South Carolina ranks 43rd in education, according to the 2022 KIDS COUNT® Data Book. The 50-state report of recent household data developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation analyzes how children and families are faring. The ranking consists of four indicators: young children (ages 3 and 4) not in school, fourth graders not proficient in reading, eighth-graders not proficient in math and high school students not graduating on time.
The annual Data Book uses indicators from four key domains — economic well-being, education, health, and family and community — to produce an overall child well-being ranking for each state. South Carolina persistently sits near the lower fourth of states, with this year’s rank at no. 39.
In a four-part series, Children’s Trust of South Carolina is exploring the reasons behind each domain ranking.
To better understand education in the state, we interviewed experts in the field, including Catherine Schumacher, president and CEO, and Qena Jennings, senior director of educational initiatives, at Public Education Partners in Greenville County, a nonprofit that works to improve public schools; Matthew Ferguson, executive director of the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee; and Chelsea Richard, director of research and strategy at South Carolina First Steps, a state agency and nonprofit that helps prepare children to start school.
What do you think are some of the causes for South Carolina’s low ranking in education?
Catherine Schumacher and Qena Jennings from Public Education Partners: First of all, our schools—especially our public schools—face a daunting task: overcoming all of the non-school-based systemic challenges (poverty, housing insecurity, food insecurity, lack of access to affordable healthcare, etc.) that generate trauma that makes it incredibly difficult for children’s brains to be in the right state to learn. So the responsibility for these outcomes does not just lie within one of our public systems but across all of them.
At Public Education Partners, we feel that our public education system here in South Carolina—where more than 90% of our children attend school—has been chronically underfunded to even begin to meet that challenge, even as the state has undergone an economic boom that has generated unprecedented surpluses in the state coffers. We see that in starting teacher salaries that still lag well behind national and regional averages (despite the focus on increasing salaries over the last few years, for which we are grateful!). Facilities in some cases are terribly outdated and lack the technology resources that are essential to 21st century learning. Mental health supports for students and educators are fragmented and inadequate, a result of lacking healthcare infrastructure. These exacerbate inequities for students of color and those who live in poverty, who in most cases are lagging behind their peers in many categories. Here in South Carolina, we seem to center on reducing the amount of money that we spend per student, rather than using data and best practices from other states with stronger outcomes to maximize that investment as an investment in the future of our communities.
However, there are bright spots of excellence across South Carolina’s educational system, school districts and schools that are doing extraordinary, creative work that is meeting students where they are and giving them what they need to grow. We fear that if we only focus on the idea of “failing schools” that concept becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; we as a society cannot afford that, as our public schools are core infrastructure to carry us forward. We must do more to identify what works and allow flexibility for the educators who know how to address the challenges in classrooms best and then resource those ideas.
Matthew Ferguson from the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee: To move South Carolina forward, the following are necessary: A systemic, community-inclusive approach focused on student outcomes and preparing students for success in college and careers; access to high-quality instructional materials for college and career readiness, and access to high-quality educators (and high-quality professional development for those educators).
Chelsea Richard from South Carolina First Steps: The key to improving education in South Carolina is through increasing the reach, uptake, impact and investment of existing and new early childhood programs. We know that those that start school behind, often stay behind, particularly children living in poverty or low-income households, children with disabilities, dual language learners, and Black and Hispanic children.
Skills to be successful in school are built from birth through age five, where a million neural connections are formed every second, with regular, responsive interactions with at least one stable, supportive parent or caregiver. South Carolina’s investments in early childhood are working, but they are reaching too few children. In South Carolina, nearly half of all young children live in poverty or low-income households.
Last year (fiscal year ’22), First Steps, through our Local Partnerships and 4K programs, was able to reach 48% of them, but 5% of children in need received the more intensive services that deliver the greatest impact. First Steps’ Local Partnerships and First Steps 4K are only two pieces of the state’s early childhood system that prepares children and their families for school academically, emotionally, physically and developmentally. Through the South Carolina Early Childhood Integrated Data System, the state’s early childhood system is working together to quantify its collective reach, uptake, impact and investment.
How is your agency addressing these issues? What do you think policymakers and other state leaders – as well as the general public – can do to improve education, especially literacy and math proficiency?
CS and QJ from Public Education Partners: Public Education Partners works to address these issues in multiple ways. First, and most critically, we highlight teacher recruitment, retention and morale as a core focus of our work, and we encourage all education champions to do the same. We know that having a high-quality teacher in the classroom is the single biggest school-based factor for student success, so doing more to support teachers, invest in them, rely on their expertise and advocate on their behalf is critical.
