Providing school choices key to advancing state

From day one, our administration has been focused on advancing ideas that are all about making South Carolina more competitive.

Whether its cutting income taxes for small businesses, passing a long-overdue lawsuit reform package, or finding millions of dollars in taxpayer savings in our executive budgets, we've had a number of key successes on that front. Simply put, I believe becoming more competitive means pushing for reforms that are consistent with market principles, common sense and fiscal responsibility.

When it comes to making our state more competitive and more successful in the education arena, I have always firmly believed that giving parents more choices in the marketplace is critical. I am more convinced of that than ever after having seen firsthand how choice turned thousands of young lives around in places like Milwaukee and Cleveland. We owe it to those kids whose needs for whatever reason aren't being met by their current school to at least explore how these success stories might be duplicated here in South Carolina.

It's important because at the end of the day, school choice is not just about its impact on those thousands of individual lives, but the fact that it has been instrumental in improving public education wherever its been tried. Take Milwaukee, which saw its public school enrollment, graduation rate, per-pupil funding and test results all go up after school choice was implemented there. The only thing that dropped over that same period was the dropout rate!

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