A pipeline of failure

When South Carolina thinks of the tides that have reshaped its economy, it thinks of the forces that have washed over this town. It thinks of the industries Kingstree was built on, and how they drowned under waves of change.

It thinks of the tobacco sheds so far gone that they were replaced by a Family Dollar and an auto parts store years ago. It thinks of the cotton gin rusting behind a tire shop. It thinks of the textile factories all around Williamsburg County — shuttered or knocked down.

They’re signs of an old economic crisis, the ruins of a state sustained by factories that were drawn to its low wages — until they could get to places where the wages were even lower. They’re evidence of how the bedrock of yesterday’s economy washed out, before a boom of high-tech factories could replace it.

All around them, a new undercurrent of trouble threatens to erode the state’s recent economic prosperity, and it's a crisis of the state's own making: its "minimally adequate" education system.

This is a state where the high school graduation rate has improved, but a diploma doesn’t meet businesses’ needs. Where a third of high school juniors don’t have the basic skills they need to get a modern job. Where entire counties are being left behind.

In places like Kingstree, 60 miles north of Charleston, the biggest companies in town say that they want workers who can do algebra more than they want cheap labor. Without them, these manufacturers say they can’t grow, and their communities are unlikely to win new factories.

In Williamsburg County, for every student certified as ready to work most jobs last year, two were not. Most are disqualified because they can’t pass the math section on South Carolina’s job-readiness test.

Williamsburg County isn’t alone: Its school district is one of 22 in South Carolina where the students who aren’t job-ready outnumber the students who are.

Most of the struggling districts fall along a path of historic inequities, a line of poor, disproportionately black communities that run through 160 miles of South Carolina's cotton country — the infamous "corridor of shame" from Dillon at the North Carolina line to Allendale, near Georgia.

Taken together, they represent the most dire cases in a staggering expanse of lost potential: Thousands of students pass through these struggling school districts each year, and most will leave without the skills required for most jobs in today's economy. Across South Carolina, a whopping 19,000 students this year will be sent out unprepared.

Some 74,000 students have fallen short since the state started measuring job-readiness four years ago. To fit them all in one place, you’d need to rent Charlotte's Bank of America Stadium, one of the largest in the NFL. The pace has hardly changed: The mass of students left adrift could fill another stadium every four years.

The economic consequences of that toll ripple across the state, but Williamsburg County encapsulates them. It has been wrecked by South Carolina's changing economy before, and its struggling schools put it on the front lines of one of the biggest threats to the state's future vitality.

"We all want a growing, productive economy. We all want per-capita income to increase throughout South Carolina. We want all of our citizens to have the opportunity to have economic well-being," said Mike Brenan, state president of BB&T, one of South Carolina's largest banks. "The transformation and improvement of public education would be a key component."

Look close enough for the signs and, as you drive north of town, you can just make out the transformation of South Carolina’s economy.

Take the massive concrete slab on the edge of Kingstree’s main industrial strip. It was once the foundation of the town’s biggest employer, a factory that made rubber gloves. It came here in the 1960s, chasing low wages to one of the poorest counties in America.

It worked out for a while. For decades, hundreds of people worked for Baxter Healthcare. But by the 1980s, its sights shifted to Malaysia, where the hourly wage in Kingstree could cover a day’s work. No one wanted to pay extra for an American-made glove.

When the plant here closed in the mid-1990s, it became a poster child of how manufacturing was changing. Newspaper reporters from across the country came here to see firsthand the “new economics” of the global economy and what happens when factory jobs move overseas. They talked to economists who warned that the only hope for American workers in the future would be their skills, not low wages.

Two decades later, some high-tech jobs are here. Factories that once depended on manual labor have been reborn with a focus on precision.

But the county’s top business recruiter, Jim Moore, said concerns about education have dulled Williamsburg's rebound. He’s not sure how many times a growing business has passed over his county because its test scores weren’t good enough. Talking about education has become a “very big part” of his job when companies do call. Urging people to get training has, too.

“The jobs are here, or the jobs can come,” said Moore, director of the county development board, repeating a message he preaches again and again. “But they won’t come if you are not ready.”

You can see why at the factory steaming behind the torn-down glove plant.

Back there, a couple hundred workers at DSM do something no one else does in the United States: They make one of the components of fish oil, without any fish.

Their factory grows enormous vats of algae, dries it and breaks it down until all that’s left is an omega-3 fatty acid called DHA. It has turned out to be a popular product. Kids aren’t supposed to take DHA from fish. Every canister of baby formula in America that has it — and most do — gets it from the plant in Kingstree.

Hugh Welsh, DSM’s president in North America, said the only thing keeping his company from growing is that it can’t find enough workers. The factory first came to Kingstree when its processes were less exacting and it needed more manual labor. It stayed as its work became more technical and its requirements increased. It's a “microcosm of what’s going on across the country,” he said.

