By fitsnews – April 29, 2011
As record amounts of tax dollars are being blown on South Carolina’s worst-in-the nation public school system, the educrats who are making bank off of this anti-competitive abomination are using your money to help preserve their stranglehold and keep the gravy train flowing.
According to our friends at The Voice, numerous public school districts openly lobbied against the parental choice bill that was temporarily blocked last week by four “Republicans in Name Only.”
“The entrenched public school bureaucracy in South Carolina is using public time, resources and money to lobby against the reform effort,” The Voice notes in its story. “Part of their ‘system over student’ strategy involves mobilizing public school employees to directly pressure lawmakers to vote against the legislation.”
Sadly, government using public funds to advance a liberal, anti-competitive ideology is nothing new in this state – although with each passing year these efforts escalate.
From Chester County – one of the state’s most wasteful, more secretive districts – here’s the taxpayer-funded spin …
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Now, here’s some government-funded lobbying from Spartanburg County School District 4, one of the most persistently underachieving districts in the Upstate (and home to one of the state’s highest paid Superintendents) …
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Finally, here’s a publicly-funded missive from Lexington-Richland School District 5 that seems to indicate one of our state’s RINO Senators – John Courson – was practically begging for some government-funded PR assistance …
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Note how Courson – who the letter says “would appreciate the support” of these educrats – is described as a “very influential position.”
Translation?
“Propagandize or else.”
Amazing …
As we’ve said before, if our state’s “education leaders” spent half as much time attempting to educate our children as they did fighting to protect their perks, perhaps South Carolina might advance academically for a change.
Obviously that’s not happening, though. In fact, it’s becoming obvious that the chronic failure of our public system is forcing more aggressive efforts on the part of these bureaucrats to defend their dysfunctional system – one in which less than half of every dollar spent makes its way to the classroom.
According to the latest data, our state’s overall graduation rate remains among the worst in the nation – improving by a meager 1.5 percent over the last decade (one of the worst percentage improvements in the entire country). That’s consistent with our rural graduation rate (which currently ranks dead last in the country) as well as our declining SAT and stagnating ACT scores.
No wonder there’s so much pressure to provide left-leaning politicians with cover!
South Carolina has tried the more money route and the government-run accountability route only to fail spectacularly on both counts – relegating generations of South Carolina children to second-class status.
The outlines of that failure are now forcing extreme measures – particularly as Republican politicians are facing pressure from the Tea Party on this issue.
Speaking of the Tea Party … we wonder how they’ll react when they learn that the same people who are currently spending all of this money to block parental choice will be taking a nice taxpayer-funded vacation in a few shorts months.
(To read our exhaustive recap of the proposed parental choice bill, click here. To learn more about the bureaucratic forces seeking to block the bill, click here. To see for yourself the undisputed failure of our state’s current status quo’s current approach to public education, click here).
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