Senators find out what you get when you ask for "disruption" in education.

SC Senators grill Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver about her interpretation of the voucher law they passed last session.

And I want to ensure you that we are are entirely aligned on first principles, that the General Assembly writes laws, and that the Department implements laws. And I am here today as an administrator, not as an advocate to argue about policy preferences.

—Superintendent Ellen Weaver, opening remarks before SC Senate Education subcommittee

Two weeks ago, members of a South Carolina Senate education subcommittee more or less accused the state Department of Education, under Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver of intentionally subverting the state’s school voucher law by assisting homeschool families to access the funds.

This week, when they called Weaver in to testify, Senators Greg Hembree (Education committee chair) and Shane Massey (Senate Republican majority leader) softened the accusation a little in terms of legality, but still seemed plenty angry at Weaver for thwarting their explicit wishes in excluding homeschool students from the money.

Massey, who spoke briefly following the superintendent’s remarks before leaving to attend another meeting, pointedly old Weaver,

I don’t think this is a legal issue… I appreciate the lawyer-written justification for the Department’s position, but I just don’t think that’s where we are. Um, one of the most attractive things about you as a candidate, and as a leader in this position, is that you have a lot of ideas. That has been very appealing to me, because I think that this is an area— education, especially— where we have lacked ideas for a long time. It’s been the status quo maintaining, and I like your efforts to try to disrupt that to some degree.

In contrast, Massey said she was “on the verge of whatever ideas you have in 2028 or 2030 dying today” if she lost the trust of Senators.

Undermining his exasperation considerably, Massey said Weaver would “certainly” be superintendent for at least four more years after the coming election (which, it should be noted, has not taken place yet; Weaver has two challengers in the race at the moment, Lisa Ellis and Sylvia Wright). Just to let that sink in: Shane Massey famously said, during a floor debate about whether or not to put a Hate Crimes bill to a vote, “I don’t believe in democratic government with a small D; I think we should elect representatives to make decisions”. That same Shane Massey is certain that Weaver will win the next election whether her policies are good or not.

The disruption legislators got was not the disruption they wanted.

Although it was clear that Weaver was not playing the game exactly the way the senators might prefer, she has arguably offered the exact kind of destructive “disruption” she telegraphed she would offer when she ran for office.

Weaver is a career acolyte of the kind of “school choice” promoted by Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025. During her candidacy, some of the “ideas” she ran on were rejecting federal education funding and rejecting the regulations that came with them, and, above all, “school choice” in the form of expansive vouchers that would, as she reminded senators in her opening remarks, cover everything from “virtual schools” to “micro-schools”. (Weaver’s former boss and founder of her previous think tank Palmetto Promise Institute, was former Heritage president Jim DeMint.)

And as superintendent, she has followed through on these promises, and then some. She commissioned one of the country’s most sweeping statewide book ban regulations over the objections of even some SC Republicans. She partnered with partisan edutainment company PragerU without going through the State Board of Education. She told schools to violate federal Title IX guidance.

Why senators thought she would respect their authority remains a mystery.

She told them explicitly during her testimony last week, and referenced similar materials the Department had sent them in the past, that the kind of “unbundling” the Department was promoting was “a characteristic of ESAs [Education Savings Accounts] not just here in South Carolina, but nationwide.”

Senator Hembree later pushed back on her references to other states, specifically Arizona, calling what happened in those states “completely irrelevant”.

But the law the legislature passed is based on the same pro-voucher think tank language as laws in many other states which have already faced the exact issues raised here: a lack of transparency around how money is being spent, significant fraud, a lack of accountability for how children are being educated, and a tendency to benefit very few of the poor or underserved students the laws are touted as targeting.

If Massey and Hembree weren’t paying close enough attention to understand that Weaver is interested in copying and pasting ideas from national think tanks into South Carolina policy, whatever South Carolina legislators or citizens might think about it, it isn’t because a great many people didn’t warn them.

And though Hembree gave her an opportunity to say she would publicly support an amendment that would clarify that homeschool students of any kind were not allowed to access the voucher funds, Weaver would not go that far, saying only that she would do what the law required her to do.

