Rex, Rhetoric and Reality
INCOMING SUPERINTENDENT CANNOT AFFORD TO FOLLOW FAILED LEGACY OF TENENBAUM YEARS
By Will Folks
FITSNews Exclusive - January 1, 2007 - The first time I laid eyes on Jim Rex it was through the control room glass of Andy Thomas’ radio studio back in April 2006.
“Who’s that guy sitting in my chair?” I asked Andrew Merr, the show’s producer.
“What, nobody called you?”
I shook my head.
“He’s the Democratic candidate for something … oh, and you’re debating him in about two minutes.”
Nothing like a well-oiled media operation that gives you plenty of time to prepare.
“Hi Will, I’m Jim Rex,” the man in my seat said smiling, extending his hand to me as I made my way into the broadcast booth. “You have to promise to go easy on me, okay?”
Apparently my reputation had preceded me.
“Sure thing,” I said, judging from the looks of him that I might have to.
Within seconds of going live on the air, however, this mild-mannered, unassuming man whom Joshua Gross still ridicules as “Lenny from LaVerne and Shirley” was smoothly and professionally delivering one of most concise, eloquent and politically-astute soliloquies I’d ever heard on the radio … on any subject.
At the first commercial break, I leaned over and motioned for him to take off his headphones.
“Hey man,” I told him. “You need to take it easy on me, okay?”
What had he done that was so impressive?
Well, a lot of things.
For starters, Rex brilliantly cherry-picked the same language used by Republican Gov. Mark Sanford and others who support school choice, the standard World is Flat-speak about how kids in South Carolina are now competing with kids in Burma, India and China - and losing. Next he talked about the need to bring new ideas and new innovations into the classroom – along with better safety and more discipline. “We expect our kids to succeed and yet we give them neither the technology nor the environment they need to be successful,” Rex told the audience – easily one of the better political quotes I heard all year. Then he said (gasp) that he actually supported school choice, provided of course it was offered within the public school system. He didn’t say it grandly or dramatically, just positively. And finally, to ice the cake, he eased into a few well-chosen anecdotes from his lengthy experience as a public educator, a not-so-subtle reminder to those listening that his opponent, Karen Floyd, had no such experiences from which to draw anecdotes … or anything else for that matter.
Of course it then became my job (after congratulating him for his political savvy) to remind listeners that when Democrats like Rex speak of innovation in the classroom, what they’re really talking about is spending hundreds of millions of your tax dollars on shiny new government programs with absolutely no promises of accountability and no enforceable mandates for achieving tangible results.
I also made it clear that supporting school choice “within the public school system” is code for not supporting school choice at all.
“He’s saying you can go down to the 32 flavors, but you have to get either vanilla or vanilla lite,” I said. “That’s not choice, that’s bouncing back and forth within the same failed monopoly we have right now.”
But for all my skill with ice cream analogies, we were debating on Jim Rex’s turf, and both of us knew it. He had positioned himself masterfully for the dialogue to come, expertly framing the issues to reduce incoming criticisms and presenting his relatively modest, status quo-oriented proposals in an exciting, change-minded light.
It was a virtuoso performance, and in giving it, Jim Rex demonstrated that he intuitively understood something that his predecessor Inez Tenenbaum never got:
Why be against something when you can be for it?
And why get beat over the head with arguments you can take from your opponents’ arsenal and use for yourself?
TALK IS CHEAP
Of course, sitting in that studio back in April, I had no idea that the man I was debating would win the closest statewide election in South Carolina history seven months later.
As impressed as I had been with Jim Rex’s performance, I still didn’t think he had much of a chance at the time – nor had I really changed my mind by the time Election Day rolled around.
Of course Rex’s campaign surprised a lot of people beyond just me on November 7, emerging with a razor-thin plurality over the inept Floyd campaign (and several not-so-minor third party candidates, as it turned out) to capture the Superintendent’s Office. Rex was the only Democrat to “win” statewide election in Republican-crazy South Carolina in 2006.
Unfortunately for the Superintendent-elect, however, his impressive rhetoric has become a little bit less valuable with each day that’s passed since his election.
In fact, it will become practically meaningless once he takes the oath of office on January 10.
