Lottery=education fantasies that do more harm than good

By CINDI ROSS SCOPPE - Associate Editor

IT’S A BIENNIAL rite of spring: Legislative candidates sprout up and start talking about how the way to fix education is to use more of that lottery money. Maybe the voters are asking them about it when they’re out on the trail, but when they stop by to chat with our editorial board, it’s the candidates who bring up the “L” word.

This sort of talk knows no party or philosophy. I’ve heard it from voucher-loving Republicans, and Democrats who are so establishment-oriented that they oppose charter schools, and from the vast majority in between. I’ve heard it from the tax-cutters and the tax-raisers. And each time I hear it, I am reminded of how misunderstood our “education lottery” remains.

This is a perception that is so universally embraced as to have become the conventional “wisdom” — that the lottery is pulling in gobs of money, enough to be transformational if only those legislators would stop wasting it. If only they’d use it to fix our schools like they promised.

And why wouldn’t that be what people think? That’s what lottery supporters told them would happen if they’d sanction a state-run numbers racket. Our schools would be swimming in money. Our education problems would be solved. The group promoting the lottery named itself “The South Carolina Lottery for Better Schools Coalition” — and emblazoned that name on a drawing of the back of a yellow school bus. The bumper stickers even said: “Lottery=education.”

It’s been eight years — 10 if you go back to Jim Hodges’ 1998 campaign for governor that got the thing started — but the myth remains, because the only people who try to set the record straight are journalists, and we don’t do it very often. Not often enough to overcome the lies of the three-year lottery campaign.

The biggest lie was how much money the lottery would generate. Oh, the numbers themselves weren’t that far off, but they were out of context. Most people who don’t follow the state budget for a living think $250 million — the amount of lottery money projected to be available for education next year — is a bunch of money. And it is. But when you compare it to $6 billion in annual school funding, you begin to understand what a small relative impact it can have.

The state will have to spend $148 million more on public education next year just to tread water — to keep child-to-teacher ratios the same as enrollments increase, to keep paying teachers $300 above the Southeastern average. That’s without paying teachers the professional salaries that the candidates streaming through our editorial office say (rightly) we need to pay in order to attract the best and brightest. It’s without paying higher salaries still to convince those best-and-brightest teachers to move to a rural community where they roll up the sidewalks at 8 and where rainwater drips into their classrooms and the toilets don’t work. It’s without providing 4-year-old kindergarten — much less earlier intervention — to poor kids statewide.

If you read far enough into the lottery’s Web site, you will learn that less than 30 percent of every lottery dollar goes to education (28.5 percent in 2006-07), but overall the site maintains the obfuscation campaign, for example reporting total dollars — “Since the start of the Lottery on January 7, 2002, the Legislature has appropriated more than $1.74 billion through fiscal year 2007-08” — rather than annual figures.

The other lie that dates back to the “lottery=education” campaign was where the money was going. The architects of the lottery never had any intention of devoting all — or even most — of the money to the public schools. They were even careful not to say it would go there. They just implied it, strongly, with those school bus-yellow bumper stickers.

Their plan all along was to devote most of the take to college scholarships, because that was the way to get and keep the support of all those Yuppie parents who tend to vote (and perhaps even give campaign donations) in very high numbers, particularly when they’ve got a dog in the fight. So 72 percent of the “profits” have gone to scholarships, while just 26 percent (and that’s 26 percent of the 28 percent of total revenue that goes to any sort of education) has gone to public education.

Spending all of the lottery take on K-12 education could make some difference, to be sure. It could fund 4K statewide, for example. Or it could make a minor improvement in teacher salaries. But it couldn’t lead to lower taxes — not unless you simply wanted to maintain the status quo. It couldn’t bring our education funding up to where it needs to be. And it certainly couldn’t solve all our education problems, since funding is only one of them.

You want to know what the lottery has done for public education? Pretty much what my colleagues and I spent three years warning it would do: It has eroded public support for education funding. The legislative candidates who say they’ll raise teacher salaries or otherwise “fix” our schools using lottery money really believe they can — that it won’t take more tax money to raise salaries or replace dilapidated schools or build new ones where enrollments or soaring or fuel up the buses.

A lot of voters believe that, too.

You want to know what the lottery could do for education, if every penny of it went to the public schools? Pretty much the same.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.