Not By Chance

Hayes Mizell

February 17, 2005

 

Today, at this very hour in South Carolina’s public school classrooms, tens of thousands of students are struggling to learn under the shadow of our state’s past.  As a group, these students constitute 46 percent of the enrollment in South Carolina’s public schools.  They are from generations of families who played major roles in the development of South Carolina, though few people acknowledge or appreciate it.  If their nineteenth century ancestors were not buried in unmarked graves, what might we learn when comparing the DNA of these students with that of their forebears?  Certainly, many of these students are descendents of the 1,131 slaves owned by Joshua John Ward in 1860, or descendents of the  838 slaves owned by John Izard Middleton, or the 719 slaves owned by William Aiken, or the 671 slaves owned by William Henry Heyward, or the 631 slaves owned by Robert Francis Withers Allston, or the 570 slaves owned by John Ashby Colclough and Eliza Maria Cantey Colclough, or the 448 slaves owned by James Chestnut, Sr., or these students are the descendents of nearly 400,000 other South Carolina slaves owned by more than 25,000 citizens of the Palmetto State.[1]

 

These facts remind us of a long and chilling chapter in our state’s history.  Most people would like to forget it, even though during the 335 years since the colonization of what is now South Carolina, African-Americans spent nearly 200 of those years in slavery.  In other words, over the course of our state’s history, as a racial group African-Americans living in South Carolina have spent more time in slavery than out of it. 

 

When slavery ended in 1863, the gates of opportunity did not suddenly open wide.  Only because of the Freedman’s Bureau, South Carolina’s Reconstruction legislature, and the determination and sacrifice of African-Americans themselves, did educational opportunities slowly become available.  However, the public school system was weak.  State leaders grudgingly embraced and inadequately funded it.  There was little concern about whether African-American children attended school at all, or for how long.  In 1910, when the State Supervisor of Elementary Rural Schools submitted his first report, he wrote, “Frequently the county superintendent does not know where they [the Negro Schools] are located and sometimes the district board cannot tell where the negro school is taught.”[2]  There were also gross disparities in public support for separate schools attended by African-American and white children.  According to one historian:

 

The exaggerations of the trend of depriving Negro children, moreover, were persistently in the low country.  In the last ‘prosperity year’ before the Great Depression, in 1928-29, South Carolina school funds were so distributed as to give $60.06 to each white enrolled, and $7.89 to each Negro enrolled.  In Barnwell County, the division was $124.29 per white enrolled and $5.85 per Negro enrolled.[3]

 

In 1940, the average salary for African-American teachers was $388 a year, 41 percent of the average salary earned by white teachers.  Only 1,009 African-American students received high school diplomas in 1940.[4]

 

Twenty years later, in 1960, the number of African-American high school graduates rose to 7,398, even though between 1955 and 1967, South Carolina had no compulsory school attendance law.  It was in 1960 that the state superintendent of education proudly reported that higher percentages of both white and African-American students who began the first grade in 1948 had remained in school to enter the twelfth grade.  However, whereas 44% of white students made it to the twelfth grade, only 17% of African-American children did so.  This was an improvement over the 12% of African-American children who entered first grade in 1943 and remained to enter their senior year of high school.[5] 

 

One way or another, to a greater or lesser extent, all South Carolinians bear the economic and social burdens of the state’s pernicious and self-destructive actions of the past, but African-American students suffer the most.  Thirty-one percent of African-American children between the ages of 6 and 17 live in poverty, more than three times the percentage of white children in the same condition.  Forty-four percent of African-American families earn less than $25,000 a year; 26 percent earn less than $15,000 annually.[6] 

 

South Carolina is now in the process of clawing out of the deep educational hole the state dug for itself.  It dug that hole in five ways.  First, the quality of our state’s public schools and the resulting academic performance of their students have not occurred by chance.  During the past 140 years, state and local political leaders made choices that shaped today’s schools and achievement levels.  Many were bad choices, frequently motivated by rank prejudice, base political considerations, expediency, or ignorance.  Quite often, a deep suspicion of public education, if not outright hostility towards it, has been a subtext of the state’s bad choices and missed opportunities.  Frequently, the General Assembly has followed, rather than led, citizen and legal efforts to improve South Carolina’s public schools. 

