Education Sandboxes Present a Great Opportunity for South Carolina
On March 18, 2026, I appeared before the Senate Education Subcommittee to testify on Senator Rex Rice’s S.708, which would create a limited regulatory sandbox and offer some much-needed regulatory and statutory flexibility to school districts who successfully applied for a waiver. However, time constraints limited my testimony significantly – below are my full prepared remarks.
Thank you, Senator Turner, and the other members of the subcommittee, for allowing me to speak today.
I’d like to take a few minutes to discuss Senator Rice’s S.708. As you just heard, S.708 creates a pilot program for public school districts to seek a waiver from the Department of Education from certain regulatory requirements to explore whether it would improve education quality and outcomes.
The bill highlights several potential routes forward. Districts could receive a waiver and implement one (or more) of the following: a shorter school week, distributing professional development throughout the school year rather than the 10 days designated by law, an amended assessment schedule that is less time intensive than the standard, or other scheduling adjustments based on student, teacher, or local needs.
Districts could also receive a waiver to develop their own school report card system, though we do have questions about the applicability of this provision in the bill as it relates to other school types. The bill states that the district-developed report card system would apply uniformly to all public, private, charter, and other school types within the district’s jurisdiction. We would expect this to only apply to schools that answer directly to the school district – including their traditional public schools, locally authorized public charter schools, magnet schools, and the like.
However, the language used in the bill could be interpreted to issue “report card authority” to all of the schools in the district’s geographical boundary. We must be careful to be sure that we are not authorizing school districts to issue their own report cards for fundamentally different types of schools that are not subject to their authority and are not a part of the current statewide accountability system – I do not expect that our independent, religious, and statewide-authorized public charter schools want their resident school district to be grading their academic performance, just as the school districts receiving this waiver would not want their performance being graded by these other types of school.
Back to the positives. S.708 essentially creates a limited regulatory sandbox for education. Regulatory sandboxes are valuable tools for states exploring ways to reduce overly burdensome regulations and spark innovation in their respective economies. According to the Libertas Institute in Utah, who helped spark regulatory sandboxes alongside the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 10 states have industry specific sandboxes, often limited to financial technology or insurance, 5 have universal sandboxes, and legislation has been introduced to establish some sort of sandbox in 20 other states.
South Carolina has the opportunity to be a national leader in education sandboxes and become one of the few states that recognize that something needs to be done to ease our regulatory burden in the education space so we can fix our education system. There are other debates taking place in the legislature highlighting the significant regulatory burden South Carolina faces, and this is no different. Nothing gets better if we do nothing and stay bound to the same regulatory structure we’ve had for years.
Of course, the effectiveness of any of these policies lies in its implementation. Some research suggests that transitioning to a four-day school week has negative effects on student achievement unless the school extends those days to reach 32 hours per week. Some districts in Oklahoma cite hundreds of dollars of savings in per pupil expenditures thanks to reduced food and transportation costs. According to the most recent SC TEACHER Exit Survey, protecting planning or break time is the top reason – even above a higher salary – that retirees and others who have left the profession might consider returning.
Even for teachers who left their district to work in another, school culture and climate and the reputation of school leadership are the top two reasons they left. Offering districts the flexibility to adjust how they administer testing and distributing professional development differently throughout the year rather than clumping it at certain times or even requiring teachers to come in on days that they should have been off (think of soft holidays, like Easter Monday or the day before Christmas Eve), could have marked effects on teacher job satisfaction.
Though not the “silver bullet” to fixing education, overall, S.708 is a promising step forward for reform. Far too often our schools are stuck in routine and “how we have always done it,” and this will help incentivize innovation and growth. There is no “one size fits all” approach to education, and often students have to explore other educational settings to meet their needs. Supporting our teachers is no different – easing the administrative burden on our teachers and allowing them to innovate and focus on their core duty, teaching, rather than checking the box on various regulatory requirements is sure to improve their quality of life and improve teacher recruitment and retention.
The flexibility afforded to districts by this bill could very well trigger a much-needed transformation in our public education system, and I applaud this subcommittee for taking it up. I’d be happy to take any questions.
