“REPUBLICANS” DOUBLE DOWN ON FAILED APPROACH TO ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT …
For years, this website has been spelling it out in no uncertain terms: More money for government-run “education” – and more intervention by the state in our children’s lives – has failed to improve academic achievement.
Last year, the liberal S.C. Supreme Court agreed with us in its landmark “minimally adequate” court ruling.
“Spending fails to provide students with the opportunity to obtain a minimally adequate education,” the court found. “Rather, the evidence demonstrates that there is a clear disconnect between spending and results.”
Exactly …
The S.C. General Assembly’s response to this court ruling? Nothing … well, nothing but political posturing.
(Oh, and they dumped billions of your tax dollars into the government-run system … again).
Anyway, this week the S.C. House of Representatives’ Education Policy Review and Reform Task Force – commissioned by fiscally liberal S.C. Speaker Jay Lucas and chaired by left-leaning S.C. Rep. Rita Allison – released its long-awaited report (.pdf here) in response to this ruling.
Readers may recall this is the task force Lucas vowed would make “significant progress” in reforming government-run education in the Palmetto State.
Did it? Absolutely not …
The Lucas-Allison report is a full-on endorsement of the failed, costly status quo “solutions” of the past – an establishment double-down that ignores proven free market reforms and wildly embraces top-down “one size fits none” planning. Specifically, the document urges increased spending in poor school districts, increased spending on facilities (ahem, really?), increasing spending on transportation, increased spending on early childhood education (ahem, really?) and increased spending on a flood of new government programs (many of them administered by the state’s bloated, duplicative higher education bureaucracy).
It is, quite simply, an orgy of big government … a liberal pipe dream that would make Barack Obama blush (to the extent he’s not already well-pleased with the direction of “Republican” education policy in the Palmetto State).
Of course what’s missing from the report is every bit as telling as the taxpayer-funded largesse it includes …
“The task force has neglected to mention one of the most effective educational reforms, school choice,” a review of the task force’s work by the S.C. Policy Council noted. “Nowhere in the report is there a reference to South Carolina’s small existing tax credit scholarship program (available only to exceptional needs students). Nor is there any hint that a new choice program could improve the state system’s performance.”
Indeed … and that is nothing short of galling given the empirical evidence that exists supporting the efficacy of parental choice.
The court’s ruling last fall made it abundantly clear that throwing more money and more government programs at our failing “public” schools was not the answer: Yet that is precisely what Lucas and Allison are recommending.
Meanwhile they have completely ignored the one thing that’s proven successful at raising academic outcomes …
What a joke …
Given our years of experience with liberal “Republican” politicians in South Carolina, we set the bar exceedingly low when it comes to our expectations for their policy recommendations. And yet somehow, Lucas and Allison have still managed to come up short – dramatically short.
Everyone associated with this panel should be embarrassed. And voted out of office at the earliest opportunity.
Having been confronted by the abject failure of their costly, bureaucratic approach to education – they now propose to “solve” the problem with more of your money. And more bureaucracy.
Insanity …
13 comments
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god you are such a retard. what the hell does school choice mean in allendale? or a dozen other counties where there’s only one school? you want to send your kids to a K-12 corporate charter, or just other people’s kids?
It means now parents can transfer their kids from schools funded by low tax receipts to schools funded by low tuition affordability, then Will can skim over the results, cherry pick the two or three statistics that improve, and hail it as a success.
Spot on. Suburban white guy problems.
Why would Will care? He sends HIS kids to one of the best public school districts in the state.
That’s right—50 years of failed “Great Society” and “War on Poverty” and NEA union thugs
Have ripped the fabric of America’s culture down to Demwits, bullies, other felons and drugs
So hey…think homeschooling by Christian whites AND blacks is a hula hoop that will pass?
Nay… it’s your CHOICE to drag yourself straight to a *ell that’s passing away and won’t last !!!
“Did someone say orgy?”
– Nikki Haley (R)
Left-leaning Rita Allison? Didn’t she work for your boss, the love gov?
inertia…a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state
of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is
changed by an external force.
Inertia of the political cranium…. Don’t expect these politicians to do anything differently. Our state government is certainly not at rest, it is on the path it has pursued for years. Throw money at the problem, the same ole problem that has been in the process of being solved for decades. All the while, they are telling that they are making progress solving the problem, we just need more money.
Rube Goldberg would be proud. we have an system that is deliberately over-engineered to perform a simple task in a complicated fashion, yielding little or no results, while costing a fortune.
Normal political answer to every problem, throw more money at it. It HAS to work at some point. Yeah-right.
The H8 Deb8… Republican’s tears are the sweat of the devil, the demons that pull Satan’s chariot.
Pissing their pants over barbarians on the other side of the planet with sharp, scary swords and dusty AK-47s…. that they *must* DESTROY UTTERLY…. carpet bomb their women – their children – after all, this isn’t World War II!
Besides, it will scare them so much, and they’ll respect America so much they’ll be AFRAID to blow themselves up.
yeah, right… both of Dubya’s and Obama’s terms wasted on war… 2 Trillion in the toilet… let’s spend more on our military and war – it’s only money – and blood.
DNA only matters if it’s in someone else’s liberal American wife.
If you include Catholic Schools, state voicher funding for your kid’s education would not only be complete, but your child would some day add greatly to the coffers of some lucky low-cost psychologist in Greenville or Florence.
This is what all of government has become.Big money,pay increases so folks can funnel money back to the politicians and their friends. Government cannot protect as it has shown. They want to take your weapons so they can control you the way they wish without any backdraft. Every government body in America is in a cycle that runs the same way. You will notice unions and those that control government return a lot of money to politicians, it is a cycle. You have to have friends in the right places to get a government job,this should tell folks something. Government waste and fraud is uncontrolled. For someone to have such control over American citizens and have no accountability shows just how uninformed and or uncaring the American public has become. Our government and it’s leaders are inept and you can see them forming their wagons in a circle to elect certain politicians that will fall in line with them.