This week, the state Board of Economic Advisors released rosier state budget numbers, reporting that legislators will have $108 million more to work with after an unexpected $80-million extra spike in lottery tickets sales, this year.

South Carolina’s tax collections have consistently exceeded projections for the past several years, as the state recovers from the Great Recession. The BEA also reported this week that state tax collections are up $39.5 million over a year ago.

All of that new money could come in handy for Haley’s $170 million education plan, which she unveiled last month.

The plan calls for major state investment in teachers, reading programs and increased technology, but does not designate a specific funding source.

Money would come from extra tax collections

Since the governor unveiled her plan, she has said on the re-election stump that the money will come from additional tax collections, not an increase in taxes. The cornerstone of her plan is the belief, widely held in Columbia and around the state that public K-12 education funding formulas are “outdated and inequitable,” and are holding back academic achievement.

Much of the $170 million, according to her plan, would be spent in the state’s rural school districts, where economic disparities can be the cruelest and hardest to overcome.

The plan would also fund reading academies at the third-grade level, summer reading camps, more funding for charter schools, and a modest set-aside for increased distance learning.

Senate Democratic operative Phil Bailey sniffed that it was an empty plan, as it looked to pick up undesignated droppings off the same “money tree” the governor has championed using to fund road and infrastructure projects, which total close to $30 billion in identified needs. 

Focus on poverty not new

Perhaps most importantly in the plan, Haley has called for additional funding weighting to be given to schools and school districts with high poverty populations.

But this is nothing new, as Dan Cooper, the retired Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, included similar efforts in his reform plan in 2011 before leaving office.

Cooper’s plan passed the House but never hit the floor in the Senate.

State Sen. John Matthews (D-Orangeburg) said he has been trying to get poverty weighting included in state funding of schools for more than a decade. He praised Haley’s plan as a “good first step that doesn’t go far enough.”

Like Cooper, Matthews has proffered plans and bills that would create poverty weighting, but the other chamber in the Statehouse did not embrace his efforts.

Matthews said his numbers showed that the state needed to spend closer to $500 million in rural school districts to “really create equity” between educations available in country and city schools.

“I think we’d be better off if we specified where the revenue is coming from,” said Matthews, the first black legislator with enough seniority to sit on the front row of the Senate since Reconstruction. “I’m not sure how else it would work out if we didn’t designate the revenue stream internally in the formula.”

Vouchers?

One item conspicuously missing from Haley’s plan, the result of a yearlong effort to meet with state education and business leaders and stakeholders, was mention of a statewide voucher system, a hallmark of her predecessor, Mark Sanford.

The closest thing to vouchers was a mention of tax credits for families with exceptional needs students, which both sides of the political divide hail, and for scholarship-granting organizations, which some education supporters see as boon to private schools.

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With the House on furlough this week and the Senate deciding not to meet because of the big ice storm, next weeks will be busy in the legislature.  Important meetings include:

House Ways and Means.  The healthcare subcommittee will meet 9 a.m. Tuesday in 108 Blatt to discuss the state Department of Social Services budget and provisos. No other meetings were listed at publication time. Check House meetings here.

Senate Transportation. The full committee will meet 11 a.m. Feb. 19 in 209 Gressette to hear from DMV Director Kevin Shwedo.

Senate Medical Affairs. A subcommittee will meet 11 a.m. Feb. 19 in 207 Gressette to talk about various proposed regulations, including one regarding vaccinations regarding contagious diseases. Agenda.

Senate Corrections. The full committee will meet noon Feb. 19 in 209 Gressette to hear a presentation on juvenile sex offender registration.

House Education and Public Works. The full committee will meet 1.5 hours after the House adjourns in 433 Blatt to discuss several bills, including some related to the First Steps program, Read to Succeed proposal and teacher qualifications. Agenda.

Senate Agriculture. A subcommittee will meet 9 a.m. Feb. 20 in 207 Gressette to discuss a bill to allow growing of industrial hemp in the state. Agenda.

