Minimally Adequate

Divided by race, mired in inequities and hobbled by its history, South Carolina’s public school system is among the worst in the nation, saddled with a legacy of apathy and low expectations that threatens the state’s newfound prosperity.

South Carolina’s schools trail other states by nearly every measure, leaving students unprepared for the world that awaits them as businesses struggle to find qualified workers to fill skilled jobs, a Post and Courier investigation has found.

The Legislature has largely sat idle while gaps in achievement and resources have widened across the state, leaving daunting divides between rural and urban districts, poor and affluent schools, and white and black students.

Lawmakers have ignored their own mandates for funding education as generations of students languish, buildings crumble and teachers abandon their profession in droves. Lawmakers can’t even agree on what the most significant problems are, let alone raise the “minimally adequate” benchmark the state has prescribed for public education.

Meantime, the Palmetto State’s education system has, in many respects, become an impediment to growth rather than an engine of progress.

• More than half of students in grades 3 through 8 failed to meet the state’s reading and math standards last year. And that’s after the state weakened its standards in the last two decades.
  

• Just one out of five black eighth graders pass the state reading and math tests. Half of white students do.
  

• One in three students graduates high school unprepared for most jobs, state tests show. That number is even worse in rural and poor districts, where some schools fail to graduate even a dozen career-ready alumni.
  

• At 16 community high schools, mostly straddling the impoverished Interstate 95 corridor, not a single student took an Advanced Placement course exam last year while their counterparts in suburban Greenville, Charleston and Columbia took thousands.
  

• South Carolina tumbled last year in the national rankings in almost every category of a test known as “the nation’s report card.” Its fourth graders did worse on math and reading than their counterparts in Mississippi, a state that spends less per pupil and has the nation’s highest poverty rate.
  

This comes at a time when the state’s economy is booming, boasting a wealth of new jobs and massive investments from multinational companies such as Boeing, Volvo and BMW. But these jobs require solid reading and math skills — areas in which the state’s students have consistently come up short.

And the situation is getting worse.

This year’s graduating class in South Carolina placed nearly last in the nation on the ACT college preparedness test, besting only Nevada among states that give the exam to all students. Just 2 percent of black students and a fifth of white students met the college-ready benchmark in every subject.

What’s more, students in four high schools scored lower on the ACT than teens incarcerated at the state Department of Juvenile Justice.

“It is clear that the disparity gap between our high-performing schools and districts and our low-performing continues to widen,” Molly Spearman, South Carolina’s education superintendent, said.

That’s not news to sophomore Hannah Breland, a student at an Orangeburg County magnet program that teaches technical career skills and sets students up to earn credits at a nearby community college. She has a leg up on her peers, but still harbors doubts about succeeding at a four-year college after her time at Edisto High, a high-poverty school situated between a country road and a cow pasture in the tiny town of Cordova.

“Even if we are the smartest here, when we go out somewhere else, we’re not up to par with everyone else,” she said.

Tony Goodloe is in the same boat after graduating in the spring from the rural Allendale County School District, now in the midst of its second state takeover to correct financial and academic failings. Goodloe graduated near the top of his class and led the school’s debate team, but he still needed remedial classes before he could attend Clemson University full time.

“My high school experience really did not prepare me for college in any aspect,” Goodloe said.

Interviews with more than 200 educators, students, business leaders, politicians and academics revealed a state school system hampered by gaping racial and economic disparities that thwart progress, particularly for black students. South Carolina is home to elite private academies and award-winning urban magnet schools, as well as run-down rural classrooms where qualified teachers are in short supply and students lack access to the arts, high-tech career training and other offerings.

It’s a tangled story with roots that extend from the tortured legacy of slavery and Jim Crow to the collapse of the state’s textile industry and the rise of new commerce in South Carolina’s largest cities. Old ways clash with fresh expectations as waves of new residents, jobs and wealth flow into the state, lifting the fortunes of some communities while leaving others far behind.

