Sellers: Scrap The Education Oversight Committee

Having recently reached for our poison pens and unleashed a veritable torrent of righteous ink – and indignation – on the head of S.C. Rep. Bakari Sellers (as in this rather testy diatribe), you can imagine our surprise when we were summoned to his office Tuesday afternoon for a friendly chat regarding a piece of legislation he’s introducing for 2010 session the S.C. General Assembly.

You might also imagine our shock to discover that Sellers’ proposal – a plan to fold the state’s utterly worthless Education Oversight Committee (EOC) into the State Department of Education – actually met with our founding editor’s approval.

Sellers’ bill would take the functions of the “independent” EOC – which are basically limited to cow-towing to special interests and concealing just how awful our state’s public schools really are – and put those “responsibilities” under the control of the State Superintendent of Education.

Wait … that’s just an alphabet soup shift, right?  Possibly so, but the move would create administrative savings of at least $2 million annually, according to Sellers, money that he wants to put into teaching supplies and other classroom expenditures.

“This is about putting money into the classroom and limiting the bureaucracy,” the Democratic lawmaker told us.

Obviously, that’s good.  Less than half of every dollar spent on education in South Carolina actually makes it to the classroom, and any plan that fires a few overpaid bureaucrats so that teachers can have books and other materials they need is A-O.K. as far as we’re concerned.

Sellers has also agreed to require the State Department of Education to release graduation rate data for African-American students and other minorities for the first time ever (we are currently the only state in America that doesn’t do that), which is also good.

Created over a decade ago, the EOC is notorious for its costly tests, inaccurate results and inexcusable delays.  Hated by teachers, the agency has wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on expensive exams that fail to provide diagnostic data on student achievement – and fail to provide apples-to-apples comparisons on how our students are doing compared with students in other states.

Beset by mounting criticism, the agency scrapped one expensive test this year (the PACT) only to replace it with another expensive test (the PASS) that was administered by the same testing company.  Of course, last month an independent academic assessment group concluded that the new test was only going to further dumb down our state’s academic standards.

“Use of lower standards would result in dramatic increases in the percentages of students meeting standards in South Carolina schools, even with no actual improvement in student performance,” the report concluded.

That’s what we call accountability in South Carolina?  Sheesh …

Sellers says he hopes that his plan will be “something that both parties can come together on,” although achieving that goal could prove difficult.

For starters, S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell – who fancies himself as the “father of the accountability movement” in South Carolina – has always been very protective of the EOC’s turf.  Then there’s the uber-lobbyist J. Warren Tompkins, who represents the company with the testing contracts.

S.C. Majority Leader Kenny Bingham told FITS that he would wait until Sellers filed his bill to fully examine it and take a formal position, but he did hint that some Republicans might be receptive to its central provisions.

“We’re not married to any particular agency doing the job,” Bingham said. “If we’ve got something that’s not working or not doing a job efficiently, we need to fix it.”

Stay tuned to FITS for the latest on Sellers’ bill as well as other pre-filed legislation for the upcoming 2010 session …