State newspaper references to Al Jazerra in demand for more SC education money

Should South Carolina defer to Al Jazerra
for input on running its schools?
(Pat Dollard image)

Politicians, media and education industry insiders dominate public schools because that's where the money is. They do not want to let go, and they want more.

The State newspaper's Associate Editor Cindi Ross Scoppe is deferring to Al Jazerra, Jihadi network news for advice to run South Carolina's schools.

Al Gore sold his TV network to Al Jazerra. 

Scoppe, a rabid Common Core advocate, is lamenting that Al Jazerra network news “sent a crew down to South Carolina to chronicle the horrid conditions of the school buildings and the embarrassingly outdated textbooks and report the depressing test scores and recount the generational poverty......”

You get the picture. The Corridor of Shame, schools along SC's I-95, revisited. Scoppe is describing South

Carolina's version of bankrupt Detroit.

Scoppe, in her Thursday column, did not note that The Corridor of Shame and Detroit have Democrat-rule in common. And the liberal education industry has been running those schools for decades.

In a nutshell (and so typical of the left) Scoppe is mad because she believes that pooling even more state money, and sending it to these poor-performing districts will save them.

But that experiment has been tried with terrible results.

Just one example: In the early 1990s, Fairfield County had its school board taken over, by the voting process.

There was nothing illegal about it. But Fairfield County has one school district. The schools received enormous amounts of money because V.C. Summer nuclear facility is located there, and it paid millions in property taxes for a small number of students.

Al Gore TV became Al Jazerra. The
network was in South Carolina to
show how bad our schools are. 

The district was awash in money. School board members took lavish trips to education conferences, tipped well, and built news schools. All paid for with school tax revenues. The media was slow to report how the new leftwing school leadership managed the district's finances.

Fairfield County ranked in the top five in the state for funding, but near the bottom for achievement.

Fairfield County had a high number of out-of-wedlock births. It ranked near the top in teenage parents and as a consequence most of the students received free lunch.

Socially, what the parents were teaching the children, was the “education” problem, in Fairfield County, not money.

The well-financed schools were a disaster because the leaders in them, were much like Scoppe. Money, not character or morals, were the focus.

If you want the state's public school students to continue to struggle, take the advice of Scoppe and Al Jazerra. If you really care about the future of South Carolina's children, vote to remove every Democrat from office. We've tried it their way. It's time to do something new.