In Weaver’s opening remarks, she sought to draw a distinction between the express wishes of the Senate and the Department of Education’s “interpretation” of the voucher law, saying that if legislators amended the existing law, the Department would comply with that amendment, but that in the meantime they would continue to implement the law as they saw fit.

(Interestingly, a few years ago my school district argued something similar before the state Supreme Court when the General Assembly insisted that its budget proviso prohibited requiring masks at school during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The General Assembly argued that its intent trumped the district’s interpretation of the proviso as written. Ultimately, the General Assembly won.)

Weaver’s argument boiled down to a sort of “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is…” semantic conceit: that although the Department was sending state funds to students who were being schooled in their homes, and although the law explicitly prohibited funding “homeschooling,” what the students being schooled in their homes were doing was actually not “homeschooling” but “unbundling,” which, she said, was allowed by the law.

Similarly, she argued that the current law forbid three specific kinds of homeschool education, but that it didn’t forbid other kinds. Specifically, the law requires any parent receiving funds to “attest… not to participate in a home instruction program under Section 59-65-40, 59-65-45, or 59-65-47”. These sections cover homeschooling approved by a local district, homeschooling “under the auspices” of the South Carolina Association of Independent Home Schools, and homeschooling under other associations with less than fifty members.

In other words, it’s plausible that legislators truly thought they were covering a very broad definition of “homeschool” services that were forbidden under the voucher law. But it’s also plausible that Weaver supported the existing language precisely because she knew the Department would be able to “interpret” it the way she wanted. (If the interpretation of Weaver’s attorneys is correct, the General Assembly may have, intentionally or not, prohibited funding for almost all homeschool programs except those that aren’t even superficially accountable to a supervising organization or agency. This of course, would be another great argument against sending any state dollars to non-public K-12 education programs— something the State Constitution already prohibits.)

In any case, Senators weren’t buying Weaver’s arguments last week.

One of the essential problems raised for voucher-friendly legislators by Weaver’s testimony is that they had sold the new voucher law as something intrinsically different from the (extremely similar) voucher law that was struck down by the state Supreme Court just before they took up the new one.

Part of this was more semantic tightrope-walking: instead of Education Savings Accounts (promoted in earlier model bills from out-of-state pro-voucher organizations like ALEC), the new vouchers would be called “Education Scholarship Trust Funds” (a moved touted by out-of-state pro-voucher organizations like ALEC this year).

Hembree and Massey argued that the Department had acted in bad faith by promoting vouchers to homeschool families when the Senate had been crystal clear that this wasn’t their intention.

Hembree told Weaver she had caused him to commit a “fraud” on his colleagues in the Senate when he pitched the voucher bill to them.

Hembree, quite plausibly, said parents could, under Weaver’s sweeping definition of “unbundling” spend state tax money on pretty much anything, from horse-riding lessons to computers.

Which is all fair enough, but, again, they probably shouldn’t have been surprised.

Weaver already thwarted the clear intentions of the General Assembly when she declined to give legislators time to provide oversight on her statewide book ban regulation (after legislators, themselves, failed to appropriately write a resolution to give themselves more time to do so).

At the time, Massey said, “I would prefer that regulations of any type be vetted in the legislative branch before they go into effect”.

And, beyond Weaver, Hembree and Massey could have listened to the many hours of public testimony, or read the the studies from across the country, or opened a national newspaper, or consulted educational experts, or listened to teachers and parents across the state, and they would have already known that Weaver was right about one thing: voucher bills like the one passed in South Carolina are inherently based on the idea that some parents (never all parents in the state, even under “universal” voucher programs, which invariably will not provide enough assistance for the poorest families to access alternative services) should be able to take public tax dollars and “unbundle” those into essentially whatever they, personally, want to call education.

That’s what vouchers are for, after all, as Weaver herself was happy to remind us: using taxpayer dollars for a program that allows individual families to make their own decisions for their own kids, without the pesky accountability or transparency required of public programs.

If the General Assembly wants better “ideas” for how to improve education, they could start by listening to someone besides Ellen Weaver and, by extension, the Heritage Foundation types who are often speaking through her.