SC lawmakers failed to pass school voucher bill, despite having the votes. What happened?
After roughly two decades of fruitless deliberation over voucher programs, South Carolina lawmakers appeared finally to be on the verge of expanding school choice this year.
The House and Senate, energized by a wave of frustration over pandemic-era education policies, passed companion bills to establish a scholarship fund that select parents could tap for their children’s educational expenses, including private school tuition.
Republican lawmakers were in broad agreement that low-income children whose needs were not being met by public schools should be afforded their choice of private education options on the public dime. It was just a matter of deciding how best to smooth out the differences between the House and Senate plans to accomplish that.
The House favored a three-year pilot program that would take $75 million from the state’s contingency reserve fund to provide annual $5,000 scholarships to 5,000 low-income elementary-age students.
The Senate wanted a permanent program open to a larger, but still limited number of K-12 students who were Medicaid-eligible or had an individualized education plan. Under the Senate plan, parents could use money earmarked for K-12 public schools — $6,000 annually per scholarship recipient — to pay for a variety of educational expenses.
The joint panel tasked with hammering out a compromise voucher bill was optimistic their report would be adopted, as such reports often are, but their plans hit a fatal snag when lawmakers returned to Columbia last week for a one-day special session to finalize the budget and resolve differences between competing versions of adopted bills.
The compromise voucher bill passed the House without discussion and had enough support to clear the Senate also, but never got a vote in the upper chamber. The Senate’s decision to adjourn without voting on the bill effectively killed it for the year.
“Voucher Bill DEAD!” Sen. Mike Fanning, a Fairfield Democrat and ardent school voucher opponent, triumphantly tweeted moments after the Senate adjourned last week. “HUGE News!”
Why didn’t school voucher bill get a vote?
The bill’s failure, lauded by Democrats and public school advocates, arguably stems from concerns raised by a leading Republican voucher supporter who spoke out against the joint panel’s removal of an accountability measure he’d fought to keep in the bill.
Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, who chaired numerous subcommittee hearings on the school voucher bill, called the elimination of a requirement that voucher recipients take the same end-of-course tests as traditional public school students a “deal breaker” for him.
“The reason I’m here now is about testing. It’s about accountability,” Massey, R-Edgefield, said last week on the Senate floor. “The reason I may be up here when it’s dark outside is because of testing and accountability. That, to me, was a deal breaker.”
Senators, sensing Massey and others planned to speak extensively on the bill, delayed debating it initially in order to first tackle other matters that were less controversial.
By the time the voucher bill came up again later that evening, more than seven hours into the Senate’s marathon special session, attendance in the chamber had dwindled. Republicans, who hold a 30-16 majority in the Senate, no longer had the necessary 24 members present to limit debate on the bill.
When it became clear no Democrats would join their attempt to invoke cloture — the legislative mechanism for ending debate — and bring the bill to an immediate vote, the Senate adjourned.
“There was a realization that there wasn’t really any need to continue to stay in the chamber because we were not going to stop debating,” said Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, a voucher opponent who spoke against the bill.
Afterward, Senate Education Chairman Greg Hembree, R-Horry, expressed frustration with lawmakers’ failure to pass school voucher legislation, but said he felt no ill will toward Massey, whose issues with the compromise bill likely contributed to it being scuttled.
“If you in good faith hold a different belief and you’re able to use the rules we have to win the day, good for you,” he said. “It’s kind of sad to see that much work go into it on both sides, but that happens all the time. We do a lot of work that never bears fruit.”
Differences of opinion on accountability
Massey’s problem with the compromise bill stemmed from its failure to provide parents, lawmakers and taxpayers the ability to directly gauge whether vouchers were actually working for students, the Edgefield senator said.
If public school students who transfer to private schools with the aid of tax dollars aren’t given the same end-of-course tests as their public school counterparts, there’s no way of knowing if the move actually benefited them academically, Massey reasoned.
“I think it’s important for us as legislators, as policymakers to be able to evaluate as to whether the program is working. Because, look, if it’s working, you want to expand it,” he said. “On the other hand, if it’s not working and they’re not progressing academically, or worse, if they’re regressing academically, then you either put some significant changes to the program or you repeal the program outright.”
In order to ensure an “apples-to-apples” comparison, the Senate’s voucher bill required that all scholarship recipients in grades three through eight take the SC Ready test and all scholarship recipients in grades four and six take the SC Pass test, both of which are administered to all public school students in the state.
The compromise bill, which adopted the House language on testing, removed that requirement and inserted the requirement only that scholarship students take a “nationally norm-referenced or formative assessment” approved by the state Department of Education.
“It’s not apples-to-apples. It’s a different test,” Massey said of the compromise language. “If the purpose of the test is to be able to evaluate and (to) compare, those nationally-normed tests don’t allow that to happen.”