So the idea of building a factory based on promises of cheap labor, cheap land or low taxes now sounds outdated.

“Those aren't the qualifiers anymore,” Welsh said. “We're much more interested in finding places where we know that we have a workforce that can learn, be trained, adapt as quickly as we do.”

That’s why Brian Lee, the Kingstree plant’s head of human resources, usually includes a few math problems in job interviews.

You’ve got to know math to work here, he said. You have to solve problems and think on the fly. Workers here don’t stay in one place, and they don’t work on one machine. They’re running a massive process that takes weeks, and it could go to waste if someone makes a mistake.

To grow lots of algae, you start by putting a single vial of goo in a flask to grow. When it’s full, it goes into a tank. And then a bigger one. And another — until the algae could fill a couple of railroad tankers.

Each step is like a big, high-stakes math problem: What’s the volume of the algae? How much glucose does it need to keep growing? How much water needs to be drained out to keep the proportions right?

Workers make those calculations day and night in a control room above six stories of algae tanks and snaking pipes of glucose and steam. They’re at once responsible for working on the factory floor and for doing math and monitoring the algae’s growth.

No one gets a pass on knowing how the plant works, Lee said, or the formulas that run it.

That was the idea behind having South Carolina’s high schoolers take a job-readiness test in the first place.

Businesses realized that a high school diploma didn't tell them enough about what graduates knew. It wasn't a guarantee that they'd learned what they needed to make it on the job. It just showed they'd passed 24 classes and cleared a basic exit exam.

So they pitched another approach: Make the test harder, but don't make it mandatory to pass. If nothing else, the test scores would show who's ready and who's not.

The low scores that have come back since are not outliers. BMW, which employs 10,000 people in Spartanburg, says a quarter of the applicants to its apprenticeship program fall out of the running when they take a similar test. Michelin, which has 8,500 workers at seven factories in the Midlands and the Upstate, says between 70 percent and 90 percent fail the math section on its test for technicians.

“Math skills are continuing to grow in importance,” said Dave Stafford, Michelin's chief human resources officer in North America, “and as a state, South Carolina is not at the required level.”

The state’s test is full of hypotheticals: To test geometry, it might ask how much fencing it would take to close off a garden. For algebra, it might ask how long it would take for a factory to fill an order. For arithmetic, it asks if a store's discounts were calculated correctly.

Other sections test how well students read things like memos and employee handbooks and how well they can pick information out of flow charts and order forms. Then it predicts how many jobs they're ready for.

The results are stark. For every student who heard they were on track for just about any job they wanted, four heard they were unprepared for most jobs.

“That is one of the roles that K-12 education is supposed to be filling,” said Ted Pitts, head of the S.C. Chamber of Commerce. "K-12 education is the pipeline for the future workforce of the state."

At the tail end of that pipeline, Torrance Wilson stepped into a shop class and found one of the problems South Carolina has struggled to mend.

He runs a career center at the north end of Williamsburg County, where 140 students come each afternoon from Hemingway High School, the county's least college- and career-ready.

A handful of seniors sat in a class on building trades, but this day's lesson wasn’t carpentry or masonry. It was arithmetic.

“Basic Math” was written on the whiteboard above a list of fractions. They were working on adding them together, wrangling denominators like they might on a job site.

Similar lessons happen across the career center, which trains high schoolers for jobs in health care and cosmetology, food service and welding. Math comes up often. Like their classmates across the district, most students here don’t qualify as job-ready.

“You’d be surprised how many of these kids get stumped just trying to learn basic math,” Wilson said.

Math is one of the reasons Williamsburg County can’t avoid the issue of education. The district's low test scores were part of why the state’s Department of Education declared a “state of emergency” here. The state threw out the superintendent and gave her replacement, Rose Wilder, a mandate to unravel the “substantial, systematic issues” pulling it down.

There was only so much she could do.

She needed to keep teachers from passing through "like a revolving door" — one in five quits in a typical year — but she couldn’t afford to pay them salaries that would keep them from moving away.

She needed safer school buildings — most were built in the early 1950s — but she couldn’t justify raising taxes in a county where nearly one-third of the population lives below the poverty line.

She needed to turn around academic problems that spanned lifetimes. For every third-grader in the district who can read and do math at a third-grade level, three can’t. When they reach the eighth grade, they fail at even higher rates.

Those problems bleed into high school, and into the workforce. In the end, 84 percent of Williamsburg County students graduate, matching the state average. But only one-third of its high school juniors are ready to work in most jobs.

The last time South Carolina undertook a complete overhaul of its school system, it looked to places like Kingstree.

Its leaders in the early 1980s saw an economic disaster looming as factories making T-shirts and sportswear closed down and other cheap-labor industries moved away. More and more, it seemed like South Carolinians would need at least a high school diploma to get a job.

