Can SC’s education system be fixed? Is it broken?

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."

-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Well, people may not be entitled to thier own facts, but there sure can interpret those facts differently.  Take the education system in South Carolina, for instance.  Some see the bad test scores and high dropout rates driven by rural SC schools and say that the schools are failing our children.  Others see the same set of facts and interpret it as a failure of the families and communities in rural SC that fail to provide direction to young children who end up as a statistic.

I, for one, tend to fall into the latter category.  While I don't think that PPIC will magically fix public education, I can understand why parents in rural counties would want to send thier children to private schools.  You see, there is no practical difference between the way students are taught in Lexington and Bamberg.  But, more money is spent in Bamberg, and students perform worse.  Why?

If there is little difference in the curriculums or materials, and nobody says that the teachers are just worse, then the problem must be another influence.  Perhaps we should consider the possibility that it is the homelife of the students who are failing that is causing them to fail. 

So, if the problem is poverty and irresponsibility, why aren't we working on those issues instead of dumping more money into a school system when it is clear that it will be lost and wasted in the school administration? 

Shouldn't we put more police on the streets to enforce drug and alcohol laws?  Shouldn't we enforce truancy laws?  Shouldn't we work to create jobs and grow the economy?

Fix those things, and you fix education.