McCARTHY OP-ED ON REPORT CARDS IN TODAY'S THE STATE
An opinion-editorial column by The SCEA President Jan McCarthy is published in today's edition of The State. In it, McCarthy reflects on the 2003 legislative report card issued last week by the association, which many educators received in their mail in recent days.
To read the column online, click http://www.thestate.com/mld/state/news/opinion/6696901.htm.
McCarthy's column is reprinted below:
"This week, some South Carolinians are getting a look at The South Carolina Education Association's 2003 Legislative Report Card. About 20,000 educators will receive the chart, which documents opportunities lawmakers had to maintain progress in public education.
"Sadly, the chart reflects that few lawmakers used those opportunities.
"In the days since The SCEA made the report card public through a press conference and our website, www.thescea.org, critics have seized on one aspect: that lawmakers of one political party scored poorly while those of another party scored well.
"It is instructive that no critic has questioned the facts outlined in it. Twenty-two votes were documented for each of the House's 124 members, twenty votes were counted for the 46 Senators. Combined, that's 3,648 facts -- a wealth of data gleaned from the public record.
"John Adams, America's second president, said, 'Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts, and evidence.'
"Truly, the record reflects a partisan imbalance that harms our schools. But in holding up a mirror to legislative action in 2003, The SCEA report card doesn't pass judgment on political parties. Rather, it calculates mathematically the depth of commitment of each lawmaker individually.
"Funding questions dominate the report card, with 11 House votes and 14 Senate votes addressing this issue directly. Funding is necessary to implement programs and goals imposed by the legislature, and public schools suffered -- with every other state agency -- two rounds of mid-year cuts, totaling more than $155 million, in 2002-03.
"While the legislature restored the funding cuts affecting its own offices, it left cuts to essential services and institutions, including public schools. This decision led to historic rollbacks of per-pupil spending to 1995-96 levels, even after a last-minute injection of federal funds.
"Educators believe that as the legislature devises its education programs and goals -- the Education Accountability Act of 1998, for example -- it bears the burden to fully fund them. Contrary to notions of public-school critics, educating children costs money -- in personnel, training, programs and classroom supplies.
"After the legislatures of the mid-1990s invested more in schools, students and educators proved those investments' value. SAT scores rose, making the greatest gains nationally over five years. Education Week magazine gave our teachers its highest ranking for teacher quality nationally.
"Some critics suggest, tragi-comically, that fully funding our schools won't achieve our goals of high standards and greater accountability. Since that option has never been tried, we believe South Carolina should consider it.
"In almost every other issue included in the chart, funding plays a role: teacher furloughs, class size, paperwork reduction, state employees' salaries and rising health care costs, and health coverage for South Carolina's children.
"The report card shows that the majority of legislators abandoned their responsibility.
"'They're just transferring the tax collection from themselves to the school boards,' says Henry Gramling, chairman of the Spartanburg County District 1 Board of Education. Gramling warned local lawmakers two years ago of the coming crisis, to no avail.
"Educators' feedback on the report card has been positive. Interestingly, some have been shocked to see that their own representative's percentage of commitment is low, when his or her campaign brochures have offered a different picture. Others say the record proves their lawmaker's support.
"That mix of responses reinforces our opinion that people make better decisions when they are better-informed. It also validates our choice to publish this report card annually, with hopes that future charts reflect more positive data on lawmakers' commitment to public schools."
DATELINE SEPTEMBER 23, 2003
TERI ELIMINATION, RETIREMENT ROLLBACK EXPECTED IN M.A.P. REPORT
Governor Mark Sanford's Management, Accountability and Performance (MAP) Commission is expected to issue its catalog of recommendations to Sanford this week, and retirement benefits for some educators and state employees are likely targets of the report.
In August, The SCEA President Jan McCarthy and representatives of a half-dozen other state employee/retiree groups testified before the MAP Commission's Human Resources Subcommittee in support of the Teachers and Employees Retention Incentive (TERI) program. But drafts of the subcommittee's recommendations to the full commission appeared to ignore their testimony, as they included recommendations to, among other things, eliminate the TERI program.
Last week, the full MAP Commission met in Columbia to hear the reports of its various subcommittees. After some debate and discussion, commissioners elected to include three recommendations in their report to Sanford:
(1) That the TERI program should be given a "sunset" date, after which no new enrollment would be allowed;
(2) That the legislature should study the financial impact of eliminating the 28-year retirement option for newly-hired educators and state employees -- those with less than five years' experience, who are not yet vested in the State Retirement System -- and returning to a 30-year retirement model; and
(3) That the retirement benefits of educators and state employees should be aligned with retirement benefits of state and municipal law enforcement officers, except for law enforcement officers' option for 25-year retirement.
