School Choice for South Carolina

Brendam Miniter has a column on the efforts in South Carolina to institute school choice measures to give poor students a chance to get out of terrible public schools and into private schools. He starts off by telling of one boy working away at Subway so that he can help defray his tuition at a private school. What is striking is how this school is operating on such a small budget but is still out-performing the public schools.

Founded in 2003 by Faye Brown, a 55-year-old retired public school teacher, Capers is one of a handful of "independent schools" that serve the state's rural poor. It operates out of rented office space, has a total of 42 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, and makes do on an annual budget of about $160,000 a year. Nearly all of its equipment--desks, books and the eight iMacs in its computer lab--were donated to the school.
The teachers who aren't volunteers make $8 an hour with no fringe benefits. Many of the kids show up without lunch. Often parents fail to make their monthly tuition bills. Only five students at the school come from two-parent homes, and most of the students are African-American. Each year, Ms. Brown is forced to dip into her retirement account to keep the school running. "It's robbing Peter to pay Paul," she told me. "I'll let the power bill go until they're about to shut off the lights and then I'm rushing down there with the money."

One place Capers isn't skimping, however, is academics. The school places a heavy emphasis on reading, writing and math. As a result the school's average SAT score, 1150, is 164 points above the state average, and this year the school expects every one of its graduates to go on to college. St. Johns High School, the public school these students would be attending if not for Capers, has an average SAT score of 788.

The vote will be close, but the public schools are so awful that there might be enough support for voting in a statewide school choice effort. If what they've been doing for decades hasn't been working, it's time to try something new and South Carolina might just be on the verge of joining Utah in voting in such a change. We'll be able to have a true laboratory of democracy experiment and judge whether school choice helps students in low-achieving schools or if the problem is more intractable than that.

On another note, Joanne Jacobs book about how a couple of teachers created a successful charter school, Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea, and the Charter School That Beat the Odds, is now out in paperback.