The issue of education was becoming unavoidable.

Samuel Tenenbaum saw it at his steel mill in Columbia, when job prospects asked to take their applications home because they couldn’t read the form.

Joel Smith III saw it as a banking executive, when he realized that he needed good schools to keep his branches staffed — and a prosperous workforce to make deposits.

Bill Youngblood saw it as a young lawyer, when he helped the government borrow money for industrial development — and kept thinking that the state needed quality workers to keep its edge.

They were among the business leaders that Gov. Richard Riley recruited to make the case for education reform. Riley wanted to increase the sales tax to boost school funding, and he knew the conservative Legislature wouldn’t buy in without the business community on board. So he pulled together a group to make the case for him — to show “the inextricable link between educational excellence and economic vitality,” Youngblood said.

It worked. Business advocates helped scrape together enough support in the Statehouse to pass the Education Improvement Act, which set aside hundreds of millions of dollars for schools to try new things.

A panel of business leaders convened by the state managed to keep the program on track for the next decade, before it was disbanded in the 1990s. The law’s advocates say its education “trust fund” has since been raided, and money that was supposed to pay for innovative programs is now used to cover the basics.

“Every significant education initiative in this state — the business community has been the leader of it,” said Melanie Barton, director of the state Education Oversight Committee. “And that’s what we need now, too.”

Ask around the business community and you’ll hear plenty of support for improving education.

Businesses send volunteers into the schools and they donate supplies. They help pilot training programs, and they hire apprentices, hoping to improve students’ skills one at a time.

By and large, the state’s biggest companies are thinking local, about what they can do in their backyards. Education advocates say they ought to think bigger — to flex their political muscle and demand wholesale reform.

“I’ve learned that when the business community really gets behind something, it moves,” said Senate President Pro Tem Hugh Leatherman, a Florence Republican and the state’s most powerful politician. “If they don’t, it doesn’t.”

John Read understands why industry hasn’t been more vocal: The business community here is dominated by global giants, not homegrown companies. And Read figures that the boss of a South Carolina-based company is more likely to speak up than a big corporation’s local executive.

He knows because he was one. Long before he became an education advocate, he was the manager of a plant making diesel engines in North Charleston for a global company. His work focused on the day-to-day work of keeping the plant running, which bred a short-term outlook. He rarely thought about the workers he’d need in a decade.

“It’s perfectly understandable,” said Read, CEO of the Tri-County Cradle to Career Collaborative, an education advocacy group. “That doesn’t make it right.”

Read’s group was founded six years ago to make the case for better schools in the Charleston area. Every graduate, it argued, should be ready for college or a modern job. It started writing annual reports on the region’s progress, with the same bleak results.

But this year the group decided that everyone in the community needed to own the state's failures in education — and their fixes. So it wrote a manifesto for better schools.

Sitting in his office in downtown Charleston, Youngblood, an attorney who pushed for education reform in the 1980s, said he sees in it an ultimatum for the state:

Public schools, by any objective measure, are failing to educate a significant number of our children ...

As a community, we have proven either unwilling or unable so far to provide ...

This is a systems failure at its worst ...

“It’s a 1983 notion,” Youngblood said. It does what advocates did back then: show “what seems to be right in front of our faces.”

South Carolina’s economy today is at a high point, especially in the state's biggest cities.

But under the surface, businesses have sounded an alarm: Being able to adapt to changing tides in the economy is more important than ever.

When companies decide to come to South Carolina, their leaders aren’t always worried about finding workers with specific skills, said Elisabeth Kovacs, who runs workforce development for the state Commerce Department. Often, they don’t know what skills they’ll need a few years from now.

They are built on technology that is changing, and the only thing they’re sure of is that their needs will change. Most businesses want workers they can train and retrain.

So, more than ever, starting a career with a solid foundation matters.

Researchers have found that well-educated communities are more likely to withstand downturns and keep growing when the economy changes. They have found that a good teacher will boost a child’s future income, and they have found that a good education can give poor children a foothold into the middle class.

They have also found profound economic potential: If every student in South Carolina reached a “basic” national standard, the state’s economy could produce an extra $358 billion by the end of the century, according to a study led by the conservative Hoover Institution. If its schools were as good as Minnesota’s — the nation’s best — the boost would be worth $912 billion.

Compare that potential to the landscape in places like Williamsburg County today, where poverty is persistently high and the odds of a poor child rising out of it are slim. Its population, which was slowly dwindling in the 1980s, has fallen into a downward spiral. There are fewer jobs now than there were before the Great Recession.

There, too, Williamsburg County isn't alone. South Carolina is speckled with places on the verge — places with shrinking populations and fewer jobs, high poverty and fewer paths to prosperity. Most of them have struggling schools, dulling one of their best chances for reversing the slide, leaving another wave to swamp them again.