When it comes to getting in the press for talking a good game – but doing precious little to back it up – S.C. Superintendent of Education Jim Rex is head and shoulders above the competition, people.
Perhaps the most media savvy Superintendent our state has ever seen, Rex has nonetheless been a failure in his first term where it really counts – in SAT scores, graduation rates, our growing achievement gap or the rash of scandals he’s faced that have run the gamut from misuse of taxpayer dollars to misuse of student’s bodies – by teachers.
A year ago, Rex tried to dismiss the growing prevalence of student-teacher sex scandals by claiming that they represented isolated instances, not an epidemic.
In fact, here’s what he had to say on the issue last October:
I think it’s inevitable that when you have a large profession–this is the largest profession in the state of South Carolina by far–that, unfortunately, you’re going to have some people who make decisions that are poor decisions for them as well as for their children.
Of course, after a fresh batch of student-teacher sex scandals hit the state last Fall, Rex changed his tune and decided in November 2007 to create a bipartisan task force with Attorney General Henry McMaster to address the issue.
The two of them did all the typical self-promotion associated with such an effort, starting seriously into TV cameras and using expressions like “cracking down” and “zero tolerance” in their best Clint Eastwood voices, but at the end of the day it was just another task force.
This Spring, Rex’s department made its first tangible move on the issue, which was to shell out God knows how much of our tax money to provide sexual abuse training to 10,000 education employees and to establish a “facilitator” in each school district to keep an eye on potentially inappropriate behavior.
And now, after none of that seems to have worked (surprise), Rex’s plan appears to be to shift blame back to the legislature, saying that lawmakers haven’t passed sufficiently tough penalties for improper relations with students.
Jeez … is anybody ever going to stop “positioning” on this issue and start leading?
Teachers are having sex with students all over the place, people. And in the latest case, it sure appears that the district involved was more concerned with sweeping it under the rug than with “facilitating” any protection of their children.
It’s nice to hear that our leaders are “cracking down” and that they have “zero tolerance” for such behavior, but we heard that last year.
