Key takeaways from the South Carolina Superintendent of Education debate

For the past several years, South Carolina has consistently ranked at the bottom of education rankings. Public schools have struggled and made herculean efforts to bridge learning students' experiences, and a teacher exodus forced the state to consider just what it could do to stop the hemorrhaging.

That's what was confronting South Carolina Superintendent candidates Lisa Ellis and Ellen Weaver when they went head-to-head Wednesday in a debate that dove into the state's ailing public education system to see how both candidates would tackle policy questions related to education funding, teacher pay, school district consolidation, assessments as well as culture war questions such as the presence of critical race theory in schools and "pornographic materials" in libraries.

Ellis, a fusion candidate and representing both the Democratic Party and the Alliance Party, is a teacher at Blythewood High School and started the grassroots advocacy group, SC for Ed. Meanwhile, Weaver, the Republican candidate, currently heads Palmetto Promise Institute, a right-leaning policy research non-profit and has served as the business representative at the Education Oversight Committee.

For the most part, Ellis and Weaver's views diametrically contrasted. They clashed over the usage of rhetoric, perspectives on funding and qualifications.

Here are the key takeaways from the debate:

The questions about qualifications

During their opening statements, Ellis emphasized her 22-year experience as a teacher and director of student activities as well as her educational qualifications, which includes two master's degrees. Meanwhile, Weaver, whose six-month master's degree has been at the center of controversy, focused on her managerial experience and relationships with lawmakers at the Statehouse and said that she would have the capacity to work with the General Assembly.

More:SC superintendent race: business donors, teachers' movement and the fate of public schools

"This is a management role of a multibillion-dollar state agency with over 1000 employees," Weaver said. "And so that leadership experience that I have had in managing large budgets and staffs, founding a nonprofit and serving on the education Oversight Committee has given me a front-row seat to understand the challenges that our education system faces," she said.

Meanwhile, Ellis said that she was a teacher and that teachers were natural problem solvers. "When I think about the decision that I have to make daily in the classroom for my students. It is one where we deal with effective communication, critical thinking and all of those important characteristics that come with it," Ellis said, adding that as director of student activities, she handled budgets and saw that policy decisions at the statehouse were not helping students and teachers down in the classrooms.

Teachers, their salaries and whether the public education system is underfunded or mis-funded?

There's a massive teacher retention issue. To combat that, the General Assembly hiked the minimum wage for teachers from $36,000 to $40,000.

Both candidates agreed that that was not enough and that teachers needed better pay and working conditions.

Ellis said that lawmakers needed to look beyond the traditional lens of an education system. That they needed to look at certifications and industry standards to assess teacher pay. "We're no longer competing against other education. We're competing against all jobs that exist out there," Ellis said.

"For example, a teacher who's majored in chemistry can go and be a chemistry teacher, or they can go and work for a pharmaceutical company and make twice as much," she said. "So you've got to look at attracting your best and brightest by paying for it."

Ellis said that the General Assembly had the opportunity to do that with a one-time surplus funding they had, but they chose not to.

When it was her turn, Weaver said that she envisioned a pay scale that the southeastern average and the best way to do that was to find savings in the education budget.

There was a difference in messaging when it came to funding. Ellis said that the public education system has been underfunded since 2008 and had ignored the system's cry for help for quite some time now, Weaver said that underfunding of education was a "myth.” Instead, Weaver said, the system was "misfunded" and that auditing and seeing what services could be cut would help "return money to classrooms.”

Weaver also said that they needed to get rid of red tape and bureaucracy to improve working conditions for teachers. Ellis said that the Education Oversight Committee, which Weaver is a part of, was an arm of bureaucracy that addled teachers with the kind of red-tape Weaver wanted to remove.

Weaver accused Ellis of being part of an "education status quo", of espousing traditional education policies where the answer to deficiencies in school infrastructure, for instance, "was just throwing more money."

Ellis chose to counter. "I find it so ironic that I'm considered the status quo when I'm the low man on the totem pole and have been fighting to have my voice heard for four years about the problems in education. The status quo is not me," she said.

Another polarizing subject between the two came up in the familiar voucher debate, a legislative policy that dominated several discussions in this year's session. Weaver, whose organization Palmetto Promise Institute has year after year advocated to divert public funds from public schools into private schools, said that the school choice was the best way to give low-income, special needs students the option to pick an educational model of their choosing. But Ellis said that the biggest issue with voucher programs was accountability. Private schools could use public money and decide who they wanted to let in through their doors as the same standards of accountability don't apply to them. Several private schools in the state tend to be religious and do not have non-discriminatory provisions. Weaver, who shares powerful connections around the state due to her political background, applauded several efforts by Gov. Henry McMaster and the General this year. She said that schools needed a better mental health apparatus in schools and the state had worked towards it.

Weaver also credited Gov. Henry McMaster's decision to reopen schools early for test scores not plummeting precipitously as they did elsewhere in the country based on the scores released in the National Assessment of Education Progress.

Ellis rebutted that it was actually the teachers and the public schools that were responsible for the state's test scores not backsliding as much as it did in other parts of the country.

Weaver went after Ellis on COVID-19 policies referring to Ellis as someone who was guided by a "far-left, union-driven" agenda. She said that Ellis had advocated for schools to not be opened early due to "politicized science" from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Ellis scoffed and said that Weaver kept throwing around the word "unions,” while South Carolina is in reality not a union state. She said that her support came mostly from teachers. "So you can throw all sorts of national politics around. But when you throw rhetoric, our students are the ones who lose out," Ellis said.

Partisan school board races, book bans and culture wars

Should school board races be partisan?

Weaver was not as resolute in this answer and said that if that's what the state law intended, then she would OK with it. She said that there was a need for transparency and the right information to be attached to a candidate. Meanwhile, Ellis reiterated that partisan politics had no role in education policy since the biggest victims of a political battle would be the students.

More:SC will not give money to teach critical race theory. But we never taught it, say schools

When asked about critical race theory and recent calls for book bans, Ellis said that these were issues that weren't actual problems. CRT, she said, was a legal lens applied to analyze systemic oppression in governmental structures. But that lens does not exist in the state's education standards.

More:Critical race theory and education are likely to become talking points in 2022 elections

Dig deeper:CRT in schools: Majority of public support current materials, quarter say it's biased

Weaver, much like several GOP candidates, said that CRT was a catchall phrase for "woke,” leftist ideology. On book bans, Weaver said that there were several "wildly inappropriate", pornographic books in school libraries that should not be paid for using taxpayer dollars.

Several of the books that Weaver is targeting had an LGBTQ character in them.

Book ban:Greenville County School Board votes to remove book from elementary schools

"I would like to know what specific books students have been forced to read," Ellis said in her response. "Because as a teacher who taught English for many, many years, our students always had choice and what they wanted to read. That's how teaching has evolved this year because students and teachers know that students learn best when they see themselves reflected in the classroom."

So to go and ban books was taking away the rights of a citizen, she said. "Because if we're talking about banning books and libraries, not everybody has to check out that book. That's the beauty of choice but to sit there and infringe on my rights because of your beliefs is really unacceptable and is not allowing our students a whole education."

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: South Carolina Superintendent of Education debate: key takeaways