Common Core Compromise Would Water Down Controversial Education Standards in S.C

Education Candidates Weigh In on Senate Bill

Republican members of the Senate Education Committee had hoped to appease very vocal conservative activists, who are demanding immediate repeal of the Common Core K-12 Academic Standards, without upending the coming school year, given that school districts have already devoted considerable resources to implementing them.

Interestingly, the now-gutted bill is raising those compromise-averse activists’ hopes if not drawing their support.

S. 300, authored by Sen. Larry Grooms (R-Berkeley), began as a ban on Common Core, plain and simple. Now, to avoid wasting the aforementioned resources and inflicting chaos on classrooms already entrenched in Common Core, the bill is a thoroughly amended phasing-out.

Because the current version of S. 300 hadn’t been made public yet, a staff member of the Senate Education Committee walked Free Times through the compromise. The first section prohibits South Carolina from sending individual student data to Washington, D.C., a concern that the staffer said “we heard buckets about” but that an education policy expert described as a bugaboo, saying, “We never have nor never intended to send student-level data to D.C. under any scenario.”

The second major provision adopts the gist of a separate piece of legislation also provoked by Common Core, S. 888 by Sen. Chip Campsen (R-Charleston), which requires that any academic standards not developed by the S.C. Department of Education be approved by the General Assembly.

The bill goes on to withdraw South Carolina from the Smarter Balance testing consortium, a group promoted by the Obama administration, and do away with high school exit exams beginning with 2015’s graduates. There is also language that will allow past graduates who did not receive diplomas because they flunked the exams to petition their old school districts for diplomas up until Dec. 21, 2015. This testing stuff is relevant because it’s how states participating in Common Core, of which South Carolina is one of 45, had agreed to evaluate their efforts.


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The Worst Republican Senator

Lindsey Graham's sorry record.

South Carolina's Lindsey Graham is a flop. He pretends to be a conservative, but sells out conservatives and insults them while doing so. He pretends to be effective at reaching across party lines, but the only thing he effectively does is help the other party. He inhabits the Senate seat of Strom Thurmond, legendary for great attention to his South Carolina constituents, but Graham spends most of his time trailing behind John McCain like a valet as McCain criss-crosses the country in pursuit of the presidency. He called Ted Kennedy "one of the most principled men I've ever met." In sum, in the words of conservative movement stalwart Richard Viguerie, "Lindsey Graham is part of the problem."

What, for example, could possibly have possessed Graham, in April of 2006, to write an essay for Time magazine about the virtues of Hillary Clinton? He called her "a smart, prepared, serious senator." She is "sought out by her colleagues to form legislative partnerships." She has managed to "build unusual political alliances with...conservatives."

He praises liberals, but reserves particular venom for conservatives who disagree with him. The most infamous example came at a speech to the utterly radical Hispanic group La Raza -- it was bad enough that he spoke to them, much less what he said -- when he described what he would do to opponents of the awful immigration proposal he helped Ted Kennedy craft: "We're going to tell the bigots to shut up." The idea that only a bigot could oppose the Kennedy amnesty plan was a recurring theme with Graham: On This Week, he told George Stephanopoulos that opponents were like those in earlier years who put up signs that said "No Catholics, no Jews, no Irish need apply."

MEANWHILE, GRAHAM deserves every bit of abuse conservatives can heap on him for his record on judicial nominees, which swings back and forth between pathetically ineffective and absolutely counterproductive. Of his leading role in the "Gang of 14," which saved the Democrats' unprecedented option of filibustering President Bush's nominees, Graham clearly thought his gesture of goodwill would win him some chits with Democrats. Think again. Right now his home circuit, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, suffers from the most serious official "judicial emergency" in the country, with only 10 of the 15 seats filled.


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Private Charleston School May Manage Failing Public School

Once construction of a new downtown Charleston, South Carolina elementary school is complete, the Brentwood Middle School now housing its students will be empty.  Local leaders are considering using it as a model for a new experiment in school flexibility.
“The state legislature passed a brand new law (Title 59-19-350) in May 2012 that allows districts to be creative and flexible in delivering educational services within the district,” explains Cindy Bohn Coats, chairwoman of the Charleston County School Board (CCSB).

Charleston is the first district to move towards taking advantage of this new flexibility law.
Such measures often allow districts to convert traditional schools to charter schools – public schools that accept students outside district attendance zones and receive more regulatory freedom in exchange for tighter accountability.  Charleston school leaders are considering morphing this concept by partnering with a local private school to reopen Brentwood with a defined attendance zone in effort to provide choice and relieve overcrowding in its high-poverty neighborhood.