We also work to increase book access and ownership for students, specifically by providing students who might lack access with a choice of high-quality books to take home. We emphasize building relationships with schools serving students in poverty, offering educators support resources (including not only books but also classroom grants) they need to improve reading and math proficiency in and out of the classroom.
We also are investing in family literacy and empowering families with strategies to support students’ learning at home. This, along with building home libraries, is the foundation of our award-winning, evidence-based Make Summer Count literacy initiative. The program, which received the 2017 Dick and Tunky Riley WhatWorksSC Award from The Riley Institute at Furman University, includes two connected strategies: building home libraries and providing specific tools to encourage family engagement in literacy development. This work extends into collaboration with our local school district to augment summer remediation and enrichment programs with books for students to take home, along with resources for families.
Finally, we collaborate within a robust network of community partnerships that are seeking to support families so they can help their children thrive, including groups like our public library system, First Steps, local community centers and other nonprofits. Helping students flourish is our community’s responsibility, and we all have a part to play in doing better.
MF from the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee: The Education Oversight Committee reports facts, measures changes, and promotes progress in various ways. The annual School Report Cards shines a light on student outcomes across the state and highlights the alarming results of too many of our students, especially those from vulnerable subgroups.
In 2022, the EOC stood up a 4K-5K education dashboard revealing that more than 24,000 who live in poverty are not being served in a state or federal-funded program. This is significant because we know that students who participate in these programs are more likely to be ready to access kindergarten standards than their peers who do not participate. The data could be interactively displayed and filtered by specific locations. The SC General Assembly has provided the agency with funding to create a larger dashboard, which will integrate multiple data sources into a consolidated, accessible warehouse for a variety of stakeholder groups. This investment will enable communities to identify actionable insights and make data-informed decisions for continuous improvement.
In its annual Education Improvement Act (EIA) funding recommendations to the General Assembly, the EOC has prioritized updating South Carolina’s instructional materials to ensure that these materials are up-to-date and aligned with South Carolina’s college and career readiness standards.
The biggest factor leading to student success is the quality of a teacher in the classroom; children need effective, well-trained teachers. Yet, approximately 6,900 teachers from 2020-21 did not return to a teaching/service position in the same district for the 2021-22 school year, according to the SC Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement November 2021 report. Overall working conditions seem to be driving teachers away from the profession, and this is of great concern to the EOC. To improve reading and math performance, children need high-quality, well-trained teachers who can help diagnose where supports are needed and keep students on track for college and career readiness.
For business leaders, families, and communities wondering how they can help students and schools, I invite them to check out the Playbooks.
CR from South Carolina First Steps: In our First Steps 4K classrooms, teachers have been working proactively to address any learning setbacks that were consequences of the pandemic, and it shows. All First Steps 4K students are assessed at least three times in their 4K year with TeachingStrategies GOLD at days 60, 120 and 180. At the end of last school year (2022), 71.3% of First Steps 4K students “accomplished readiness” in literacy, compared to 65.5% in the 2019 school year. This improvement persists across all GOLD domains with the biggest improvement in math with a 17.8% increase of students scoring “accomplished readiness” in school year 22, compared to school year 2019. The 2022 school year also marked the first year of statewide 4K expansion, and these data further support the state’s investment in that effort that is reaching more children today than ever before.
First Steps 4K reacted quickly during the early days of the pandemic. First Steps 4K classrooms were closed for in-person instruction for only about eleven weeks at the start of the state of emergency before resuming in-person instruction on June 1, 2020. While the classrooms were closed, 4K students were supported at home through virtual learning and read-alouds with their beloved 4K teacher. To better support teachers in addressing potential language and literacy learning setbacks, First Steps 4K launched the Language and Literacy Boost program in 81 classrooms, impacting 968 students in school year 2022. The Boost program is a combination of professional development, ongoing coaching and support, and classroom materials funded through federal COVID relief funding from the South Carolina Department of Education.
In Fall 2021, First Steps launched two new Local Partnership programs to address any potential learning loss modeled after our successful Countdown to Kindergarten program, thanks to federal COVID relief funding from the South Carolina Department of Education. The first one, called Catch Up to Kindergarten, served children during the first six weeks of kindergarten to support a smooth transition to “big school” for them and their parents. Catch Up to Kindergarten served 234 children in nine counties. The other program, called Countdown to 4K, pairs the child’s soon-to-be 4K teacher or teaching assistant with the child and parent for one-on-one sessions the summer before school starts. The Countdown teachers follow a curriculum and model activities to promote learning at home, provide high-quality learning materials, and – perhaps most importantly – create relationships for strong home-school connections. Countdown to 4K and Countdown to Kindergarten were offered in 24 counties in the summer of 2022 serving an estimated 1,900 children (final data to come soon) and will continue to be implemented for years to come.