Joint Bond Review. The committee will meet 10 a.m. Feb. 25 in 105 Gressette to discuss a USC lease and other projects. Agenda.

S.C. Secretary of State Mark Hammond, who has won by convincing margins in recent elections, may face a serious challenge from Charleston nonprofit consultant Ginny Deerin, a veteran in Charleston progressive politics.

First, Deerin is known as a consummate organizer, a strategist who founded the much-heralded Wings for Kids after-school program. She also helps run Project XX, a nonprofit that tries to get women candidates elected.

Second, Hammond, expected to seek a fourth term, doesn’t have much money in his campaign coffers, with just $33,463 on hand in December according to media reports. 

Third, Deerin sounds more like a Republican than a Democrat in her calls to “cut fees, cut budget, cut regulations, improve customer service.”

• More: http://www.ginny4sos.com/

Game on.

Loveday to head to Clyburn’s office

S.C. Democratic Party Executive Director Amanda Loveday is moving to U.S. Rep. James Clyburn’s state office to handle state press functions after three years at the state party.

She’ll replace longtime press aide Hope Derrick, who has taken a position with the University of South Carolina. Loveday’s start date is up in the air until a new state director is hired.

More than 3.3 million Americans have signed up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act through February 1, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,

A new Gallup Poll based on more than 19,000 interviews shows the rate of uninsured adults is at 16 percent -- the lowest level since 2008. Across the nation, the percentage of Americans covered by Medicaid went up from 6.6 percent in late 2014 to 7.4 percent now, an increase that “may be because some states have chosen to participate in Medicaid expansion under a provision of the Affordable Care Act.”

South Carolina, however, is not one of those states. Its leaders have shoved aside calls to reclaim billions of South Carolina’s federal tax payments to allow tens of thousands of the state’s poorest to get health care through Medicaid expansion. Nevertheless, 41,300 South Carolinians signed up for health insurance through a federal exchange as of the first day of the month, according to HHS figures. Critics say only 25,000 people or so have paid and received coverage through the new system.

One family that scrapped its health plan for one offered through the exchange was ours. Through the exchange with the help of a health insurance agent, we picked a plan and got signed up relatively quickly. 

The key, however, to getting the plan fairly easily was using an insurance agent, not to trying to do it on our own.  Health economist Lynn Bailey of Columbia said using agents is important because they have specialized training and really know how the new insurance system works. 

“There are lots of people sitting out there with no health coverage who are just intimidated,” she said, noting that the scattered rollout of the Healthcare.gov Web site didn’t help. “They’re overwhelmed. They just become confused. It is complicated and they just walk away.”

In South Carolina, about 800,000 people traditionally have not had health insurance. Of those, about 200,000 of the state’s poorest fall through the cracks for coverage because South Carolina hasn’t accepted federal aid  to expand Medicaid for Obamacare. The rest of those without coverage can apply for insurance through a federal exchange. Those who earn up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level may qualify for a subsidy to make the insurance more affordable.

While the data show that South Carolinians are very slow to get coverage as a March 31 deadline approaches, Obamacare is changing lives, as highlighted in the story of a single mother in the Lowcountry. 

The woman, says health insurance agent Marcia Alfaro of Charleston, has had a family history of diabetes and heart disease. She has worried the conditions threaten her health and her teen-ager’s future. But she didn’t have insurance because coverage didn’t come through two low-wage, part-time jobs. And she couldn’t afford coverage, although she works hard, pays her bills and provides for her family. When she has gotten sick, she has gone to a public health clinic, but didn’t have a doctor who focused on wellness. 

But through Obamacare, the mother could get a subsidy to make health insurance affordable for the first time, said Alfaro, who owns Visionary Insurance Advocates in Charleston. No longer does this woman worry about what happens if she gets sick. She’s not embarrassed to visit a doctor because she has an insurance card. And when she recently visited her own doctor for the first time, she was surprised to pay nothing, Alfaro said, noting how she reminded her client that the new law covers 100 percent of the cost of preventive benefits.

