The South Carolina Education Oversight Committee’s website

CONTROVERSIAL COMMITTEE HAS BECOME $2 MILLION BURDEN ON TAXPAYERS

The wasteful South Carolina Education Oversight Committee (EOC) may soon be a thing of the past.

Less than three months after State Rep. Bakari Sellers (D-Bamberg) publicly called for the dissolution of the EOC, lawmakers began consideration of a plan to eliminate its funding.

The EOC is tasked with overseeing public education standards in South Carolina, but critics claim the controversial arm of state government has become little more than a needless $2 million per year burden on taxpayers.

“Real ‘oversight’ can only be provided by engaged parents,” said Randy Page of the South Carolinians for Responsible Government (SCRG), an education watchdog organization in Columbia. “Families need to be given timely and nonpartisan data about schools and then the power to make real choices about where their children are enrolled.”

The EOC has been chronically late in delivering annual school and district report cards and have put in place numerous testing and reporting standards that have weakened public education in South Carolina.

“It has come to a point where that agency has run its course,” Sellers told The Palmetto Scoop in November. “I think [the EOC] stifles progress in the classroom, I think it contributes to teaching towards a test and not teaching the actual student, and I truly think it’s a waste of money because it is duplicative.”

The motion to strip EOC funding was proposed by State Rep. Annette D. Young (R-Charleston) and adopted without objection by a House Ways and Means subcommittee. It now heads to the full committee.

What do you think the lawmakers should do?

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