South Carolina’s New School Choice Bill Lags Behind Tennessee and Texas

We are grateful to the South Carolina Senate for its recent passage of S.62, a bill by Education Chairman Greg Hembree that aims to restore school choice in South Carolina following the SC Supreme Court’s Eidson decision that left thousands of SC families with their promised scholarships ripped away. The legislation passed after several weeks of debate, and it is expected to be taken up in the House in the coming weeks.

But South Carolina families are not alone in their fight for school choice.

Right now, there is a nationwide movement to embrace choice in education. In the last few years, school choice legislation—particularly Education Scholarship Accounts (ESAs)—have seen widespread adoption across the United States. And in the last three weeks, we’ve seen major moves on school choice in two other states, Tennessee and Texas.

Our policy staff has analyzed the bills passed in Tennessee and Texas, comparing them with the SC Senate’s S.62. Compare the legislation with the chart below:

The ESA bill is a work in progress, so a lot could change, but one thing you will surely notice is that South Carolina’s ESA program, as it currently stands, is nowhere near as expansive as Texas or Tennessee’s. The income limits in South Carolina are much lower, the number of scholarships available are half that of Tennessee’s, and the amount of each scholarship is far lower than Texas’.

We can be competitive with our fellow Southeastern states and expand our ESA program even further in the House. Last year, the House passed a universal ESA expansion bill by a vote of 69-32. With an expanded Republican supermajority in both the House and Senate, we hope to see expansive school choice embraced and passed into law, rapidly so that South Carolina’s ESTF families can return to certainty and we can secure school choice for generations to come.

UPDATE (2/26/2025): 

With the SC House’s passage of an amended version of S.62, our staff expanded the graphic above to include the House’s version of the bill.