South Carolina law requires the Education Oversight Committee to compile a report every year on how well students receiving private-school vouchers are doing on standardized tests, but Columbia’s State newspaper reports that the first report still hasn’t been completed — and there’s no indication when it will be.
The Education Department has the first year’s data, but a spokeswoman tells us it hasn’t given it to the EOC yet because the Supreme Court’s 2024 order blocking the voucher part of the original law forced the agency to rely on parents rather than schools to transmit the data; that’s making compilation extremely difficult. The schools should be reporting most of the data and the EOC reports should be back on schedule next year under the new law passed in 2025.
Still, to many voucher opponents, this is just more evidence that vouchers are a bad investment, or at the least that the state has no interest in demonstrating whether or not they’re a good investment.
But Senate Education Chairman Greg Hembree says such delays are inevitable because “You’re going to have hiccups along the way.”
“It’s complicated, it’s brand new, it’s going to have problems,” Mr. Hembree told the newspaper.
He’s right to be patient — and he’s right about the problems inherent in standing up new programs. It does take time. It does involve learning what works and what doesn’t work. And ideally, it involves going back and making corrections when you learn that there are problems with some parts of your new program. As there will be with most any new program.
We’ve never been optimistic that we’d get much useful information from those test results, because voucher students aren’t taking the same tests the Legislature requires all public school students to take — and individual private schools could be administering different tests. Although the tests are supposed to be comparable to the state-mandated tests, they’re not the same, so they’re not going to tell us whether kids at private schools are learning the things the Legislature decided all S.C. students need to learn.
Even if you think it’s none of our business what kids attending private schools learn — and we don’t think that — certainly it’s our business whether kids are learning what our Legislature wants them to learn, and whether they’re learning it as well as they would in public schools, when our tax dollars are paying for their private education.
More to the point, though, are Mr. Hembree’s comments about the still-in-development voucher program. They underscore the folly — we might even call it irresponsibility — in the push by Gov. Henry McMaster and Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver and many lawmakers to expand the program without any data other than the number of kids attending private schools and how much taxpayers are spending to send them there.
The program already is set to expand eligibility from 10,000 students to 15,000 this year, but GOP leaders are pushing to expand it to 20,000 students instead. That would raise the cost by $61 million. All of this year’s slots were reserved for kids who are close to what most people would consider poor — the target audience supporters had told us for years they were trying to reach, before they pulled their bait-and-switch. So without a significant expansion beyond what the Legislature already had envisioned, there will be a lot of better-off parents who are already sending their kids to private schools who won’t get government subsidies to pay their bills.
But there are a lot of people who won’t get Meals on Wheels deliveries if the state doesn’t increase funding for those. There are a lot of kids with disabilities who won’t get specialized treatment if the state doesn’t increase Medicaid funding. There are a lot of people who won’t get their kids into 4-year-old kindergarten — which can make all the difference in whether those kids succeed in school or struggle for their entire careers — if lawmakers don’t accept and expand the governor’s proposal to grow that program. The list goes on.
The difference is that we have years of research that show that 4K and home meal deliveries and special-needs treatments and all the other services we provide as a safety net actually work, and work on a large scale. We have no data to show whether or not vouchers improve education except in individual cases.
The data the EOC hasn’t compiled yet are unlikely to demonstrate anything, because private schools lobbied hard to make sure they wouldn’t. But we at least need to give the voucher program time to shake out, to work through Sen. Hembree’s “hiccups,” before we double its size.
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