BY STEVE NUZUM
Prior to the 2023-24 school year, I would imagine that most teachers, like me, thought about the State Board of Education rarely, and that when they did think about the Board, it was mainly in relation to teacher certification challenges.
This makes sense, because SC’s educational bureaucracy is unusually convoluted. The state constitution gives the General Assembly the ultimate authority and responsibility over the education system, but also creates a constitutional officer, the State Superintendent of Education. In many states, the Superintendent is appointed, but despite attempts to change the constitution-- including, memorably, the time current Superintendent of Education Weaver pushed for a law that ended up creating her own crisis when she did not meet its requirements to hold office-- it remains an elected position in South Carolina.
The Superintendent is the head of the South Carolina Department of Education, the entity which administers most of the state’s regulations (which are promulgated by the State Board of Education, and approved by the legislature, but we’ll get to that).
Members of the State Board of Education, along with Superintendent Ellen Weaver (right) discuss policy.
South Carolina also created the Education Oversight Committee in 1988 (five years after the politically-motivated A Nation at Risk Report), arguably as a way for legislators to have more control over education policy, and as a way for them to place business types in greater positions of power over education policy. The law that established the EOC is heavy on the kind of “accountability” and “standards-based” language that had gained bipartisan favor at the time, based on an emerging argument that the problem with schools wasn’t that they were underfunded, or that they were grappling with a recent emergence from a system of legal racial segregation, but that we just weren’t holding teachers’ feet to the fire enough.
Weaver, before becoming Superintendent of Education, had her first and only experience with public school oversight as chair of the EOC.
During the past several years, the EOC’s role has become controversial enough that there has been bipartisan progress towards abolishing it completely.
The State Board, then, occupies a strange place in the regulatory landscape. Members are not elected, but appointed by local legislative delegations (with an additional member appointed by the governor). Many board members have little to no experience in politics, and many are former educators and/ or working school superintendents. (For example, current Board Chair Dr. David O’Shields is the superintendent of Laurens 56.)
The Board does spend a lot of its time hearing appeals when districts challenge teacher certificates-- which they can, notably, do any time a teacher leaves a position after signing a contract, for any reason. But the Board is also responsible for “promulgating” regulations that govern the state’s education system. In practice, this means that the Board can consider regulations, amend them through a public process, and send them to the General Assembly for approval.
It’s this last part where the Board that has lately put a new spotlight on the Board’s activities. With the introduction of Superintendent Weaver’s Regulation 43-170, the Board was handed an unusually complex, long, and inherently controversial regulation. (For comparison, the most recent regulations passed by the Board up to that point were a handful in 2021. Most of these are a few paragraphs long, and deal with straightforward bureaucratic issues like transfers and withdrawals of students or disciplinary standards.)
With 43-170, the Board had to grapple with two of-the-moment (and manufactured) controversies: the supposed “indoctrination” of students in the state’s public schools, and the alleged proliferation of “obscene materials” and “pornography” in school libraries. Attendance at the afternoon full Board sessions swelled so much that there were repeated breakdowns in communication with the public about procedures and sometimes failures to properly call speakers. The Board seemed taken aback during these meetings, likely because dealing with controversy and attention is not generally a part of its job.
Some Board members, themselves, seemed confused about the process. Did they have to simply rubber-stamp the Superintendent’s regulation? Did they have to cede to pressure from the General Assembly to pass something to address the new (manufactured) panics about “indoctrination” of students and “pornography” in schools? (Of course, according to the SC Standards Manual for Regulations, the Board does serve an important role in publicly reviewing and, if necessary, amending, regulations.)
Part of advocating for changes to the regulation involved getting constituents to educate some Board members on what their roles were-- they certainly could suggest amendments to the regulation to the Board Chair (and, if they couldn’t, why would we even have an appointed Board?).
While the regulation is still overly broad in its approach to identifying instructional materials that can be banned, this process did lead to some important improvements to the regulation, like a limit on the number of challenges an individual can bring. (That there was no such limit in Weaver’s original draft suggests she is unaware of, or indifferent to, the challenges created by book bans around the state, where in some districts individuals have challenged hundreds of books at once.)
Unfortunately, another group confused about the Board’s role in promulgating regulations was the General Assembly itself. There was public, bipartisan concern over the speed at which such an unwieldy and consequential regulation was being passed, and leadership in the legislature did try to slow things down by delaying enactment of the regulation until the next year, so that they could use the upcoming legislative session to talk it through and potentially return it to the Board for changes.
Unfortunately, the resolution they wrote was apparently worded incorrectly. As Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey said, “We didn’t vet [the regulation] because we thought it wasn’t going to go into effect, so that has surprised a lot of people, and I don’t like that”.
And so a regulation that had seen massive public debate, which gave unprecedented new powers and responsibilities to a State Board which had been suppressed for decades by the presence of the EOC, passed, essentially, by accident. As of this writing, eleven books have been taken up for formal review by the State Board, including often-taught classics like 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Romeo and Juliet. A plain reading of the overly-broad definition in the regulation of “age-inappropriate” material suggests that at least one of these books must now be removed from every school in the state, and while I hope none of them are actually removed, that in itself will demonstrate the overly subjective nature of the new book-banning process.
Ironically, in its review of 1984, a staff member advising the Board wrote, in a summary of the book, “Independent thought is prohibited, surveillance is everywhere, and censorship is standard fare. What makes this novel so compelling is that Orwell writes from the inside that such governments are horrific states in which to live.”
Imagine that.
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