Bottom line: It’s going to take awhile for the Affordable Care Act to make more of an impact in South Carolina. But as time passes and people get over being scared or confused about it, it will start to work -- just like it did for one Lowcountry mother.

Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report.  You can reach Brack at: brack@statehousereport.com.

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By Vally Sharpe
Special to Statehouse Report

FEB. 14, 2014 -- The Common Core is not the problem. The Common Core is simply a list of guidelines for what “core” skills and conceptual knowledge American kids need to know today in order to thrive … and, on average, what they need to learn at each grade level along the way.

It is “common” because the goal is for a kid in South Carolina, which has inhabited the bottom five in the barrel of SAT scores for as long as I can remember, to have a near equal shot statistically at doing as well as a kid from Massachusetts, a state known for hanging around the top of the SAT rankings. It isn’t a matter of intelligence, personality, affluence or skin color — it’s a matter of survival — and, frankly, common sense — if the United States expects to fulfill a leadership role in the world going forward.

I mention the SAT because one of the collaborators in developing the Common Core standards was The College Board, which has, since its inception early in the 20th century, developed, distributed and scored the SAT. Here’s a quote directly from their website:

“The SAT is aligned to the Common Core State Standards as well or better than any assessment that has been developed for college admission and/or placement. The College Board will continue to invest and is committed to building deeper alignment to ensure the SAT reflects the key components of the CCSS.”

The Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, collects test results from 65 countries for its rankings, which come out every three years. In 2012, 29 nations outperformed the U.S. by a statistically significant margin in math, 22 in science and 19 in reading. In a global economy in which, on average, American students continue to slide down the rankings year after year, it is a travesty to sideline any effort to improve student learning by making education an issue of state’s rights or allowing politicians and now parents who think children are robots and teachers are mechanics to drive policy. And yet, that’s exactly what has happened.

The goals of both No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were honorable attempts to reward those schools who made progress in closing the income-achievement gaps revealed by a 1980’s study. But they have failed miserably. This is, in my opinion, due to the worst form of the Peter Principle, where authority is given to individuals who have no idea how to do the job they are tasked with evaluating. The governments from Washington to school boards are largely clueless about 1) how we learn, 2) how to measure true learning (as opposed to the ability to fill in circles on a standardized test), and 3) how to engage human motivation to persevere toward achievable goals, whether they are the Common Core standards or not. The message is clear—what we’ve been doing to counter the issues confronting American students HAS NOT WORKED AND IS NOT WORKING.

Will the Common Core standards solve the problems by themselves? No. Not unless they’re implemented into the curricula by people who are skilled in project management and have experience in leading us naturally-resistant-to-change humans. But they’re a step in the right direction and they must be implemented and now if we expect the majority of our children to be able to compete in the world of tomorrow. With the pace of technological changes, even these will be obsolete by the time kids entering Pre-K now reach high school.

We did not get here overnight. People with an ounce of common sense know that we can’t repair the damage of 30-plus years overnight either. Doing nothing is bad enough. Bashing attempts to solve problems on the basis of misinformation is worse. It reveals a far-too-common flaw in the political scheme today — the willingness to distract attention from inadequacy and incompetence by hiding behind straw man arguments and out-and-out lies.

The issues facing public education today are complex and blame for where we are can be placed at the feet of presidents, parents and everyone in between. But blame will get us nowhere. The past cannot be cured. Only the future can be changed. And only by those who can tell the difference between ideas that move us toward real solutions and the fodder of political rhetoric.

Vally Sharpe, M.A., is a resident of Asheville, N.C., but follows South Carolina public policy as a contractor for SCClips.com.  A Georgia native, she is a specialist in the fields of human learning and assessment.

Power companies. While more than 300,000 in the state suffered power outages during a crushing ice storm this week, let’s give a tip of the hat to all of the power company workers who are trying hard to restore power.