It’s bred an unequal landscape for public education, with pockets of promise amid corridors of faltering schools struggling to meet state standards. South Carolina’s constitution, however, requires only that the Legislature provide a “minimally adequate” education for all, the state Supreme Court has ruled.

South Carolina faces many of the same challenges as other Deep South states, including entrenched poverty, a stark urban-rural divide and a tradition of segregation.

But other states have set a higher bar to improve, and several regional neighbors have embarked on ambitious, comprehensive plans to remake their school systems.

Louisiana worked to overhaul its statewide curriculum, boost early childhood education and nurture young teachers. Tennessee raised its academic standards and shoveled money and attention into fixing its lowest-performing school districts. Mississippi also enacted tougher standards while expanding preschool and teacher mentoring programs.

“There is not a single thing we are monitoring that’s not headed in the right direction,” Mississippi Education Superintendent Carey Wright said. “The key is to do something that is very comprehensive.”

South Carolina has not made wholesale reforms to its education system since the 1980s, when then-Gov. Richard Riley used his office as a bully pulpit to push for change. Key to that strategy was the backing of the state’s business community, which played an active role in lobbying the Legislature.

Business leaders haven't mounted a united push for reform this time around, though a number of large employers have raised alarms about the dearth of qualified workers in the Palmetto State.

But if the state is to grow and attract more business, experts warn, South Carolina must find a way to overcome the many challenges that are driving our students toward the back of the pack.

“It’s going to take a movement,” Riley, the former governor and U.S. education secretary, said.

South Carolina has a long legacy of apathy toward public education.

In the 19th century, the state barred enslaved black children from learning how to write. In the 20th century’s Jim Crow era, the Legislature battled against integrating schools as white families fled to private segregation academies. And in the 21st century, after fighting the longest legal battle in state history to fend off a lawsuit from its poorest school districts, the Legislature essentially disregarded the state Supreme Court’s 2014 order to repair deep and persistent inequalities.

Today, six decades after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregated education inherently unequal, almost half of the state’s public schools still are made up of students of predominantly one race or another. In a state where race and income track closely, that creates huge — and growing — disparities among schools.

In Charleston County, for example, the nearly all-white Sullivan’s Island Elementary is in one of the nation’s priciest zip codes. Less than 10 miles away is downtown Charleston’s Mitchell Math and Science Elementary, predominantly black and the city's poorest school.

Almost 85 percent of Sullivan’s Island fourth-graders met or exceeded expectations in science on the state’s standardized assessment test this year. Barely more than a quarter of Mitchell students did.

Other examples abound as school choice exacerbates these gaps in areas where magnets and charters siphon top-performing students from struggling schools while children with the fewest resources get marooned in failing institutions.

In the state’s third-largest city, North Charleston High loses more than half the students in its attendance zone to a host of magnet, charter and private schools, leaving behind a core of poor black students. Only one in five last year tested as being ready for most jobs.

Less than 2 miles away, Academic Magnet is ranked among the nation’s best high schools. Nearly all of its students scored as job-ready. Its mostly white student body largely drives in from more affluent suburbs. Less than a tenth of its student body last year came to school from North Charleston.

It’s not just school choice. Some 36,000 students also have fled South Carolina’s public school system altogether, their parents shelling out thousands of dollars annually to at least 280 private schools around the state that are overwhelmingly white. Dozens of those private schools first opened so white students could escape desegregation in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Millicent Brown became one of the first black students to integrate Charleston County schools when, as a 15-year-old, she entered the all-white Rivers High School in 1963. A former associate professor at Claflin University in Orangeburg, Brown contends the state has not fully confronted the legacy of its past or the racial divisions that continue to separate us.

While other states in the Deep South have made renewed commitments to public education, she said, South Carolina has allowed its schools — particularly those serving black students — to simply deteriorate in the years since integration occurred.

“The most basic issues about the importance of education just seem to elude us,” Brown said. “We can’t seem to figure out how to do it right.”

