The Education Oversight Committee reported to the House Education and Public Works Committee that 85.4% of students in the class of 2024 graduated on time, but committee members pressed officials on whether those diplomas reflect college- or career-ready skills.

"This is just gonna give you an idea of what we do," Dana Yao, executive director of the Education Oversight Committee, said during a presentation on the agency's role, its data dashboard and recent evaluations. Yao told the committee the EOC conducts annual evaluations of state-funded programs and maintains a public data dashboard at dashboardsc.sc.gov.

The committee's work includes approving content standards and statewide assessments used in accountability; producing the statewide school report cards (issued annually by Oct. 15, as legislatively required); and evaluating EIA-funded programs including the full-day 4K initiative and the Educational Credit for Exceptional Needs program. Yao said past EOC evaluations show "that program does work for 4 year olds." The EOC also reported an evaluation of rural recruitment incentives, which the transcript identifies as $7,600,000 in EIA funding available to districts.

Why it matters: Committee members said the graduation rate alone does not show whether graduates leave high school with a credential of value. Representative Bridal asked whether only about 30% of the graduating cohort was "college and career ready," and members debated differing dashboard figures that they read as measuring readiness in different ways.

At the hearing, Yao described the EOC's data visualizations, including a K-12 dashboard that juxtaposes per-school spending with performance, and a pre-K dashboard and a postsecondary persistence dashboard that uses National Student Clearinghouse data. She also pointed to chronic absenteeism as a major concern: "In 22-23, 23 percent of students were actually chronically absent meaning they had missed about 10% of the school year," she said, and the committee is collecting parental and student focus-group feedback on causes.

Lawmakers followed with questions about retention, remediation and teacher turnover in rural districts. Yao said the EOC evaluated a menu of roughly 15 rural recruitment incentives (housing, mentoring, recruitment fairs, international teacher recruitment and other items) and was assessing their return on investment; she did not provide a specific statewide turnover rate but agreed to follow up with numbers for rural retention.

The EOC indicated it has a small staff: Yao said the agency has eight full-time equivalent staff. She encouraged committee members to use the public dashboard and to nominate members for the cyclical review of the accountability system scheduled this year.

Committee members requested copies of the slides and the EOC said it would provide them. Several members asked to meet with the EOC subcommittee on K-12 issues to discuss readiness metrics, retention and interventions.

The committee did not vote on any policy during the presentation; the EOC offered to return to the committee for follow-ups and provided contact information for additional data requests.

A copy of the EOC's materials and the dashboard are available from the agency; committee members were told the agency will share the slides and forthcoming focus-group results.