Pressure grows for phase-out of SC’s Educational Oversight Committee
Pressure grows for phase-out of SC’s Educational Oversight Committee
A member of the South Carolina state legislature is leading the crusade that classroom teachers, not consultants and bureaucrats, ought to be the top priority in the South Carolina public school budgets, That contention has come from critics of the local Beaufort County public school system too.
That realization led State Representative Bakari Sellers (D-Bamberg) to call for the phase-out of South Carolina’s expensive and controversial Educational Oversight Committee (EOC), once hailed as a public watchdog for accountability and standardized testing.
The EOC was established in 1998 as part of the Educational Accountability Act (EAA). Lawmakers envisioned a small agency, outside of the existing Education Department, providing legislators and parents with details of student and school performance.
Many in Columbia, and across the state, believe the EOC has failed to deliver on that promise, Sellers says.
This fall, for the second year in a row, the EOC announced that school and district report cards would be released to parents weeks or even months late. The committee also adopted new scoring guidelines for the PASS test, standards that national experts have decried as exceptionally low.
Money is another concern. State budget reports indicate that EAA funding has soared from $35 million in 1999 to over $257 million for the last school year. Total state spending on accountability in the last decade now exceeds $1.8 billion. Last week, the EOC asked for a further $1.6 million for next school year. Representative Sellers and other lawmakers are making the case that this money ought to be sent directly to teachers in the classroom.
Randy Page, president of the watchdog organization South Carolinians for Responsible Government (SCRG), echoed Representative Sellers concerns that the high-dollar EOC had “run its course.”
“Real accountability is when schools and teachers answer directly to parents and communities, not to high dollar bureaucrats and testing consultants in Columbia,” explained Page. “South Carolina spent over $12,000 per student in our public schools last year.” In Beaufort county, that figure is more than $15,000 in spending per student. More of that money needs to reach teachers in the classroom, Page says.
Page also noted that the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) recently ranked South Carolina 50th (dead last) in “promoting power,” a measure of the percentage of 9th grade students who progress to 12th grade in three years. SREB singled out South Carolina as the only state in the nation that failed to report detailed data on dropout rates for African-American and other minority students.
Click here to see all our articles about the Beaufort County public schools.
Related posts:
- SC Education Oversight Committee says our schools are failing us because our leaders are unwilling to face the truth and make hard decisions
- State oversight agency says Beaufort County’s public school system is “below average” and “in jeopardy”, trend is downward
- County council’s finance committee considers property tax increase to spend even more money on schools
- Pressure continues to rise on Governor Mark Sanford to resign
- South Carolina official data shows public school spending continues to climb