Private-Model Public School
Meeting Street Academy (MSA), opened in Charleston in 2008 to give parents an option outside the poor-performing public schools their children must otherwise attend.  The pre-K-to-fourth-grade school focuses on poor and academically struggling children. Although it spends approximately $12,000 per child per year, outside donors have largely bankrolled their efforts.  Fees to attend MSA are calculated on a sliding scale, with parents generally spending less than $400 a year to educate a child.  Since 2008, attendance has grown to 120 students and the school’s intensive vocabulary and literacy-based pre-K instruction appear to be producing results.  


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‘The Definition of Bullying’: Church VS. State Threat Leads Another School To Cut Ties With ‘Operation Christmas Child’

Just days after a South Carolina charter school came under fire and subsequently dropped support for Operation Christmas Child, an annual outreach to poor children that is operated by Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical Christian organization, another public school in Colorado has done the same.

But while SkyView Academy, an elementary school in Highlands Ranch, Colo., officially cut ties with the group, parents are fighting back with an effort of their own to make sure that the outreach goes on as planned.

Church vs. State Claim Leads Another School to Drop Student Support for Operation Christmas Child Outreach

The school announced last week that it will be severing its relationship with Operation Christmas Child, ending two years of participation in the outreach, The Christian Post reported.

Students at the school had been raising funds and were preparing to put shoe boxes together for children in need. This was halted, however, when the American Humanist Association recently wrote a letter threatening a lawsuit if the charter school didn’t stop working with Operation Christmas Child.

The letter warned that the school is violating the separation of church and state by facilitating student participation in a Christian outreach — one that shares the Bible’s central message along with items for kids in need.

So, looking to avoid a lawsuit, SkyView Academy sent a subsequent note to parents and explained that the school would be halting to project.

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Founding American Documents Ignored By S.C. Colleges, Universities?

by Kelli Weston
Jan. 21, 2013

Taylor Smith is getting an education at the University of South Carolina, though not necessarily the one he signed up for.

The 21-year-old junior from McBee, who is majoring in religious studies at USC’s Columbia campus, says he was going through the S.C. Code of Laws one day when he stumbled across a law that surprised him.

According to Section 59-29-120, all high schools, colleges and universities that are “sustained or in any manner supported by public funds shall give instruction in the essentials of the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers, including the study of and devotion to American institutions and ideals …”

The law goes on to say that “no student in any such school, college, or university may receive a certificate of graduation without previously passing a satisfactory examination upon the provisions and principles of the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers, and, if a citizen of the United States, satisfying the examining power of his loyalty thereto.”

In a recent interview with The Nerve, Smith said what surprised him about the law was that when he checked into USC’s core teaching requirements, he realized that the “two sets of requirements weren’t matching up.”

“The new one (curriculum) for 2012-13 is a very obvious violation of that particular part of the legal code,” he said.

Another state law, Section 59-29-130, says that instruction on the U.S. Constitution “shall be given for at least one year of the high school, college and university grades, respectively.”

It’s unknown whether Palmetto State colleges and universities as a group are complying with the law. The Nerve over the past week contacted a number of institutions, including USC and Clemson University, but received an answer from only one – Coastal Carolina University.

Smith said he initially debated whether the law left room for interpretation, allowing, for example, colleges and universities to not teach about America’s founding documents but to accept students who fulfilled the law’s requirements while in high school.

A Jan. 4 email to Smith from the state Department of Education – a copy of which was provided to The Nerve – seemed to confirm Smith’s interpretation of the law.

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Harrell Investigation Ongoing Seven Months After Complaint Filed

by Rick Brundrett
Sept. 18, 2013

A State Law Enforcement Division spokesman said Tuesday an investigation of S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell is “still open and ongoing,” seven months after the South Carolina Policy Council –The Nerve's parent organization – filed an ethics complaint against the Charleston Republican.

Contacted by The Nerve, SLED spokesman Thom Berry declined to comment on specifics of the investigation, or when agents expected to wrap up their work.

Once the investigation is completed, SLED’s case file “will be presented to the proper prosecutorial authority; then they will review it and make a determination where it goes from there,” Berry said, adding that the prosecutor could refer the case back to SLED for further investigation.

“We have been cooperating fully, and the investigation is sort of wrapping up,” Charleston attorney Bart Daniel, one of Harrell’s lawyers and a former U.S. attorney for South Carolina, told The Nerve when contacted Tuesday.

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