Lawmakers likely will try to revive a school voucher plan overturned last week by the S.C. Supreme Court, but there are better ways to provide a better education to poor kids.
Legislators haven't yet rallied around a plan to respond to the surprising S.C. Supreme Court ruling that declared their school voucher plan unconstitutional, but Gov. Henry McMaster says he wants a do-over in court "so that the children of low-income families may have the opportunity to attend the school that best suits their needs." Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver pledged to work with lawmakers and the governor "to support these students and educational freedom for all South Carolina families."
If they mean that, it's good, because there are much better ways to ensure that poor kids get a decent education than throwing public money at private schools.
The best way, of course, is to do more to ensure that the schools we own and that the Legislature is required by the S.C. Constitution to operate do a better job. Legislators have been increasing funding for those schools to combat a national teacher shortage and to direct a greater share of state funds to districts with more struggling students. Both are good steps.
But lawmakers never have done enough to make sure additional funding benefits the students in greatest need. They've never required that school districts assign the best teachers and principals to the schools with the most at-risk students, who have the greatest need for the best. They've never given principals enough authority to get rid of those teachers who shouldn't be teachers. They've never done enough to make sure someone intervenes when school boards focus more on providing jobs for their friends, business associates and family members than on providing the best education possible.
These are all things our Legislature could do if it wanted to -- if its top concern really were ensuring that poor kids get a good education.
Choices? The Legislature has had countless opportunities, for decades, to let all students attend the public school of their choice. The one time it passed such a law, then-Gov. Mark Sanford vetoed it, quite clearly worried it would undercut his effort to pay parents to abandon those public schools and send their children instead to private schools, using our tax dollars. The voucher law that the high court struck down last week even allows parents to use their vouchers to send their children to public schools they aren't zoned for -- but includes no mandate for public schools to accept students from outside their attendance zone or outside their district.
For that matter, if lawmakers believe that taxpayers should pay for poor students to attend whatever private school they want, there's a much more direct way of doing that, which no one could possibly suggest violates the provision in the state constitution that prohibits spending public funds for the "direct benefit" of private schools: Instead of creating an elaborate "trust fund" that the court says isn't really a trust fund and putting money in it for 5,000 poor children, just give that money directly to the parents, to spend as they please.
We're not convinced that taxpayers should hand out blank checks to parents, but if we're going to hand out checks to give parents more choices, it makes more sense to let the parents decide not only which school their children attend but also whether they consider it more important to send their children to a private school or to ensure that their children get three meals a day, have electricity and running water or move from the streets into a home. It's well-established that kids learn better when they have regular meals and a safe place to live. And surely no one could argue that taxpayers have a greater obligation to send children to private schools than to help ensure they have regular meals and a permanent home and water to drink and heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer.
Of course, that would get expensive, because all impoverished parents would welcome help with the groceries and the utilities and rent, but most of them won't bother applying for a school voucher: Either they're content with their public school or they realize there's a good chance that the voucher wouldn't cover the costs of a private school and the private school probably wouldn't accept their children even with a voucher. Or they realize they have bigger problems than where their children attend school.
Besides, the voucher law was capped at 5,000 students in this first year and 15,000 by the time it was to be phased in by year three.
But the House voted this year -- before the voucher law even took effect -- to expand the law exponentially, removing all the limits: no cap on the number of students, and no caps on parents' income. So since House members want to throw money at every parent in the state who wants to send the kids to a private school, surely they would be happy to throw money at every parent, or at least every poor parent, period. Right?
Click here for more opinion content from The Post and Courier.
Sign up for our opinion newsletter Get a weekly recap of South Carolina opinion and analysis from The Post and Courier in your inbox on Monday evenings.
Sign Up!