Former South Carolina superintendent says state needs federal oversight to do the ‘right thing’
History has shown that at key moments, South Carolina has needed federal oversight to do the right thing for its students, South Carolina’s former top schools official said this week.
Molly Spearman, the state’s Republican superintendent of schools before Ellen Weaver took over in 2023, told a packed room of about 100 people March 12 at Furman University’s Trone Student Center that she was “frightened” about the current GOP-endorsed plan to hand all education responsibilities over to the states.
“It took the federal government telling us that we needed to integrate our schools,” Spearman said. “It took the federal government to tell us that we needed to take care of children with special needs. And it goes on and on.”
Spearman had been superintendent of schools for just over a year in 2016 when South Carolina settled with the U.S. Department of Education over the state’s underfunding of special education in the years immediately following the Great Recession. According to reports at the time, the federal government threatened in 2011 to withhold $112 million after South Carolina’s Legislature failed to meet its state match for special education.
The country can survive without a U.S. Department of Education if the president gets his way, Spearman added, but it is “highly unlikely” in that scenario that the most vulnerable children — the poor and disabled — would get what they deserve.
“We wouldn’t have to have any laws if everybody did the right thing,” Spearman said.
The crowd at Furman, which included education advocates, teachers and Furman students, was gathered for a Riley Institute panel discussion on culture wars in South Carolina’s schools.
Spearman, OnTrack Greenville Executive Director Edward Anderson and Michigan State education policy expert Josh Cowen shared their thoughts on parental rights, the state’s book bans, cutbacks on Black history curricula and vouchers for private schools.
The Riley Institute’s next education program on April 7 will be “Decoding the Reading Wars: Finding Consensus on Literacy Education and Policy.”