The National Education Association has finally compiled and published nationwide education stats for the 2016–2017 school year, the first year of South Dakota’s extra half-penny sales tax to fund teacher pay. The headline result: Last school year, South Dakota’s average teacher pay jumped from $42,025 to $46,979. We jumped from last in the nation to 48th, ahead of Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Mississippi:
The U.S. average public school teacher salary for 2016–17 was 59,660. State average teacher salaries ranged from those in New York ($81,902), California ($79,128), and Massachusetts ($78,100) at the high end to Mississippi ($42,925), Oklahoma ($45,292) and West Virginia ($45,555) at the low end [National Education Association, “Rankings of the States 2017 and Estimates of School Statistics 2018,” April 2018, p. 5].
South Dakota’s teacher pay jumped from 71.8% to 78.7% of the national average.
Remember that the increase in our regressive sales tax was supposed to boost us to the new statutory target average salary of $48,500. Based on figures previously released by the South Dakota Department of Education, I previously reported that we closed only 54% of that gap. According to the new NEA data, the additional sales tax dollars filled 76.5% of that gap.
One could argue that the reason we didn’t close the rest of that gap was that we did not follow Governor Dennis Daugaard’s wishes in 2016 and get rid of 400 teachers. Instead of cutting teaching staff by 4.24%, our schools actually increased teaching staff by 1.78%, or 168 teachers, from 9,436 to 9,604. Had we pared down to Governor Daugaard’s target number of teachers at 9,036 and divided among them the same 2017 total salary expenses, we’d have reached an average teacher salary of $49,932, which would have beaten the gap to the $48,500 target by 22% and placed us 40th in the nation.
But the 1.78% increase in teaching staff coincided with a 1.21% increase in fall enrollment, meaning our statewide student/teacher ratio decreased from 13.88 to 13.80. Governor Daugaard’s desire to cut 400 teachers would have resulted in a statewide student/teacher ratio of 14.67.
But here’s a surprise: even though the state cranked up the sales tax to fund this plan, Pierre’s percentage of K-12 funding actually dropped from 30.4% to 30.3%. The average state share of K-12 funding nationwide is 45.6%. If the locals kept their dollar contribution toward teacher pay steady and if the state increased its funding to match the nationwide average state share—i.e., if South Dakota state government worked as hard as the average state to fund K-12 education—our average teacher pay in 2017 would have been $60,192.
Alternatively, if we had held to the 2017 salary of $46,979 but reformed K-12 funding to bring state government’s share to 45.6%, we could have relieved local school property tax burdens by 22%.
Teachers are doing their job. Our sales tax hike is paying them somewhat better for doing that job. The question remains: is state government doing its job to properly fund K-12 education?
Stay tuned: regional comparisons and the cost of living debate are coming up!
All day yesterday SDPR was reporting that SD teacher wages had risen to 41st place. Where are they getting their numbers?
41st? That’s a puzzler. Maybe they were talking about the Legislative Day on which the Legislature will pass a plan to raise teacher pay to the regional median or the national average.
48th—that’s the same rank as South Dakota’s overall average wage that I reported last August. Things are tough all over.
Things are tougher in some places than others. In general, things are much better for everyone when liberals run the show.
~ California’s state government is flush with cash. The state’s income tax revenue has continued to far exceed both projections and last year’s totals. In the current fiscal year taxes have totaled over $82 billion, nearly $4 billion ahead of projections and over $9 billion ahead of this point last year.
~ Home prices in the Bay Area have reached a new record – a median of $820,000 in March, up 9.3 percent from February and up 14.7 percent from a year ago. It’s no surprise that tech jobs are helping push up the prices; the median annual pay at Facebook is $240,430.