changed history

Thanks to the Charleston Post & Courier for this weekend feature article on the sit-ins of the 1960s at S.H. Kress on King Street and elsewhere.

What a tremendous message these events communicated: That high school students could and can, in fact, have a great impact on the history of their communities.

Today, I'm afraid to say, thanks to the super-saturation of pop culture, our high schoolers

Read More

Loftis, Byrnes, Tillman, Thurmond... Flair?

In some respects, Lake City has come a long way.

In 1898, Lake City's African-American postmaster and his infant daughter were murdered after a terrible lynching incident. Thankfully, we don't have incidents of this sort anymore.

Rather, Lake City is known today as the birthplace of astronaut Ron McNair and university benefactor Darla Moore, as well as a trio of professional athletes, Derrick

Read More

Good luck to Marlboro County educators and students

Anyone who has undergone an accreditation review by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, or SACS, knows the anxiety that comes with the process to prepare for SACS visits and to put the best foot forward.

This is what the educators and students of Marlboro County face at the moment.The Marlboro County School District will start a three-day evaluation process Monday aimed at gaining

Read More

Congratulations to Florence District 1 students

Here's the sort of team I'd love to see lined up across the podium of the State House, draped with medals and receiving the adulation of an appreciative legislative body.

Perhaps in the next life.

Still, it's worth celebrating that the students of Florence School District 1 are given credit for their achievements in the local newspaper.Teams from five Florence School District One schools met

Read More

O'Gorman to become associate supt in Berkeley

News from Aiken includes this school personnel change, as reported by the Aiken Standard: Associate Superintendent Kevin O'Gorman will leave in June to begin work in Berkeley County.Like many other educators throughout Aiken County, Wagener-Salley High School principal Pat Keating was surprised to learn that Kevin O'Gorman, the associate superintendent for instruction, is leaving in June for a

Read More

Remembering King's sacrifice for America's workers

Chris Mahin, a union organizer, published this note in 2006 on that year's anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination in Memphis, Tennessee.

As today is the forty-fourth anniversary of our loss, it's appropriate to remember King, why he was in Memphis on that date, and what he exemplified for the rest of us.April 4 is one of the saddest days of the year. On that day in 1968, the Rev.

Read More

Did Stephen Colbert have the last laugh on Haley?

The present occupier of our governor's office, traipsing across America in search of buyers for her new mem-wah, stopped last night in New York City to appear on "The Colbert Report." Fitting, I thought, that she kicked off her media tour on the cable network named Comedy Central.

O, a fine time was had by all, as native son Colbert played a parlor game of state trivia with Nikki Haley, who

Read More

Floyd praises wealthfare, criticizes citizens' ignorance

In 2006, Karen Floyd of Spartanburg ran for state Superintendent of Education and tried diligently to avoid acknowledging her support for publicly-funded private school vouchers.

Now that the State House has approved such a measure for the first time, Floyd has published an opinion-editorial -- in Mount Pleasant, of all places -- praising that news and celebrating her long-time support for

Read More