Putnam: Get Columbia Out of Classroom

Rep. Joshua Putnam says that government continues to stand in the way of education.

Putnam spoke last month on education at a Powdersville Business Council Luncheon.

He said legislators have pumped more dollars into public education. 

“This past year, we gave an extra $150 million to public education,” Putnam said. “Public education has never been better funded in the state of South Carolina. I don’t think it goes back to a money issue. It goes back to how we allocate that money.”

The education budget has many different line items tied to special projects and programs.

“The way we need to approach it to go forward is, we need to get all those pools of dollars, put them all into one pool, then we divide it up to school districts,” Putnam said. “We divide it up to the number of kids that we have. Each kid is treated exactly the same in South Carolina – it doesn’t matter if they live in the Corridor of Shame, down in the lower part of the state, or they live in Anderson District One.”

The school district funding formula is “years outdated,” Putnam said, and revisiting that formula would Anderson District One.

Then government needs to get out of the way of educators, Putnam said. 

“What happened? What changed?” he asked. “We grew government so large. We have all these different mandates, different programs, you have to teach this, you have to teach this this way, you have to write this report at the end of the day. We’re tying the hands of teachers left and right.”

The system needs accountability, but individual districts need more control of school funds without “the burden of bureaucracy.”  

“What I would like to see happen is you give the money back to the school districts,” Putnam said. “The school districts do whatever they want with the money. You hold them accountable at the end of the year for that money. You address the problem at the end of the year and hold that administration accountable for it. You get Columbia, you get bureaucracy, you get the special interest groups that are in Columbia, out of the problem. You have the local school boards make the decisions for your kids.

“Allow the teachers to teach, allow the principals to make the decisions,” he continued. “At the end of the year, if you have bad test grades, then you fire the principal. You hold them accountable with different benchmarks … so they’re holding your tax dollars accountable.” 

Parental involvement is crucial, he said.

“If the parents aren’t willing to do something with their child, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if we have the best teachers, the best classroom, books, the most updated technology,” Putnam said. “It goes back to the home life. We’ve got to get parents involved. How do we do that, from the government’s standpoint? I’ll tell you the truth, there’s not an easy answer for that. There’s a line that government should come to, but we shouldn’t cross that line. We’ve got to be very careful with that.”

Patrick Dickerson with Chick-fil-A said he employs many high school and college students and has had to fire many because of character issues.

“The purpose of education, I think, is to pursue gainful employment, to be an asset to society,” Dickerson said.

He’s seen many former employees dissatisfied with the paths they’ve chosen, which leads to wasted effort and wasted funds  

“We have so many students pursuing education for the sake of education, not because they know what they want to do,” he said. “They have no clarity – no clarity of goals, no clarity of purpose. They don’t know what their strengths are. If we could help these guys learn their purpose in life and give them some character education … we’d find that a lot of this money wouldn’t be wasted. People don’t come prepared for work – but they spend a ton of money on school.”    

Each student is different, and education should address their strengths, but still keep the end goal in sight.

“Let’s teach our children in schools there’s a purpose,” Dickerson said. “When you graduate, you ought to be doing something you love to do, that will benefit society – and if you love to do it, it’s going to benefit you.”

College education is important, but sometimes emphasized too much, Putnam said.   

“If you don’t have a college education, it’s almost impossible to get almost any job out there nowadays,” Putnam said.

But students are too often pushed into programs that aren’t a good fit for them, he said.

“I tell my friends who are about to get a master’s ‘Why don’t you work that job for a few years and figure out if you enjoy it first?’”

Career Centers and tech schools are great for helping students find what they’re excel at, “before they go to college and make those decisions (they regret later)” Putnam said.