[In the absence of a deferred retirement option program such as TERI, alignment with the law enforcement officers' retirement benefits would mean retirees could seek to return to employment after a 15-day waiting period, work without an earnings cap but also without due process and grievance rights.]
"The number of veteran teachers that have chosen to remain in the classroom because of TERI demonstrates that the program is valuable to South Carolina," says McCarthy. "No one has yet offered a convincing argument that TERI costs the state, while there is clear data that demonstrates the state benefits from it. Five consecutive years of the greatest gains in student achievement nationally indicates that veteran educators bring additional value to the quality of South Carolina's public schools."
The SCEA opposes efforts to repeal or "sunset" the TERI program, she said.
Following is the text of the memorandum delivered to the MAP Human Resources Subcommittee following McCarthy's testimony:
TO: Human Resources Committee/MAP Commission
FROM: Jan McCarthy, President, The SCEA
DATE: August 8, 2003
RE: Teachers & Employees Retention Incentive Program
As outlined at your meeting on August 6, The SCEA supports maintenance of the Teachers & Employees Retention Incentive (TERI) program for a variety of reasons. At your invitation, we would like to reiterate those reasons and urge your committee to recommend maintenance of the TERI program for the foreseeable future.
As intended and presently, the TERI program offers an incentive to veteran educators who might otherwise retire after 28 to 30 years of service in public schools. The importance of retaining qualified veteran teachers cannot be overstated:
1. The projected stream of graduates from college and university education programs is insufficient to meet the demand of ever-higher enrollment in public schools.
2. Greater demands of higher standards and accountability – reflected in state and federal legislation – and their practical impacts on the workload of classroom educators, in addition to non-competitive salaries and benefits packages, are driving qualified teachers out of the classroom and into the private sector. The S.C. Department of Education has documented that more than 90,000 men and women hold teacher certification in South Carolina, but fewer than half of them currently teach.
3. National and state studies demonstrate that students taught by qualified, veteran educators score higher on standardized tests, which now form the basis of state and federal accountability models.
Because the state salary schedule for educators includes only 22 steps, veteran educators receive no guaranteed rise in salary after the 22nd year of their service to schools. The TERI incentive is available to educators in their 28th year of service and, while it is not a true salary increase, it represents to many veteran educators a significant new benefit of salary. For many, this incentive provides an important reason – for some, the single most important reason, given ever-increasing demands and expectations – to remain in the classroom.
It is our understanding that the TERI program carries associated costs, but that those costs do not presently impact the state’s retirement system, as some suggest. Indeed, as the retirement system’s executive director, Peggy Boykin, suggested to you at this week’s meeting, if the legislature will continue to invest in that system with additional direct appropriations or through an increased employer contribution for retirement, there is no reason that TERI should negatively affect the retirement system in the future.
If amendments may be proposed to improve or refine the provisions of the TERI program, we will gladly review such amendments and may support their passage. But we will oppose wholesale elimination of the program, as well as proposed changes that will substantively undermine its present purpose.
DATELINE SEPTEMBER 25, 2003
COMMITMENT TO FUND EDUCATION KEY TO SCORES, SAYS THE SCEA
COLUMBIA--Commitments to fund class size reduction and professional development for educators is key to meeting federal education standards, says Jan McCarthy, president of The South Carolina Education Association. McCarthy issued the following statement on the news that only 23 percent of South Carolina's public schools met new federal requirements on this year's standardized tests.
"Given the rollback in school funding in 2002 and 2003, precisely when more stringent federal mandates went into effect, it should come as no surprise that fewer than a quarter of our schools made the grade. That figure echoes the findings of The SCEA's legislative report card for 2003, where only one-quarter of lawmakers demonstrated a 90-percent or higher commitment to funding class size reduction, professional development for educators, early childhood development programs and other proven strategies to strengthen student achievement.
"Children are not assembly-line products, and educating them isn't a uniform process. So long as South Carolina's leaders misguidedly apply the laws of market economics to educating our children, these standardized test results aren't likely to change. The strategy of funding the lowest possible level of education will continue to leave the majority of children on the sidelines.
"Solutions are as obvious in South Carolina as they are in other states: reduce class size, give continuous professional development to educators, offer training to parents to encourage greater involvement, and equip classrooms with the resources and tools that children need to succeed. These are data-driven, proven solutions.
"As unfortunate as it is that our students and schools are labeled as failures, it is worse that these students and schools don't have the complete support of their state's elected leaders. Contrary to Governor Sanford's recent pronouncements on this year's scores, vouchers to private and parochial schools are not a feasible solution to helping South Carolina's children measure up to federal standards.
"Rather than experimenting with programs already found to make no real difference in student achievement, South Carolina and its lawmakers should focus on making sure that all students have the tools they need for success."
