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One commonsense public education reform - public schools should receive a per-student grant for every child they serve

Op Ed originally published in The State
By TOM DAVIS - Guest Columnist

When it comes to public education in South Carolina, the bad news is all too familiar: Almost half of our children do not graduate from high school in four years, and of those who do graduate, far too many score at the bottom of national academic assessments.

The societal costs of this abysmal record are staggering. For example, the probability that a high school dropout receives Medicaid benefits is 64 percent higher than for a graduate, and a dropout is more than twice as likely as a graduate to be incarcerated.

It has been estimated by the Friedman Foundation that each new class of dropouts costs our state $98 million every year. Over a 50-year lifetime, just one year’s class of dropouts will cost South Carolina $4.9 billion.

No one disputes these costs, but there isn’t a consensus on what should be done to improve the education for our state’s children. In recent years, a possible solution that has been hotly debated is allowing parents to select the public or private schools of their choice and then receive tax relief or scholarships to help pay for this choice.

That debate should continue. In the meantime, however, there is one commonsense reform that everyone — liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats — should support that would pay immediate dividends for our children: reforming the way we fund our public schools.

Our problem is not the overall amount spent. For the current fiscal year, the money spent on K-12 public education in South Carolina works out to an average of $11,480 per child — about the national average. The problem is that not nearly enough of that money makes its way to the classroom.

As the governor’s senior policy advisor, I was stunned to discover the degree of state control over the allocation of our education dollars. Some dollars are sent to districts, some are sent to schools, some are divided among schools, some are set aside for programs that may or may not be applicable to a school, and so on. There are also pages of line-item education appropriations added into the state budget each year at the behest of lobbyists and special interests.

Adding to the confusion is the huge number of different funding streams for K-12 education that flow from the Education Finance Act, the Education Improvement Act, the Education Accountability Act and the Education Lottery.

A large corps of state bureaucrats manages these expenditures and oversees these complicated funding formulas, and local school districts are forced to employ administrators of their own to comply with all the red tape. Obviously, every dollar spent on these administrative costs is a dollar that isn’t spent educating our children.

It is time to do away with all of the archaic funding streams and the state control of spending and to adopt what is known as “backpack” funding. This type of funding enables public schools to receive a per-student grant for every child they serve, while giving local school leaders control over their budgets in order to fulfill their school’s mission.

This would allow dollars now being wasted on administration to be put into the classrooms and also would enable local school boards and superintendents, with input from local teachers and parents, to make the important spending decisions on our children’s education.

But such reform has been met with fierce resistance in Columbia by those who benefit from the current system — by those who have convinced the Legislature to fund their education programs and materials. These special interests hire lobbyists to argue that eliminating their particular programs and materials would “gut” public education.

This is a disingenuous argument. If those programs and materials are actually helping children, then local schools would continue using and paying for them once they became empowered decision-makers through backpack funding. The truth is that these special interests fear a process that allows the local community to view and judge the product of its own school system. But we need to be about providing our kids with the best possible education, not protecting programs hand-picked in Columbia that don’t work.

Despite past defeats, however, there is now real reason for hope. Three separate groups in Columbia — representing the House, the Senate and the superintendent of education — are meeting through the summer and fall to study implementation of backpack funding, and in speaking with them I have been impressed by their resolve. Their work should be done by the next legislative session, and we all need to pull together then to make the reform happen.

Mr. Davis, a Beaufort attorney and former chief of staff to Gov. Mark Sanford, is the Republican candidate for Senate District 46.