South Carolina has become a target state for well-organized groups that seek to restrict curriculum, reduce the influence of teacher groups, ban books, and ultimately privatize public schools.
Taken together, these efforts will undermine social progress and undercut universal free public education.
People commonly assume that private schools must provide better instruction than public schools. In fact, data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that scores for students who attend private schools are higher than scores for students who attend public schools. However, looking beyond simple descriptive statistics leads to an entirely different conclusion. A longitudinal study by Pianta and Ansari (2018) revealed that merely controlling for variation in family income eliminated most of the differences in achievement for public versus private school students.
Bills to Privatize Public Education
Privatizing public schools was the priority item on the legislative agenda for the 125th session of the South Carolina General Assembly. The first bill up for debate in the Senate in 2023 was designed to circumvent the state constitutional prohibition against spending public money for private schools, an idea that the League has consistently opposed.
The session opened with S.39 in the full Senate Education Committee. There was no subcommittee hearing on this year's bill and no opportunity for public testimony. The Senate gave third reading to S.39 on February 1, 2023, after considering over 50 amendments during more than two weeks of floor debate. The sponsors of the bill hope to avoid the constitutional prohibition by routing the government payments to Education Scholarship Accounts and authorizing parents who choose to enroll their students in private schools to use the funds for expenses that include, but are not limited to, tuition and transportation.
Senate bill 39 was initially promoted as a way to offer more educational options to children with disabilities and children who qualify for Medicaid; however, it morphed over the debate period into a potential boon for private schools. The original restrictions were eliminated. The bill that eventually passed the Senate offers to subsidize expenses for attending private schools at the rate of $6,000 per student with automatic provision for expansion that grants funds to 5,000 students in the first year of the program and increases the number of recipients by 5,000 each year for the next two years.
Qualifying income restrictions become more lenient each year, beginning with 200% of the poverty level or about $60,000 annually for a family of four in the first year. By the third year, the program will have expanded to 15,000 students with the qualifying income limit increased to 400% of the poverty level, which would likely approach $130,000 annually for a family of four. South Carolina has approximately 750.000 students in kindergarten through grade 12, and 735,000 of them would receive no benefit from the 90-million-dollar program outlined in S.39.
A second Senate bill S.285, offers an alternate strategy to circumvent the same constitutional prohibition by setting up a tax-credit plan that collects dollars for private school scholarships before they ever reach the State Treasury. This bill could divert 100 million dollars of potential state revenue to scholarships for homeschoolers or for religious or private schools. Scholarship amounts in this proposal can range from $1,000 per student to a maximum of $11,000 per student per year. The League provided testimony to the Senate K-12 Education Finance Subcommittee, noting the bill offers no accountability provisions and allows private schools to reject students for a variety of reasons including disability, gender, religion, and academic aptitude. A House bill, H.3591, proposes yet another approach to privatization: a referendum to amend the state constitution by repealing the prohibition against spending government funds for direct aid to religious schools or other private schools.
The South Carolina House of Representatives will probably make some changes to any bill the Senate passes; however, there is a reasonable likelihood that a privatization bill could pass this year.
Curriculum Restriction and Book Bans
Curriculum restriction efforts in the House resurfaced as H.3728 where testimony before the K-12 Subcommittee of the Education and Public Works Committee was limited to one minute each for the twenty-five speakers who appeared before the subcommittee. Twenty-four, including the League, spoke against the bill. The one supporter of H.3728 was a man who spoke on behalf of Moms for Liberty, a well-connected, well-funded group that has fielded successful local school board candidates in several districts in South Carolina.
Members of Moms for Liberty have initiated efforts to ban books in several South Carolina counties. Most of the books that have been targeted for removal have focused on either racial or LGBTQ+ themes. A recent report, titled “Merchants of Deception: Parent Props and Their Funders,” has exposed the funding sources and business connections of Moms for Liberty and similar groups. The report is available as a free download from the Network for Public Education. The report connects funders for groups pushing book bans and curriculum restriction regulations to a network of dark money donors who support privatization and oppose teacher unions.
Public good or private enterprise?
What the scholarship bills, curriculum restriction bills, and book-ban requests have in common with recent efforts to take over local school boards is that all four of these tactics are aligned with a national trend to create pathways for privatizing public education. Proponents of privatization promote choice programs as an approach that should lead to better academic outcomes, but the assumed cause-effect relationship does not survive under scrutiny. Variation in family income has been shown to account for most of the reported differences in student achievement scores between public schools and private schools. Historically, programs that divert public funds to religious or private schools have led to increased de facto segregation. So, ultimately the question is whether our citizens and our lawmakers believe that free public education is a public good that is worthy of adequate support, both in terms of funding with state dollars and in terms of supervision and resources that could be provided through the South Carolina Department of Public Education.
Citations:
Cunningham, M. T. (2023). Merchants of Deception: Parent Props and Their Funders. Network for Public Education. https://networkforpubliceducation.org/merchants-of-deception/
Pianta, R. C., & Ansari, A. (2108). Does Attendance in Private Schools Predict Student Outcomes at Age 15? Evidence From a Longitudinal Study. Educational Researcher, 47(7), https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/XfYmtC25VddcCfbA3xiV/full