Rex’s adeptness at “framing the issues,” which was so helpful in securing his election, will be considerably less helpful as he attempts to discharge the responsibilities of his new office. This paradox, faced by all newly-elected officials to some degree, will be particularly pronounced for Rex, who in addition to inheriting the least successful agency in state government was also the only winning statewide candidate who failed to receive the support of the majority of the electorate.
Sure, Rex and his supporters can tout his victory as a “mandate for public education” all they want, but the fact remains that 52.5% of South Carolinians voted for someone else.
In fact if anything, Rex’s race was very nearly a mandate in the other direction, yet another indicator that the public school stranglehold over the South Carolina electorate that peaked with the victories of Jim Hodges and Inez Tenenbaum in 1998 is on the wane.
That dynamic goes beyond just vote totals, too, as Rex’s “softened” school choice rhetoric during his campaign with Floyd demonstrates.
Public perception is moving, and Rex’s words (if not his policies) had to move with it.
Of course, Rex’s biggest problem right now isn’t rhetorical or political – it’s the unmitigated disaster he inherits as State Superintendent of Education.
Recapping, in a nutshell:
*South Carolina’s SAT scores are the nation’s worst
*One out of every three public schools is rated either failing or below average
*Half of our students fail to graduate, also the nation’s worst mark
Sadder still, these abysmal statistics are so familiar by now to most South Carolinians that they have almost lost their shock value. A century of failure, it would appear, has become more than just accepted state policy – it’s become an ingrained part of our underlying state psychosis, a malady we seek to assuage ourselves of annually by throwing more and more money at the problem.
Of course every year the new money doesn’t work, prompting the State Department of Education to give its “Wheel of Excuses” another spin.
Among them: Our students have “test fatigue.” Our tests are too hard or inaccurate. Our schools need better facilities. Our schools need more teachers. Our schools and teachers need more money.
And then every year they get the money, generally hundreds of millions of new dollars, in spite of the previous year’s results.
Which, of course, is the whole problem - that you can’t possibly expect to change a system that’s built on rewarding underachievement and perpetuating abject failure. At least not from within.
CHOICE WORDS
The only real sense of urgency the education debate in South Carolina has seen in recent years comes from school choice advocates who are making a strong push for market-based reforms like tuition tax credits - and of course the virulent backlash of the education establishment working against them.
The logic of the choice supporters is simple: Kids are getting left behind by the thousands, and if the system has proven incapable of correcting itself from the inside, why not try fixing it (at least partially) from the outside?
After all, if vouchers and tax credits really do make public schools better (which the evidence conclusively proves is the case), shouldn’t public school zealots and government officials who wrap themselves around public education support both? Especially having conducted a rational examination of the continuing, costly failure of the current approach?
You’d think so, but as the saying goes common sense isn’t common when it comes to government. And on top of that most modern governments at the state level are light years ahead of the fractured, antiquated and incompetent quagmire that is good ole boy-infested South Carolina, a place where rational thought has about as much utility as a pair of reading glasses in bare-knuckled brawl.
In fact, when it comes to issues before the South Carolina General Assembly, there are basically two currents of thought that dominate decision-making – “the way it’s always been done” and “outside agitation.” And by way of demonstrating how deeply this division runs, most of the Republican-controlled General Assembly views South Carolina’s own governor – the Florida-born Sanford – as one of the outside agitators.
Not surprisingly, the two-year legislative debate over school choice has been among the most vituperative in South Carolina’s history, in part because of the emotion involved but also because of how it has been covered in the press.
The mainstream media (along with South Carolina’s increasingly-active political blogosphere) has chosen to cover school choice almost exclusively as an “inside baseball” story, focusing on lawsuits, campaign contributions and the intimate details of daily personality clashes, all while largely ignoring the substance of the problem and specifics of the various proposals aimed at solving it.
This approach guarantees a steady flow of printable rhetoric from politicians already tripping over themselves to get their names in the paper. But more importantly, it enables the mainstream press to keep the focus on political brinksmanship, not social responsibility, when the story is about school choice.
Of course, when the story is about spending huge sums of tax dollars on unproven new programs, the focus quickly reverts back to the social obligation we have as a state to adequately provide for our future generations.
