Pressure From Harrell Restores EOC Funding

By FITSNews || The father of South Carolina’s failed “accountability” movement isn’t ready to part with his favorite bureaucracy just yet …

Less than a month after a key legislative subcommittee voted unanimously to scrap funding for South Carolina’s inefficient, ineffective Education Oversight Committee, S.C. Speaker of the House Bobby Harrell has successfully pressured budget writers to reinsert funding for the agency into the state spending plan.

By a non-recorded13-9 tally, the House Ways and Means Committee voted last Thursday to restore nearly $2 million for the administrative costs of the EOC.

That sets the stage for a messy fight when the Ways and Means budget hits the floor of the S.C. House.  In fact, sources tell FITS that Harrell is already working hard to line up votes in his chamber for the EOC, as well as aggressively lobbying Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman to make sure that EOC funding remains in the Senate version of the budget.

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.

South Carolina also spends millions more than other states on its exams, due in large part to the fact that our testing contracts are awarded to the same politically-connected company each year – in spite of its abysmal results.

Also, the EOC has been dumbing down the tests in order to hide the failure of our state’s worst-in-the-nation public school system.

Of course, as the “brainchild” of the powerful House Speaker, the Education Oversight Committee (EOC) has always enjoyed immunity from the consequences of its ineptitude.

Anyway, because House Ways and Means Chairman Danny Cooper (RINO-Anderson County) refused to permit a recorded vote on this issue last Thursday, there is no way to know for sure who supported the reinsertion of the EOC funding into the budget.

Sources tell FITS that Cooper and S.C. Rep. Annette Young (RINO-Dorchester County) were the leaders of the movement to reinsert the funding, however, and that both lawmakers told their colleagues that they were acting in accordance with Harrell’s wishes.

Also, in addition to Cooper and Young, we know for a fact that Rep. Roland Smith (RINO-Aiken) and Rep. Herb Kirsh (D-York) were among the thirteen lawmakers who voted to reinsert the funding.

Among the nine lawmakers voting against the reinsertion of the funding were Jay Lucas, Jimmy Merrill, Mike Pitts, Gary Simrill and Murrell Smith.

In addition to effort to strip EOC funding in the state budget, S.C. Rep. Bakari Sellers (D-Bamberg) has proposed legislation that would permanently do away with the agency.

Of course, it’s obviously no coincidence that last week, the House Education Committee voted to delay consideration of that legislation.