73,000 students trapped in failing SC schools

This school year 185 public schools across South Carolina were ranked as “failing.”

These types of under-performing schools were once called “F-schools” but they were later renamed “unsatisfactory.” Now, in the new politically correct edu-speak of Jim Rex, they are merely called “at-risk” by the State Department of Education.

No matter what you call them, these schools are primarily attended by low-income and minority children. In fact, 92% of the 73,722 students at failing schools come from low-income families and 77% are African-American.

Not only are these groups of students the most under-served in the public schools system, they are also the least likely to be able to make a real choice to attend a school other than their local public school. Their parents simply lack the money to move to a different attendance zone or enroll their children in private school. These kids are trapped (and the problem is not lack of government resources).

South Carolina can learn from FL schools

Anyone with even a casual interest in public schools public education in South Carolina should read this article from the Washington Times.

Public schools in South Carolina continue to disappoint parents with consistently low SAT scores, a still widening achievement gap, and a massive dropout rate that ranks among the nation’s worst. All this bad news despite per-student spending over $11,000 per public school student.

The situation in Florida is very different.

Taxis to school?

South Carolina singled out for misleading school reporting

Jim Rex’s 10 new $100,000+ staffers will have to start reporting the real dropout rate to parents and lawmakers.

Yesterday, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings spoke in Columbia about the new requirements for reporting graduation rates. Under the new federal rules, states will be required to uniformly report graduation rates, and provide data on the individual student demographics.

Parents will be glad to hear about the opportunity to objectively learn how their local schools compare to public schools around the country, but state education officials are predictably unenthusiastic.

Already 80% of South Carolina public schools failed to meet “Adequate Yearly Progress” goals in 2008, and the new regulations would impose even more goals for schools to meet.  Rex has his hands full trying to explain away testing and graduation rate failures, and the addition of new progress goals would only make his agenda of excuses more difficult. This year Rex has done just about everything possible to do away with the assessment measures that show the ineffectiveness and failure of his administration. Replacing the PACT with a new, even more insipid PASS Test was a start. Now Rex is begging the General Assembly to get rid of all ‘absolute’ and ‘improvement’ ratings for local public schools.

64,219 dashed hopes

SC Dept of Education is hard at work denying thousands of children federally guaranteed services

South Carolina’s public schools spend an average of $11,480 per student. Of that money, roughly ten percent (or $1,097) is from the US federal government.

Federal K-12 spending is much higher in low-income and low-performance schools because of the Title One program which aims to reduce socio-economic correlated gaps in student achievement.

Much of the money comes down to the state and local districts through the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) which was designed to encourage accountability in public education through standardized testing.

While many parents and lawmakers are rightly frustrated with federal involvement with public education, historically a local issue, the state’s acceptance of federal K-12 education funding involves a commitment to the NCLB law and its assessment provisions, which the state hopes to meet through its new PASS test.

Less well-known are the NCLB provisions dealing with children attending persistently failing schools. In order to provide these children with supplementary instruction, NCLB calls for after school tutoring to be offered to these children, free of charge to the parents. The parents are also to be offered some forms of transfers for their children to other, better performing, public schools.

Edu-Failure Machine Rolls Forward in Allendale

The public schools in Allendale and Lee Counties may be the absolute worst schools in all of the United States. They are certainly the lowest performing in South Carolina, where the statewide average SAT scores and graduation rate linger at or around 50th each year in national rankings.

Now, we hear that Jim Rex’s State Department of Education is unwilling to take direct over control of these failing schools, despite having run failing schools in the past as an attempt to “reform” them in accordance with state and national accountability laws.

From 1999 to 2007 the entire district of Allendale was managed by the state, but frankly, that didn’t seem to help.

Thursday’s State News Paper explains:

Two failing schools were called before the state Board of Education Wednesday. Fairfax Elementary in Allendale and Mount Pleasant Middle in Lee County avoided state takeover. But if they do not improve within coming months, the state still could take control, Rex added.

“There were enough extenuating circumstances that we decided to put (these schools) on a short leash but give them another chance,” Rex said.

At Fairfax Elementary school in Allendale hopes are being pinned on a new principal:

New Fairfax principal Dewey Carey, who has been charged before with reviving similar rural, low-income schools in Georgia, said he can turn the school around.

“By no means will I tolerate incompetence in the classroom,” Carey said. “You hurt too many children in the classroom if you do that.”

These two comments speak volumes about public education in South Carolina.

1. After years of sustained failure the State Superintendent analogizes the schools to misbehaving dogs. And 2. Following eight years of state intervention and $11 million in additional funding a high dollar out-of-state administrator has finally been recruited to enforce a “no incompetence” policy.

State government will NOT succeed where local government has failed. In fact, greater centralization of K-12 education through the State Department of Education has actually led to growing performance gaps between both black and white students, as well as between rich and poor students.

Nor is money the problem. In 2006, Allendale public schools served 1,704 students and spent $23,680,637.00 to educate them. That works out to $13,897.09 per pupil! The problem is the no-transparency, no-accountability, no-competition model of government schooling itself.

No one can seriously expect a state government which oversees the nation’s highest violent crime rate and the country’s third highest illiteracy rate to design and administer an effective and equitable system of schools. Rather than continue to fail these children by denying them educational opportunity, lawmakers ought to take a portion of the $13,800 per pupil allotment, and give it to parents for their children. Even just one-third of that money would be enough for a private school tuition (the national average is less than $5,000). This would mean more money for those who remain in public schools, improvements for all students through introduction of competition, and the ability of parents to control their children’s educational future.

