Literacy

For much of the state’s history, education was left principally to families. Nonetheless, while historically the state’s support of schooling has been hesitant, sporadic, and limited, the last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed growing attention to schools.

Although not all EIA programs have survived, the dedicated sales tax has been maintained in a separate revenue fund and continues to be used for increasing the level of South Carolina’s student achievement.

Beginning in 2001, school and district “report cards,” indicating whether the local schools were rated as excellent, good, average, below average, or unsatisfactory, were sent to parents and published in local newspapers.

A slowing economy, declining state revenues, and tax cuts by the Republican-controlled General Assembly severely limited Hodges’s role as an “activist” governor.

The South Carolina Department of Education is the administrative arm of the State Board of Education. The department promulgates and…