 

Second, because of intention, callousness, or oversight during the past century, our state undereducated or miseducated hundreds of thousands of its youth.  It was only in the mid-1970s that South Carolina began to develop a truly inclusive system of public education.  Until then, the state did not seriously seek to educate all children who were either disadvantaged, African-American, disabled, or female.  Only the enactment and enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, and the 1975 Education for the Handicapped Act prompted South Carolina to live up to its moral responsibility to improve the educational opportunities of all children. 

 

Third, the state’s determination to restrict the opportunities of African-Americans also stifled South Carolina’s interest and ability to develop educational policies that would benefit the state as a whole.  Racial discrimination trumped all efforts to improve public education.  Maintaining de jure segregation was not only morally corrupting but also a tremendous psychic drain on the energy and creativity of the state’s political leadership.  South Carolina’s determination to limit the knowledge and skills of African-Americans produced the unintended consequence of also limiting the educational development of whites, as well as the economic progress of the entire state.  It is not by chance that 116,000 South Carolina families now live in poverty.[7]

 

Fourth, until the last quarter of the twentieth century, the quality of public education was not a priority for South Carolina.  There were no state academic standards or expectations for student performance.  Teachers who could not pass the state teachers exam could still qualify to teach, although at a lower salary.  There was no system for assessing and publicizing the performance of school districts or schools.  There was no commitment to using state funds to address the educational and developmental needs of children in poverty.  There was no uniform method for distributing state education funds; wealthy districts benefited the most from the state’s school finance system.[8]

 

Fifth, the total effect of all of the above was to create a culture of low expectations that plagues South Carolina to this day.  For decades, the priorities, rhetoric, and actions of the state’s political and business leaders sent parents and children the clear message that high levels of achievement did not matter.  Minimal academic performance was acceptable.   No one complained too loudly if children simply stopped attending school.  Few people thought it important to identify and nurture the latent talent of each child.  Many people considered the futures of some children more worthy of investment than others.  One has only to examine the current priorities of some political leaders, and listen to what they do and do not talk about, to understand that their low expectations now extend to the potential of the public schools themselves and, by implication, to government. 

 

South Carolina’s legacy of bondage, no education, miseducation, and inadequate education reaches into present day classrooms to profoundly impact the academic performance of current students.  The State Department of Education groups elementary and secondary students’ academic performance in four categories:  Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, and Advanced.  Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the national goal is for all students to perform at the Proficient level by 2014.  On the 2004 Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test, 37 percent of fifth-grade African-American students taking the English/language arts test performed at the Below Basic level, while 14 percent of white students scored Below Basic.  From the third through the eighth grades, the percentage of students performing Below Basic slowly increases until in the eighth grade 55 percent of African-American and 23 percent of the white students perform Below Basic.  The aggregate raw numbers across grades three through eight are sobering:  44,000 African-American students and 24,000 white students score Below Basic in English/language arts alone.[9] 

 

The proportion of African-American and white students performing at the Basic level in English/language arts is comparable.  At first glance, this seems to be encouraging until one realizes that approximately three times as many white as African-American students are performing at the Proficient level and five times as many white as African-American students are performing at the Advanced level. 

 

Performing at the Basic level is what we might call “getting by.”  Though the students qualify to go on to the next grade, Basic means they are only “minimally prepared.”  Students who perform at the Basic level are unlikely to lift either their own economic fortunes, or those of the state, very far.  More students performing at the Basic level is a worthy interim goal, but the ultimate goal is for increasingly greater proportions of students to perform at the Proficient and Advanced levels.  

 

South Carolina is just now emerging from a very bleak past in public education.  During the first eighty years of the twentieth century, many, many children benefited from the dedication of public school educators and the commitment of some political leaders, but a significant minority of young people did not receive the quality or quantity of education necessary to chart more secure futures for themselves and their families.  Our state continues to pay a heavy price for educating only some, rather than all, children well. 