The testing requirement, he said, was one of the most important aspects of the bill and retaining the Senate’s language on it was paramount.
The House took a similarly hard-line stance on testing, vowing to walk away from negotiations unless its language was adopted, said Hembree, who served on the panel that hashed out the compromise bill.
“The primary issue for the House involved the testing of students and how that testing was going to be carried out,” he said. “This was their drop dead issue, this was their line in the sand.”
State Rep. Shannon Erickson, a Beaufort Republican who operates several Lowcountry preschools and represented the House on the joint panel, said she thought requiring nationally norm-referenced tests provided enough data.
“Requiring the exact same testing is not necessary to show a child’s progress and achievement gap gains,” she said, adding that doing so “can actually be distorting info if, for example, different subject matter is covered at different times of the year based on what curriculum or education plan a child is on.”
Hembree, whose views align more closely with Erickson than Massey, ultimately sacrificed the Senate’s testing requirement in order to ensure the state’s voucher program would be permanent and open to high school students.
“The House came our way on the permanence and the expansion to K-12,” he said. “We conceded on the way the testing was done and how that was defined.”
Hembree said he didn’t think insisting that voucher students take state assessments accomplished much of anything, as long as their achievement was still being measured in some form, and therefore struggled to articulate Massey’s position in negotiations with the House.
“I couldn’t really defend the position because, quite frankly, it doesn’t make any sense to me,” he said. “If the goal is to see where the kid is and see if the program is valuable — is it worthwhile? — you could do that without this added element.”
Hembree argued the requirement also might deter private schools from participating in the voucher program entirely by creating “one more headache” for them to sort out.
“It chills the providers from getting into the business,” he said.
Massey has a different take on why House lawmakers objected to his preferred standard for testing, arguing they gave in to the private school forces lobbying for the elimination of accountability measures.
“The folks in the lobby did not like the accountability measures,” he said. “It kind of makes sense. If you’re gonna be the one getting a lot of money from this, why do you have to justify the success of the program?”
Massey said he understands why private school interests might object to greater state oversight — and doesn’t attribute any corrupt intent to lawmakers who were persuaded by them — but said it’s essential in this case that private institutions be subject to it.
“If you’re going to spend $75 million of taxpayers’ money, you need to be able to show taxpayers that it’s a success,” he said. “I don’t want to spend $75 million on something that is not helping children.”
Oran Smith, a research fellow with the Palmetto Promise Institute, a South Carolina-based think tank that advocates for school choice and other conservative policies, said Massey seemed to fundamentally misunderstand what school choice is all about.
One of the core premises of voucher-like programs, he said, is that few requirements are placed on the independent schools that participate.
“They can’t discriminate on the basis of all of the categories in the Civil Rights Act, they have to be safe and they have to teach a broad range of subjects,” Smith said. “But for the most part around the country, that’s how school choice works. There’s very little restraints or regulatory burdens placed upon the schools because, in essence, they’re little test factories for how things can be done differently than in the public schools.”
Smith said he and other school choice advocates watched in frustration as the Senate debated mandating state assessments, a requirement he claimed was not part of similar programs anywhere else in the country.
He said the religious and independent private schools that would have been eligible to participate in South Carolina’s program don’t have the same standards or curricula that the state tests were designed to assess and denied their opposition was borne of fear over accountability and evaluation.
“It’s really the reverse. They’re really aggressive about telling you how they did versus the average South Carolina student or average national student,” Smith said. “I think it’s just they’re being asked to use a tool that’s not related to the other parts of their curriculum and no other state requires it, and the House wasn’t interested in it.”
Will a school voucher bill ever pass in SC?
Despite again failing to pass school voucher legislation this year, Republican lawmakers are far from deterred on the issue.
“I don’t think this is the end of it,” Massey said. “This is something that a lot of folks have been pushing for for years. We got closer this year than we’ve ever been, and I’m hopeful we can push it across the finish line next year.”
Hembree said Sen. Larry Grooms, R-Berkeley, the lead sponsor of this year’s voucher bill, already told him he planned to file a new bill next session.
He said the Legislature is primed to pass a sweeping school choice bill in the near future and doesn’t expect the disagreement over testing to be insurmountable.
“Assuming we get the level of support we think we have, we think we’ll be able to manage through that issue,” Hembree said.
Massey, who said he may introduce a voucher bill of his own, also expects future school voucher legislation to move quickly on the Senate side and is hopeful the House follows suit.
“I want effective school choice to happen,” the Edgefield senator said. “There will be disagreements about the parameters and funding, but we’ve worked that out so far and can do it again.”
This story was originally published June 22, 2022 at 5:00 AM.