Our weekly Top Five feature offers big stories or views from the past week with policy and legislative implications.
1. State’s teacher shortage is getting worse, Columbia Free-Times, Feb. 2, 2017
Some 6,500 teachers didn’t return to their districts to teach in 2016-17, although 1,640 of them moved to other districts. But that means more than 4,800 teachers quit altogether by August, according to the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention and Advancement. An excerpt:
When you look at the total workforce, the numbers don’t look so bad — the number of full-time positions filled by newly hired certified teachers for the 2016-17 school year was 6,934, which is an increase of 379 compared to the 2015-16 school year. But center officials say that although more teachers were hired last year than left, it’s because of a statewide increase in hiring, which was prompted by increased enrollment and additional funding resources in several large school districts. At the beginning of the 2016-17 school year, according to the center, there were 481 vacant teaching positions in the state’s public schools.
2. Loftis again blasts state pension fund management, The Post and Courier, Jan. 31, 2017.
State Treasurer Curtis Loftis has been criticizing the state’s pension fund managers for years for how it managed the fund, now in the red more than $24 billion (yes, billion). A new state attorney general’s opinion gives Loftis some more ammo. It’s complicated, but here’s an explanation by Loftis, who is pushing for a “closed 30-year amortization” to determine what’s going on with the fund:
“If you have a $1,000 a month mortgage and you only pay 53 percent of it to the mortgage company, you can take the other 47 percent and go to the beach. But at some point the mortgage company will say the debt hasn’t been paid, and the interest has grown substantially,” Loftis said. “That’s what we have done. There ought to be outrage, but there’s not going to be,” he predicted.
- Read another story: Pension debt ballooning, WLTX
3. Why we should read more books, David Lauderdale in The Island Packet, Jan. 31, 2017
Columnist David Lauderdale offers a piece that summarizes a new book of essays that honors University of South Carolina historian Walter Edgar. One of the essays by colleague Lacy Ford suggests that state leaders can move the state forward in a big way by getting them to read more and investing in their education. An excerpt:
In the knowledge-based economy, the traditional practice of building skills once jobs have been created must yield to a new approach that creates an intelligent workforce and uses the quality of that workforce as a recruiting and job creation tool,” Ford concludes.
“Such an approach is expensive and carries some risk and is hence politically difficult, but it would benefit the state over the longer term. The state must invest more heavily in the education and training to overcome a long history of underinvestment. Without such an investment in its people — all its people — South Carolina will likely consign itself to a prolonged period of economic stagnation.”
4. Florida prison writing program is changing lives, Kathie Klarreich in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Jan. 18, 2017
This story on a South Florida writing program highlights how literacy programs help inmates keep from returning to prison and help them get jobs. An excerpt:
Participation improves relations with other inmates and staff, and strengthens their relationships with their family members. It improves inmates’ self-discipline, self-esteem, and self-respect. Attending classes reduces disciplinary infractions and helps transform personal identities from what the professionals label “pro-criminal” to what we educators term “pro-social,” which, in non-jargon, means inmates start identifying as law-abiding citizens rather than as law-breakers.
5. It’s important to bridge the urban-rural divide, Esther Manheimer and Grant Godwin in The (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer, Jan. 28, 2017
This op-ed piece in a leading newspaper from our sister state to the north suggests that it is not productive to continue to exacerbate an urban-rural divide. With the economies and lifestyle of the two Carolinas so similar, it might be wise for us to listen. An excerpt:
In short, it is time to throw out the divisive talking points about the rural-urban divide and get down to work, because we have more in common than we generally recognize. Shifting resources from one pot to another is not going to cut it. We need to make the pot bigger and allocate more strategically. We need to acknowledge that communities starved for resources inevitably fight with one another.
As a state, we need to focus on how urban and rural communities are linked as economic regions, as evidenced by our economic hubs and their commuting patterns. In this new economy, city limits and county lines blur. New jobs anywhere in the region are a win for everyone as the employees to fill those jobs will come from throughout the region
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!