Lawmakers hold the power to enact change. But the crisis-driven Legislature can’t agree where to start as its attention wanders to myriad other issues. Less than a quarter of lawmakers actually have children in public schools, a Post and Courier poll determined.

“If we continue to ‘lead’ in this manner, we’re just going to wait until everything collapses, and that’s no way to lead,” said Rep. Nathan Ballentine, a Chapin Republican.

Still, The Post and Courier surveyed the South Carolina Statehouse this year and found no clear consensus on the most pressing issues in education. Some lawmakers cited teacher pay; others, classroom spending. Still others wanted to focus on building maintenance, school consolidations and other concerns.

Indeed, legislators introduced more than 200 education-related bills in the last session alone, but have yet to deal with a school funding mechanism that dates back to the 1970s or the low bar set by the state’s “minimally adequate” standard. Instead, they’ve wrestled with topics such as the number of bathrooms that should be placed in school athletic stadiums.

At least 13 resolutions have been introduced over the past decade calling for a constitutional change to raise South Carolina’s educational standard. All went nowhere.

Education reform appeared to be on the horizon when the Abbeville County School District v. South Carolina lawsuit ended in 2014 with the state Supreme Court ordering a sweeping overhaul of the funding system that leaves poor, rural districts behind. But the Legislature slow-walked efforts for change for three years until new justices joined the high court and helped nix their predecessors' mandate. The case went away without changes to the funding scheme. Lawmakers essentially remade the court rather than the education system.

Senate President Pro Tem Hugh Leatherman, considered South Carolina's most powerful politician because he leads the Senate and several committees that control state purse strings, is not sold on the need for big changes. He advocated baby steps toward improvements rather than attempt wholesale reform that he says could make the situation worse.

“I’m not sure you can solve this problem with one big overarching overhaul,” he said. “There are no magic bullets for education.”

Instead, state leaders in recent years have focused on a variety of stopgap fixes and patchwork reforms that have rarely delivered promised results.

One example is the Read to Succeed Act, a 2014 law championed by then-Gov. Nikki Haley as a way to turn the tide on South Carolina’s dismal childhood literacy rates. In four years, the measure cost the state about $214 million and yielded no improvements. South Carolina fourth-graders actually back-slid on national rankings for reading during the course of the law’s rollout.

The bulk of spending went to conduct summer reading camps in every district and to hire a small army of literacy coaches who were forbidden under the law from actually working with the students.

Meanwhile, left untouched have been some of the thorniest issues impacting students, including the antiquated education funding formula and tax cuts that have systematically robbed school systems of their steadiest revenue streams.

A 2006 tax reform law, for instance, prevented districts from using property taxes on owner-occupied homes to fund school operations. The move costs districts millions in revenue each year.

“How the state has let itself off the hook is criminal,” said Jon Hale, a University of South Carolina professor whose research focuses on education history.

Wealthy districts can supplement state funds with special sales taxes while others barely scrape by, unable to fix dilapidated schools, replace aging technology or bump teachers’ starting salaries above the state average, which ranks 46th in the nation.

Booming Charleston County, for instance, hauled in more than $440 million in a five-year period through a special sales tax to fund school building improvements. A tax in the Pee Dee’s rural Marlboro County netted just $6 million in that same time.

And over nearly a decade’s time, Horry County, home to the growing tourism mecca of Myrtle Beach, collected $490 million more from its special sales tax than neighboring Dillon County, which has two small and cash-poor school districts.

So while Dillon patches up aging buildings in disrepair, Horry has built five new schools to address growth, including Socastee Middle, a $42 million, 800-student facility with solar panels, colorful murals and laptops for all.

If Horry ever has to give up that sales tax and depend on state money? “We will be in a tough bind,” Mark Wolfe, the school district’s facilities director, said.

Also unaddressed is the state’s crippling teacher shortage, which grows more severe by the year.

