South Carolina's Corridor of Shame
What is the Corridor of Shame?
The Corridor of Shame is a popular subject amongst South Carolina educators-- it's known for its inadequate funding and its levels of poor student achievement. It's a strip of poor, rural areas in the Lowcountry that goes along Interstate 95 (Keierleber, 2017). The Corridor of Shame is an important topic to address in South Carolina because there are numerous counties that fall into it. Additionally, not addressing this issue causes hindered success of students and definitely plays into the teacher shortage/retention crisis based on how the field of education is treated in the state.
The Corridor of Shame, although unofficially defined, consists of roughly seventeen counties: Bamberg, Beaufort, Calhoun, Clarendon, Colleton, Darlington, Dillon, Dorchester, Florence, Hampton, Jasper, Lee, Marion, Marlboro, Orangeburg, Sumter, and Williamsburg county (The Charleston Chronicle, 2016).
Inadequate school funding not only causes hazards in schools, but also a distractive learning environment. These horrible conditions are not a place for students to learn or for teachers to teach.
https://www.thestate.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/cindi-ross-scoppe/article161794743.html
If schools don't have enough funding to fix major architectural hazards, how are they supposed to afford the resources necessary to give their students the most enriching learning experience?
https://data.postandcourier.com/saga/minimally-adequate/page/9
Many students in rural or poor counties may not have access to an internet connection at home, and in a world where our dependency on technology is significantly increasing (especially due to COVID-19), this can be a cause for more issues in education and especially within the Corridor of Shame. There are various pieces of legislation and also initiatives that aim to help address this issue, like AFL's Fiber to the People campaign (Bustos, 2020). Although this is a great way to help rural schools, it doesn't completely solve the problems within poor and rural schools as it is directed more toward communities and not specifically students.
http://projects.aljazeera.com/2014/south-carolina-schools/class-action.html
Efforts have been made to curb the severity of what's occurring in the Corridor of Shame, but the next few maps are going to display data in order to analyze how schools, county education expenditures/funding, median household income, and elementary state test scores all relate in order to make crucial connections that help show where problems generally lie in different counties among South Carolina.
https://www.the74million.org/article/deep-in-south-carolinas-corridor-of-shame-teachers-at-new-tech-network-strive-for-a-big-turnaround/
Each lavender dot represents a school, and each county is colored based on how much the Department of Education spent on funding for the Fiscal Year of 2017-2018. The darker the red, the higher the expenditure. All of the data in the following maps represents the 2017-2018 period.
District Expense Data: https://ed.sc.gov/finance/financial-data/historical-data/district-expense-information/
I aggregated the number of schools per district in order to compare how many schools there are per district in a way that would be easier than looking at individual points. The size of each dot represents how many schools are in each respective district. Notice how the larger the dot, the darker the county generally is. This makes sense because if there are more schools to fund, districts are going to need more money.
Now let's look at Median Household Income by county. The light blue dots represent Median Household Income, and the District Expenditures layer remains the same. Notice how some of the largest dots are in darker red areas.
Now let's look at the mean PASS test science (grade 4) scores for every county. The darker the green, the higher the score.
PASS Score Data:
https://ed.sc.gov/data/test-scores/state-assessments/scpalmetto-assessment-of-state-standards-pass/2018/
Now let's look at the mean PASS test social studies (grade 5) scores for every county.
Notice how even though these are different subjects and different grades, the score trends are very similar.
PASS Score Data:
https://ed.sc.gov/data/test-scores/state-assessments/scpalmetto-assessment-of-state-standards-pass/2018/
Now let's compare PASS grade 5 social studies scores with district expenditures, except this time the district expenditures are counted by size, represented by the purple dots. The larger the dot, the larger the expenditure. Notice how counties with lower scores (the lighter green colors) generally have smaller expenditures, especially within the Corridor of Shame (notice that in the Upstate, there are counties that have smaller expenditures but still maintain higher scores).
This can be explained, however, by the median household income per county (light blue dots). It is generally a bit higher in Upstate counties with low expenditures (purple dots) in comparison to the counties in the Corridor of Shame.
How do we address the Corridor of Shame?
South Carolina teachers are unable to unionize as they are public employees, but this doesn't stop them from trying to make a difference (Bowers, 2020). The teacher activist group SC for Ed could be a good start to try to address this issue. Their main intent is to advocate for educational reform and being an already organized, very large group, this data gives them evidence to show to legislators and other influential figures to help the counties in the Corridor of Shame receive the appropriate funding and assistance they need. The data layers show that generally, the lower the median household income is in a district, the lower the test scores are (and district expenditures). Family aid should be the first focus of legislators, and from there they (or the SC Department of Education) need to focus on increased funding for those school districts within the Corridor of Shame.
Legislators can be very uninformed when it comes to making decisions about education. Many of them do not know what it's like to teach, let alone in a county that needs government assistance. Legislators are more likely to look into certain topics if many of their constituents raise concerns about them, so we can start by sending messages to our state senators and representatives including this data in order to educate them about rural and lower-income counties and how that affects the schools and education there. Protests are also a good way to advocate for the changes the schools in the Corridor of Shame need. Overall, these maps can be used to identify where the problem areas are in the state, and how each variable such as median household income and education funding can affect the other.