 

Clearly, South Carolina will not reach the national goal of all eighth graders performing at the Proficient level by 2014 if the state veers from the path of hard work and sustained investment it has trod in recent years.  South Carolina is now in the solid middle of state rankings of public investments in K-12 education.  Independent analysts rate the state’s education accountability system, including its academic standards and testing program, as one of the most coherent and rigorous in the nation.  They rank the state second in the nation in its efforts to improve teacher quality.  Four-year-old children with a variety of risk factors who participate in South Carolina’s child development program are going on to score significantly higher than non-participating children on PACT tests through the fifth grade.  The English/language arts performance of South Carolina fourth graders, and the mathematics performance of eighth graders, is improving at a rate that exceeds that of all but a handful of other states.  South Carolina ranks among the top 20 states in nation in the percentage of high school students demonstrating mastery on Advanced Placement exams.  In recent years, South Carolina students have also made impressive gains on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.[10]

 

Unfortunately, neither the rest of the country nor the world is standing still, waiting for South Carolina to overcome its past.  Next month the new SAT test will make its debut.  Designed to measure students' critical thinking and writing skills, it will include a 25-minute timed essay and a section of multiple-choice questions testing students' aptitudes in grammar and editing. The essay will require students to take a point of view on an issue and defend that position with reasoning "based on their own experiences, readings, and observations."[11]  This is only one indicator that expectations for academic performance will continue to rise. 

 

For the first time, South Carolina knows how to improve student achievement, even for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.  We know the way, but do not always have the will.  South Carolina schools are changing for the better but they need to change still more and more rapidly.  Improvements in the performance levels of both educators and students demonstrate they can achieve at higher levels, especially when they are encouraged and supported in their efforts.  If South Carolina continues to focus on strengthening its public education system, and becomes more aggressive in targeting underperforming students and their communities for intensive educational development, the state can make even greater progress.  If it chooses to pursue any other course, the state’s educational progress during the past 20 years will stagnate, if not erode.

 

Unfortunately, the current posture of some of our state’s elected leaders does not bode well.  They have difficult choices before them, but as too frequently has been the case in the past, they whistle in the dark while walking down the wrong road.  The General Assembly has already spent more than $10 million in legal fees defending itself against a school finance lawsuit brought by eight rural school districts that serve low-income, African-American majorities.[12]  The school districts argue the state is not providing the resources they need to ensure that each child receives the “minimally adequate education” the Supreme Court of South Carolina requires. [13]  Lawyers for the General Assembly contend that the Court only requires the state to provide the opportunity for an adequate education and current laws and resources satisfy that mandate.  As far as I know, the General Assembly has not sought a compromise that would be in the best interests of both the children of the plaintiff school systems and the state.  Instead, as in those no-so-glorious days of yesteryear, the legislature has yielded to its primal instinct of resistance.

 

In addition, the General Assembly has not kept faith with its commitments under the 1977 Education Finance Act (EFA) to cover the costs school systems incur in providing the basic elements of education for South Carolina students.  Whereas school systems should be receiving $2,274 per student from the state, the General Assembly is providing $1,897 per student.[14]  Aside from the fact that even full funding would be inadequate because the Education Finance Act is badly out of date, the lack of full funding has the greatest impact on school districts in low-income areas of the state.  Unlike school districts in more prosperous counties, these districts depend most on state funding for basic operational support but have the least capacity to raise additional funds through local taxes to compensate for shortfalls in state appropriations.  It is not by chance that school districts that suffer the most are the ones with high percentages of students from low-income and African-American families.   

 

There is also reason to worry about the future of public education because the proposals and rhetoric of some state political leaders seem to be an echo from the distant past.  The rationale and words have changed, but the effects are likely to be the same.  Instead of mobilizing ordinary South Carolinians to help all students develop the knowledge and skills necessary to perform at the Proficient level, these leaders exploit the narrow self-interests of individuals who have given up on public education.  Instead of expanding South Carolina’s rigorous program of school accountability, these leaders seek to cobble together a parallel education system that values choice over results.  Instead of mounting programs that ensure low-performing students will develop skills and values that contribute to the state’s economy, these leaders proffer a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too philosophy designed for short-term political gain.  Instead of working to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of school districts, these leaders’ rail against the “education bureaucracy” that, ironically, exists only because the state mandates and funds it. 

 

These actions repeat a pattern all too familiar to South Carolina: avoid the real issues, elevate a specious ideology to an article of faith, confuse citizens about what is in their best interests, and ignore the needs of at least a third of the state’s population.  Because South Carolina has experienced all this in the past, it is not hard to imagine the future consequences for our people and the state’s economy.  Whatever the outcome, it will not occur by chance.

 

Thank you.

 

End Notes