REX’S GAMBIT
The unwavering loyalty of the mainstream media won’t be enough to provide Jim Rex – or South Carolina’s long-suffering schoolchildren – with the answers they need to turn things around, however.
Nor will the eight-year legacy of dramatic funding increases, bureaucratic expansion and recalcitrant opposition to market-based reforms that Rex inherits from his predecessor, Inez Tenenbaum.
That’s why it’s so disappointing that Rex’s gambit - for the moment - appears to be a religious towing of the Tenenbaum line.
“We have to have the resources … and we have to have the funding,” the Superintendent-elect said during a mid-December visit to Marion County, the heart of South Carolina’s so-called Corridor of Shame. “In order to improve public education, we are going to have to reform it and in order to reform it we are going to have to support it. You cannot attack it and expect it to get better.”
Never mind that the goal should be improving the academic achievement of each individual South Carolina child, not improving a specific system, or the fact that a limited voucher and tax credit program is no more an attack on public education than state-supported scholarships to private colleges are an attack on the publicly-funded University system.
“Americans expect and demand choices in their lives, and they’re not going to make an exception for public education,” Rex said during a visit to a Columbia-area magnet school just days before his visit to Marion.
He’s right.
Now he just needs to acknowledge that this expectation extends beyond the confines of the public education system.
In spite of the daily demonizing of school choice supporters by the education establishment and the mainstream press, voters in South Carolina have begun to see the chinks in the status quo’s armor. Gradually, they are beginning to acknowledge the hypocrisy of those who would place the ever-escalating financial interests of an unappeasable bureaucracy ahead of the individual best interests of the children that bureaucracy is failing … by the thousands.
Rex’s softened rhetoric is, in fact, Exhibit A in the status quo’s new slang – a language of acknowledgement that’s based on the simple electoral reality that voters are tired of chronic failure.
Unfortunately, until the desire to “appear” supportive of school choice is accompanied by a true understanding of its benefits, expect little change in South Carolina under the leadership of Jim Rex.
Except perhaps in the excuses he makes when it’s time to ask for more of your money.
Comments
By tammy on January 3rd, 2007 at 1:14 am
Expect little change in SC under the leadership of Rex?
C’mon, WIll. I don’t think anyone with a lick of sense (about 10 people in SC) thinks Jim Rex or Karen Floyd or your “school choice” ideas or Rex’s “school choice” ideas are going to bring any drastic change to the problems plaguing the SC public education system.
Our problems in this state run a bit deeper than a voucher or more funding could fix. I don’t think we need either, by the way.
Nor do we need to keep on and on with the partisan bickering over the most important thing in this state.
But damnit…here I go anyway.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
No. I don’t want to.
Rex won and it was the folks in YOUR party that crossed the line to give that win to him. What the hell was up with that? I think if the SCGOP supports vouchers then you should ask them why they didn’t vote for your candidate. Not blame Rex because they did.
Do I believe Rex is the savior of SC public education? Of course not. He’s one man. As I said…SC has some real problems that a voucher NOR funding will fix.
Throwing money at poor schools isn’t the answer and further segregating the upper crust with vouchers isn’t either. It is 2007 and SC needs to learn what public schools are for…to educate the public. Not reform the school system to meet the needs of the neighborhoods with the most money. Or give these people a “credit” because they want to segregate their kids from the “public” school kids. The public schools need to be reformed to give all us a decent base of educated citizens that know how to follow the rules and read and write–wow, that’d be nice. College prep? Are you kidding me? What if we work on getting maybe half the class to write a complete sentence?
I don’t even know what the hell I’m rambling about now.
Anyhoo, all I was trying to say is that we need to overcome some of the social attitudes and issues plaguing our state–maybe then we’ll see some changes in the public education system. Jim Rex can’t change that nor could K-Flo. You and I can talk conservative and liberal views on the issues on how to protect and educate the children of SC all day, we could agree to disagree and work our asses off together to fix public education and get nowhere…why would we get nowhere? Because most people don’t value an education in this state much less care about the children of SC on the whole.
it is a deep rooted issue though and I have no idea where we start to fix it but we need more than bandaids….
damnit. i haven’t thought about this for almost 2 months. And it all just came flooding back…thanks alot.
t
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