Thanks for sharing these thoughts of Mr. Hutchins, who until recently was posing as an objective journalist in this state.

Always good to know the media’s take on things.

-FITSNews

Last Saturday’s guest column by South Carolinians for Responsible Government’s Randy Page revealed the fundamental agenda of the school choice lobby who have hijacked the S.C. debate on education for years: the desire to subvert public education as the first step to disintegrating our state government.

Page wrote that voters should be “skeptical” of politicians calling for reform and change and blamed an association of government bodies for

If anything, people should be skeptical of Page’s organization, which has publicly fought against disclosing the names of its rich, white, out-of-state, plutocratic, apologist donors.

Voters should be equally skeptical of the entire incestuous network of S.C. voucher-lobbying organizations here designed by New York anti-government financier Howard Rich.

It should be abundantly clear that Page doesn’t hold the priorities of South Carolina’s middle-class and working-poor families in the highest regard.

Furthermore, it is intellectually dishonest to imply that his organization is pushing its school choice agenda because its members care about the SAT scores and graduation rates of S.C. public schoolchildren. They really want to rip government out of education because they know more of their tax dollars go toward funding it than anything else.

Page and his cohorts are part of an ideological movement to smash government without any real concern for the people who are affected by it.

What the school-choice lobbyists don’t seem to realize is that even if they got what they wanted, and all S.C. schools became privatized, the layers of government that would need to be applied to the process would bankrupt any kind of abstract limited-government philosophy they were trying to achieve. Their ideas have failed to gain any sort of legislative traction because of their obsession with abstract ideas, their failure to work in practicalities and the fact that S.C. electorate just fundamentally doesn’t agree with them.

Allowing groups such as South Carolinians for Responsible Government and people such as Randy Page to dominate the debate on education in our state would be like hiring Charles Manson as the school guidance counselor.

COREY HUTCHINS

Columbia

school choice is a threat to money-wasting administrators, not effective classroom teachers who want what’s best for children

Right on. The noble efforts of the Department of Education should place its fiscal transactions on a plane above the prying eyes of the taxpayers who fund it. Right on.

I care about them wasting 7500 bucks even if you don’t. These have got to be only a few examples of this kind of excess. I’m sure the Dept of Ed covers up the worst of it. Why are public ed higher ups are blowing the money that should be going to educating kids?

What has the world come to? don’t ask me…

Way to uncover the facts boys!