BY JAY KING HOMETOWN NEWS State Superintendent of Education Superintendent Jim Rex spoke at length Monday night about issues facing public education in the state before a crowd of about 50 people during a town hall - type meeting at Spartanburg High School. The audience was made up mostly of educators and concerned parents as Rex talked about such issues as equitable funding for public education and reforming the state’s accountability system. He said this was the 23rd town hall meeting he’s conducted across the state to discuss education reform initiatives sponsored by his office. Rex said that developing a coherent, balanced public education policy should be a nonpartisan issue in which educators and legislators work together to develop effective reforms. He said the state education department is working on five key areas where he believes public education needs the most critical changes. The first plank of Rex’s plan involves promoting innovative approaches to teaching and education. “Most innovation is happening in spite of the state and not because of it,” Rex said. “We’re still doing way too many things that don’t help too many children.” He said that the state’s public education system is still essentially organized the same way it was in the late 19th century and that one way to improve this would be to organize teachers into teams. He said this would allow beginning teachers to learn from more seasoned educators instead of throwing them alone in a classroom in a sort of “sink or swim” approach that characterizes public education currently. Rex’s next area of concern relates to public school choice. He said he wanted to be clear that he was not referring to any of the voucher programs that have been proposed in recent years. Rex said he thought such programs were bad ideas that would lead to even more severe problems with public education without materially addressing the needs of the most at-risk students. Instead, Rex said his office is urging every school district across the state to develop public school choice plans that allow parents a range of options from language immersion coursework to single-gender classes, for example. “I think this is an idea whose time has come,” he said. He added that he didn’t think it was fair or equitable to force a child to go to a school based simply on the “piece of dirt their house sits on.” Rex next addressed the need for reinvigorating the teaching profession. He said that in South Carolina because of the Baby Boomer generation nearing retirement, the state is about to lose a significant portion of its most experienced and effective teachers. “And there’s nothing in the pipeline,” he said. “We really need to get on the stick with this.” He said that he would like to see a South Carolina public education system that could approach a promising 18 or 19-year-old college student and be able to tell them that if they chose to enter the teaching profession — and especially if they opted to teach at a struggling school — they could earn $70 - 80,000 a year within three or four years of starting instead of waiting 25 years. Rex then addressed the critical need to reform the state’s accountability system. He said the PACT test that the state has spent millions of dollars in developing and implementing gives educators the wrong information and is not timely enough in its assessment of student performance. He said that the state House has approved a plan to replace the PACT test and that he is cautiously optimistic the senate will follow suit. He said he would like to see the senate opt to replace the test for the 2009 academic year instead of forcing educators and students to continue to prepare for a test that most acknowledge is severely flawed. Finally Rex spoke about the need for equitable funding for public education. He said existing methods do not fairly address issues of poverty and privation that plague many schools and districts across the state. “Poverty is pervasive in South Carolina,” he said. “It’s not just the ‘Corridor of Shame’ you may have heard about.” Rex said that equitable funding in this state has to be accompanied by comprehensive tax reforms. He said that without a balanced reassessment of tax policy and public education funding, meaningful reforms cannot happen. “This is not a private school versus public school discussion,” Rex said. He added that there has traditionally been no sense of urgency in Columbia to address needed reforms and that he has met some resistance to the stress he has been placing on addressing those needed reforms sooner rather than later. ‘I think four years is a really long time, and I think it’s especially a long time in the life of a child,” he said. During the ensuing question and answer period, Rex addressed such varied issues as charter schools and school district consolidation. On the consolidation issue, Rex said that he would like to see the number of districts across the state decrease by about a dozen or more districts within the next decade. Rex said that he thought this should be achieved not so much by caveat from Columbia but by creating circumstances where districts can find ways to pool resources and eliminate redundant services so that they might eventually voluntarily opt to consolidate. Rex was also asked about some concerns that have been raised in Spartanburg County about possible shortfalls in K4 funding. He said that part of the problem lies in the changes the state legislature has made to education funding by replacing owner - occupied property taxes with a sales tax increase. Rex said that when the measure was passed many educators warned that replacing the stable and predictable property tax funding with consumer-driven sales tax funding made the system vulnerable to an economic downturn – a situation that has manifested itself now and not years into the future like many legislators seemed to anticipate. “The chickens have come home to roost,” he said.