South Carolina’s colleges of education are not producing enough graduates to keep up with demand, veteran instructors are bailing out and an ever-growing number of teachers — more than 1,700 in the last school year alone — are leaving the profession within five years of completing college.

“It’s almost an endemic thing that continues to grow, and it’s always shocked me,” said Jon Pedersen, dean of the University of South Carolina's College of Education. “What other profession or business could survive with a 30 percent turnover rate?”

Rural and poor districts have contended with this shortage for decades, desperately seeking foreign-exchange teachers or uncertified young college graduates to fill the gaps. Now that crisis has spread to wealthier metropolitan counties.

Gov. Henry McMaster suggested during his recent re-election campaign that the answer to South Carolina’s education problems rests with improving the economy and adding jobs that would raise our standards of living.

But experts say those jobs won’t come if the state lacks an educated workforce.

Jim Moore is the top business recruiter in Williamsburg County, a one-time textile hub. With the county’s beleaguered school system in the midst of an emergency state takeover, Moore must field calls from companies leery of relocating to a place where test scores scrape the bottom.

“We definitely lose projects every year because we never even get a chance,” Moore said.

Williamsburg County residents Roger and Maria Scott considered the situation so dire that they sent their oldest children to live with relatives in another county so they wouldn’t have to attend local Kingstree Senior High.

“I don’t think we’ll have any of our kids graduate from Kingstree,” Roger Scott said.

Williamsburg County, oddly enough, nearly matched the state’s graduation rate of 85 percent — an all-time high. The state trumpeted those numbers in a television commercial last year, part of a $500,000 series of ads aimed at convincing people that South Carolina’s schools aren’t as bad as they think.

But if college and career readiness tests are any indicator, a South Carolina high school diploma might not be worth much. Only two-thirds of South Carolina students are considered ready for a majority of jobs. In the worst districts, as few as one in five students qualify.

Students at technical colleges routinely must take remedial classes to make up for what they should have learned in high school. At Trident Technical College in North Charleston, the largest school in the state technical college system, nearly half of new students needed at least one remedial course this fall.

In the previous century, this might not have mattered as much in South Carolina given agriculture and textile jobs were plentiful. But advanced global manufacturing companies have brought new jobs that require deeper math and analytical skills. And they aren’t afraid to import that skilled labor from outside the state if they can’t find it here.

But as other states ratchet up their expectations to prepare students for the modern workforce, South Carolina is doing just the opposite.

The state has lowered its grade-level math proficiency standards since the turn of the 21st century, particularly in early elementary grades. And when the conservative-leaning Fordham Institute reviewed English standards across the country in 2018, it rated South Carolina’s among the weakest.

What’s more, South Carolina was one of just four states to lower its expectations on standardized tests for math and English between 2005 and 2015, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Such moves puzzle veteran educators like Jane Pulling, who retired in 2006 after a career spent working in South Carolina’s high-poverty and rural schools. She wonders if fiscal concerns are truly what stymied change or if state leaders are simply indifferent to the state of South Carolina’s schools.

“If they really cared, they would do something, or try to do something, or make some little steps toward doing something,” she said.

There are plenty of models to draw from around the country and within our own borders.

In Orangeburg, the High School for Health Professions boasts a 100 percent graduation rate and near-universal college attendance after training its students for needed medical jobs. In Greenville, Lead Academy charter school has received state recognition for the academic progress achieved by a student body recruited to reflect diversity. And in North Charleston, Meeting Street Academy is turning around two mostly black and poor neighborhood schools by putting two teachers in each classroom, extending the school day and year, and raising expectations.

“We are trying to move the needle in education and say this is not a hopeless problem,” said Ben Navarro, the billionaire founder of Meeting Street Schools.

Still, there is little sign at the state level that anyone is working to replicate these efforts on a wider scale.

The next legislative session begins in about two months. In the run-up, there’s been talk of tax cuts, utility rate relief, a ban on sanctuary cities for immigrants and an effort to put an armed law enforcement officer in every South Carolina school. But systemic education reform?

Not a word.