Education
South Carolina’s education system fails our children and casts a shadow over the future of our state. Students under perform and too often drop out; teachers are over regulated, under paid and disrespected; facilities are in disrepair; money is misspent and communities are demoralized.
Poor schools are a drag on our economy. When we fail to produce 21st century workers for 21st century jobs, companies look elsewhere to build and expand. A failed education system costs us jobs and a higher standard of living. Over time we fall further behind our neighbors and run the risk of losing our competitive edge in a global market.
Superior education opens opportunities. A well-educated workforce attracts new businesses to the state, encourages investment and raises incomes. Excellent education improves the quality of life, decreases prison populations, lifts neighborhoods, and strengthens the fabric of democracy. Quality education makes all the difference. It is time we make educating our children the state’s number one priority.
I have devoted my adult life to educating. I bring expertise and experience to the job of fixing our broken schools. Many factors contribute to low educational achievement; no single policy change will solve all of our difficulties. We must, however, identify key problems and look for creative solutions. We must be innovative. We must not fear change. The old system has failed us. Reform must begin now.
Major reform is essential in four areas:
Parental Choice
Parents in some school districts have the opportunity to send their children to magnet, charter schools, or schools out of their geographical zones. All parents in South Carolina must have this opportunity to ensure the best education for their children.
We must encourage charter schools. Charter schools, when designed responsibly, provide parents with alternatives for their children, especially children with special interests or needs. Education officials must make it easier to establish charter schools that partner with community organizations, attract excellent teachers, and require parental involvement.
We must enable access to honors and advanced placement courses for every student. If these courses are not available in the school, they must be available to students via the internet or through other venues.
We must advance creative local experiments. Each school faces different challenges and many schools have failed to improve using traditional methods. Local school boards need to be supported as they experiment with creative solutions to local problems, such as single-gender classes, year round school, credit-based education and other alternatives. Scientific studies should assess the success of these programs so other school districts can identify and employ solutions that work.
Freedom and Accountability for Teachers and Administrators
We must treat teachers as professionals and hold them to high standards so that they maximize their full potential and our children receive the best education possible. Further, we must give them the freedom to truly teach their students and free them from the shackles of paperwork and test requirements that hinder their performance. It is important that teachers be allowed the flexibility in instruction necessary to creatively engage students and remain excited about the material they teach. Let teachers be teachers!
With greater freedom comes greater responsibility. We must reward successful teachers with higher pay and bonuses in return for increased accountability and higher standards in our schools. Appropriate student testing and regular evaluations should provide the basis for assessing a teacher’s performance. Administrators must also have greater freedom to dismiss poor teachers - our children deserve it and our school system desperately needs this freedom.
These same principles apply to strong administrative leadership. Administrators must be granted the freedom to lead, and they must be held responsible for the results. Good schools have good administrators who raise teacher morale, maintain a disciplined student body and provide strong instructional leadership. We must hire and retain the best administrators.
We must offer greater incentives to teachers willing to teach in hardship areas, both rural and urban, or remedial classes. Good teachers must continue to teach good students, but they must also be rewarded for teaching struggling students.
Community Involvement
Communities must be deeply involved in public schools to address issues that government cannot. The success of our schools affects every person and community in South Carolina. We must decide as a state that our schools are too important to fail. We must all take responsibility for our children’s education.
Schools must not be blamed for all the educational problems of South Carolina. Poverty-and the culture of hopelessness and dependency that it fosters-accounts for much of the poor performance we see in South Carolina schools. High dropout, teen pregnancy and youth obesity rates also undermine the effectiveness of our schools. Government cannot and should not address all of these social ills with interventionist programs that create more dependency. But there are things we as citizens can and must do.
We must, however, promote a statewide culture of educational achievement. Churches, civic organizations, and businesses must get involved in our schools and after school programs to provide the social support many school children lack.
Public schools must also become the site for creative solutions to problems in the community. School buildings could, in some cases, become distribution points for public and private services-particularly health services-to pupils and their families. Schools and the public might also, for instance, share library or fine arts facilities. In these ways we build stronger relationships between schools and communities.
Adequate Funding
Public education must be adequately funded. Much taxpayer money, however, is wasted on bloated administration, inadequate testing and trivial paperwork. Furthermore, inequities remain in the collection and distribution of state education funds. By cutting much of the wasteful spending in public education and by reforming the system of state funding for schools, we will free money to spend on boosting teacher salaries and bonuses, recruiting excellent teachers and administrators, reducing class sizes, maintaining adequate facilities in good repair, supporting libraries, fine arts and physical education classes and funding innovative solutions to difficult problems. We don’t need to spend more money; we need to better spend what we have.