To move the needle on education, policymakers and the general public need to support the current structure and utilize programs of the state’s early childhood system. This will allow the system to build on its current strengths and previous investments and follow its collective roadmap – the inaugural state strategic plan, “For Our Future: South Carolina’s Birth through Five Plan.” This plan includes all of the objectives, tactics, and metrics for how to measure the system’s success to achieve its vision of every child reaching their highest potential.
Much of the KIDS COUNT data was collected before the COVID-19 pandemic. How have you seen the pandemic influence children’s reading and math proficiency?
CS and QJ from Public Education Partners: I think that while we have seen that scores dropped precipitously after the pandemic (which is completely understandable and expected), in districts and school communities where they are leaning into meeting students where they are and moving ahead, rather than focus on narratives of “learning loss,” we are seeing progress. For example, here in Greenville County, our District motto this year is “Believe in students.” We must center a belief system that all students can thrive if given the support they need.
As a result of the pandemic, we have seen an increased need to further engage community partnerships in support of high-quality literacy and math intervention as well as to provide mentoring support for students. There is an increasing awareness that the anxiety of the pandemic, and the resulting pressure to “recover” from all the “learning loss” can be counter-productive, for both students and educators. Focusing on progress and celebrating progress, rather than focusing exclusively on the distance still to go (to an arbitrary goal) is useful.
One benefit of the pandemic is the urgency it has given to the focus on a whole-child approach which includes providing more robust mental health support for students. We are seeing acknowledgment that the mental impacts of the pandemic and the critical need to have social-emotional supports and learning strategies in place to help students recover so they can thrive academically. Also, there is an increased emphasis on the foundations of optimal learning and building classroom climates through safety, connection, and problem-solving. If this plays out as the research suggests, these investments and strategies should create learning environments that will lead to improved academic outcomes, as students’ brains will be in the right place to absorb the knowledge teachers have to share.
MF from the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee: The recently released SC READY data from students in grades 3 to 8 show that English Language Arts (ELA) scores have rebounded to pre-pandemic (2019) levels. Scores in mathematics improved from 2021 levels but remain alarming, especially for students from vulnerable subgroups.
We celebrate the growth and improvement in student achievement as compared to 2021. We have already identified several schools where more than half of the students are demonstrating growth that places them on the path to college and career readiness, and plan to publicly recognize such schools for these improvements.
We also recognize that there is much work to be done; six in 10 students in math and more than half of students in English Language Arts are not meeting grade-level standards. It is ultimately up to each community to prepare their students to be college and career-ready, and there is a role that each of us must play in making certain that all children achieve success.
The KIDS COUNT Data Book also shows South Carolina has experienced one of the sharpest increases in children and teens reporting depression and anxiety since 2016. How does the mental health crisis among children and teens intersect with education?
CS and QJ from Public Education Partners: We addressed this in the response to the last question as it relates to the pandemic, but this data, of course, dates from before Covid, which speaks to the direct connection between a child’s brain state and their capacity to learn. When children and teens are experiencing emotional trauma and anxiety, they simply cannot learn. We need to work on addressing the issue of student mental well-being as a foundation for improving educational outcomes. Embracing and systematizing trauma-informed practices and social-emotional skills isn’t auxiliary to education—it is the ground upon which we need to rebuild our system in the post-pandemic era.
MF from the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee: Though South Carolina’s adolescent anxiety rates remain below the national average, the mental health of our students must remain a focus and high priority for educators and community stakeholders. We recognize that social media and other cultural influences have exacerbated feelings of depression and anxiety among our children. Add to this the isolation that so many experienced during the pandemic; schools and communities must be equipped to recognize and intervene to support students when appropriate. The physical and mental health needs of students are a necessary prerequisite for educational achievement.
CR from South Carolina First Steps: We do not need fancy scientific studies to tell us that children who are not getting their mental, emotional or physical needs met will not perform well in school. We know that, like literacy skills, the foundations of social-emotional development and mental health begin at birth and that a parent or caregiver’s health status, whether mental or physical, impacts their children’s health status. We also know that adverse childhood experiences and intergenerational trauma have lasting effects through childhood and beyond into adulthood. Both First Steps, the Early Childhood Advisory Council, and other agencies in South Carolina utilize two-generation approaches in their work to ensure that programs and interventions are addressing the whole family’s overall health and well-being.
