Democratic Plan Calls for $50K Teacher Pay, No Staff Reductions

South Dakota’s Democratic legislators have responded to the Governor’s plan to raise teacher pay with their own critique and counterproposal. The South Dakota Democrats’ Comprehensive Report on Education Reform, released yesterday alongside the Governor’s State of the State speech, says that the Governor’s endorsement of his Blue Ribbon K-12 panel’s recommendations does not go far enough to solve the teacher shortage.

The Democrats agree with many of the Blue Ribbon recommendations: new teacher-based funding formula, incentives for shared services, expanded online learning, caps on school reserves, mentoring and other support for teachers. The big disagreement rests on three points:

1. The Governor’s plan is about $17 million short of fully funding the increases in pay and benefits that the Blue Ribboneers’ funding ratios call for.
2. The Governor’s target teacher-student ratios, which would replace straight student numbers as the basis for the new K-12 funding formula, would increase the statewide student-teacher ratio from 13.9:1 to 14.5:1. To meet those target ratios and achieve the Governor’s salary goals, schools statewide would have to cut 400 teachers, 4.3% of the current K-12 teaching workforce.
3. The Governor’s target salary of $48,500 still leaves South Dakota at the bottom of the regional pile, paying teachers a lower average salary than every adjoining state.

The Democrats thus propose a plan with the following major details; I line them up side by side with Governor Daugaard’s proposal:

	Democrats	Daugaard
target teacher salary	$50,000	$48,500
salary rank in US	28th	37th
adjoining states with higher salaries	3	6
target teacher-student ratio for schools under 200	11.3	12.5
target teacher-student ratio for schools over 600	14.6	15.0
new funding for K-12	$122,500,000	$86,400,000*
new state sales tax rate	5.0%	4.5%
projected revenue	$220,000,000	$107,400,000*
use of extra revenue	exempt food from sales tax	cut property tax

The Democrats offer a plan that makes South Dakota’s average teaching salary the regional median instead of the regional minimum. $50,000 would be more than 96% of our neighboring states’ average pay. Their target teacher-student ratios allow us to reach that higher average pay without shedding teachers. And while both the Democrats and the Governor rely on the regressive sales tax instead of a bolder, more creative progressive fiscal solution, the Democrats at least ameliorate that regressivity by cutting the tax on food.

The South Dakota Education Association is applauding the Governor’s plan as “very bold.” They should be applauding the Democrats’ plan as even bolder.

But a reader who took my advice and reviewed my analysis of the Blue Ribbon plan before the Governor’s speech yesterday reminds me that neither plan is all that bold considering where we could have been if Governor Daugaard and his predecessor hadn’t beaten down K-12 education throughout this decade. By the math I did in November, if we had simply maintained 3% annual increases in the per-student allocation since 2010 (and the 3.36% annual rate at which we’ve increased per-resident spending indicates we could have managed that), we’d be able to pay teachers $50,505 right now under the Blue Ribbon funding formula.

So really, neither our Republican Governor nor our Democratic legislators are as bold as slow, steady investment in K-12 education would have been. Both the Blue Ribbon and Democratic proposals are “bold” only in the way that an alcoholic making it through his first day of sobriety in thirty years is “bold.” Either plan would simply get as back to the normal K-12 functionality that healthy states enjoy.

*Update 12:26 CST: I have updated these revenue figures based on information reported by Kealey Bultena on SDPB Dakota Midday today. The Governor’s plan calls for $40 million in property tax relief, leaving $67 million from the additional sales tax for K-12 education. The Governor gets another $19 million for teachers salaries by moving pension levies into the general fund.