CommentaryBy Warner M. Montgomery

Public schools are government schools. As such they are designed to teach what the government says is good and right. Their purpose is to produce graduates who will support the government.

Private schools are institutions set up by non-governmental entities to produce graduates who will support a particular religion, a philanthropic concept, or a political agenda.

In the old days before government schools, parents were responsible for the education of their children, and practitioners (physicians, lawyers, carpenters, preachers, etc.) were responsible for the training of their apprentices. With the founding of our nation, government took an interest in the education of its pauper children. A cynic would have said the purpose was to get them off the streets and out of the gutters.

The Columbia Academy was established in 1792 to educate pauper children in the City of Columbia. It had no money and no one wanted to pay taxes to do it, so they soon charged tuition and their clientele went upscale. It wasn't until 1883 that local tax money went into schools in Columbia.

South Carolina College (now USC) was founded in 1801 as a deal between the Lowcountry and the Upstate. The Lowcountry gentry agreed to move the capital to Columbia in exchange for voting power in the General Assembly. They agreed to establish the college in Columbia as a place where young men from all over the state would learn politeness, politics, and patriotism.

Throughout the US, as in SC, government schools grew slowly and surely between 1900 and 1945. After WWII, federal tax dollars were dumped into state schools and colleges. Colleges became universities, and universities became agents of economic development.

During the Civil Rights Era and school integration, more federal money directed who would teach what to whom in local schools. Presidents Clinton and Bush pushed federal objectives deeper into government schools seeking higher test scores. The idea of parents running schools was lost in the rush to accountability.

Charter schools were seen in the early 1990s as a way to take government out of schools and bring parents back in. But since, charter schools had to be approved by local schools boards, they faltered and failed, either because of battering by school boards or backing by principals eager to get rid of their "at risk" students.

On May 3, 2006, Gov. Mark Sanford signed the SC Public Charter School District into existence, the first in the nation. It is a way to get charter schools out from under local school boards. The Charter School District is still a government school system, albeit statewide. The intent was to give educators more alternatives, more opportunities to experiment, and less government intrusion.

A state school district will simply move the policy decisions from the local level to the state level. It will be neither a solution nor a threat. It will still be controlled by the bureaucrats at the State Department of Education and money from the US Department of Education. A government school is a government school is a government school.