But, thanks to politicalized bureaucrats, special interest money, and “Know Nothing” lawmakers looking to protect their turf, the greater likelihood is that public schools in Allendale and Lee will be given more public money to waste as they systematically destroy any hope of future academic, professional, or personal success in the lives of their students. All the while, Rex and others will continue to apologize for these “third world” educational conditions.

PACT Debate Misses the Mark on Money, Standards

Lawmakers are debating how, and when to replace the controversial PACT test. Rather than merely changing the test, Jim Rex is using the transition as a bait-and-switch attempt to also re-tool and weaken state accountability laws. While the current bill is less damaging than the initial proposal, the transition alone will cost taxpayers more than $24 million over the next three years.

One aspect to this story that has been lost on the main stream media is that under Rex, the Department of Education tried to outmaneuver the Legislature, the State Board, and the Education Oversight Committee  last year by issuing contract bids for both tests and test items without approval.

If South Carolina is serious about K-12 assessment, lawmakers need to look to the successfully model of private schools across the state. These schools employ commercially developed, off-the-shelf standardized tests such as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Stanford 10 test. Such tests cost a fraction of the PACT and allow for speedy, specific, and diagnostic results for each child. They are also being used by public schools in other states to meet NCLB requirements.

But that makes too much sense. More likely, politically connected companies like Data Recognition Corp (who administers the PACT and was hired to suggest plans for its replacement) will continue to rake in hundreds of millions in long term state contracts.

Assessment is a great tool for accountability. It can help keep parents and teachers informed of student and school progress. But assessment can also hide problems. Everyone knows that South Carolina is the nation’s shame with a high school graduation rate below fifty percent. But through the use of poorly-crafted tests and selective testing state officials are able to claim that over 71 percent of students passed a high school “exit exam” last year.

Contact your lawmaker. Let them know that teachers and parents need accurate data. Explain to them how states, like private schools, can buy standardized tests that assess student performance against absolute benchmarks, not muddled South Carolina specific “standards.”

The Rex/Walker Plan to Strip Standards

South Carolina’s Education Accountability Act (EAA) and the national No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law are examples of standards-based accountability. Lawmakers want to ensure that schools are focused on outcomes, or individual student achievement, so they set benchmarks for performance. The schools measure student performance against these benchmarks, and inform parents and policymakers on the results.

The philosophy behind standards-based reform is that public and uniform performance targets are the best way to foster good instruction. Good instruction is of course the real key to student learning. While some parents and teachers have voiced frustration with the specific tests or funding mechanisms associated with NCLB and EAA, all agree that the basic emphasis on absolute performance and outcomes is sound.

But now, some education administrators and Columbia politicians want to start stripping the accountability. Their plan is subtle: they want to provide parents with information on a student or school’s “growth” (once called “improvement”) rather than just an absolute grade. This movement is being spearhead by two men: Jim Rex and Bob Walker.

Rex wants to wants to use differential accountability for his low-performing schools so that he can avoid the federal support and oversight mechanisms designed to transform failing schools.

Rex’s partner Bob Walker is sponsoring a bill (a watered down version of his initial proposal) that will try to confuse parents by using “growth” ratings on school report cards. This re-worked EAA will also allow failing schools to receive Palmetto Gold and Silver Awards for “growth” and “improvement” even if they don’t meet state or federal performance standards.

The inclusion of “growth” ratings on accountability report cards is disingenuous, and leads to lowered expectations. South Carolina’s public schools have the nation’s lowest graduation rate and the second lowest SAT scores. South Carolina’s economic competitiveness is a function of the total quality of our workers and companies, not merely their relative “growth.”

Weakening our standards and reporting practices will not resolve the problems in South Carolina’s public schools. Providing all parents with accurate information and real options (including access to independent and private schools) will.

Two Sets of Books: Misreporting Graduation Rates in SC

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a interesting article about the ways in which states misreport and under-report their on-time graduation rate to the federal government. The Times points to a 13.8 percent difference between the number of South Carolina public school children who receive diplomas four years after entering high school and the number of mere “completers” as reported by the SC Department of Education.

A posting about the article, and the national move toward a uniform measure, has already been written by Jennifer at the blog Elonkey. She laments that while four-in-ten public school children fail to graduate, Jim Rex is actually applying for participation in a federal program that further weakens NCLB accountably reporting standards.

South Carolina’s lowest in the nation graduation rate is not only a problem for those dropouts who fail to complete school; it costs all taxpayers in the state. Brian Gottlob of the Friedman Foundation reported last June that:

Over an expected lifetime of 50 years, one year’s class of dropouts will cost South Carolina $4.9 billion. These cost estimates only include costs associated with three sources: lost revenue from taxes and fees, increased Medicaid costs and increased incarceration costs. Because dropouts also incur many other public costs, the true public cost of dropouts is larger than $3,193 per dropout per year.

Public schools in South Carolina spend more than $11,000 per student. This is two and half times the average private school tuition rate in the state. The sustained failure of SC public schools to produce competitive graduates – and their dishonesty in obscuring that fact – is costing students and taxpayers millions. Call or email your representative and ask if they support School Choice or, if like Jim Rex, they hid behind excuses and misinformation.