Last updated on 2024-01-15
While Republican Majority Leader Will Mortenson (R-24/Fort Pierre) is trying to expand the Capitol Complex Commission, the Department of Education is making some room for his government bloat… and weakening the power of practicing educators to oversee their professional affairs.
In House Bill 1021, the Department of Education, led by anti-teacher former Mitchell superintendent Joe Graves, seeks to merge the Professional Teachers Practices and Standards Commission and the Professional Administrators Practices and Standards Commission into a single ethics body called the Professional Educators Practices and Standards Commission.
The teachers ethics commission consists of six employed full-time teachers, none of whom may be administrators, and one parent, neither a teacher nor school board member, who has a child in K-12 school. The administrators ethics commission has seven members as well: five full-time admins (two principals, two superintendents, and one other, like a business manager), one school board member, and one non-admin/non-school-board parent of a K-12 student. The teachers commission met ten times this year. So did the administrators panel.
HB 1021 proposes to merge these two busy bodies into one seven-person panel. (In the big-government picture, that would open up the two additional spots Will wants for the Capitol Commission and leave five more openings for expanding other government bodies! Whee!) HB 1021 also leaves only one body instead of two that can employ and executive secretary and other staff (although right now, both panels employ DOE’s Ferne Haddock as their executive secretary and engage the same well-connected Pierre lawyers as commission counsels, so I’m not sure HB 1021 would have the state writing fewer checks on the staffing side). But by dropping the number of teachers and administrators involved to three each, this merger unavoidably reduces the representation of both teachers and administrators in overseeing questions of profession ethics within their respective fields.
But Graves doesn’t just reduce the numbers. HB 1021 lowers the standards for serving on the merged ethics commission. Instead of teachers and administrators working full-time in the schools, Secretary Graves would have us settle for people holding teaching or administrating certificates. Under HB 1021, the majority deciding the fate of teachers and administrators for ethical violations would not necessarily be practicing educators who are dealing daily with the obligations and challenges of working in the schools and applying in their own work the professional standards that they are charged on these ethics panels with enforcing for their colleagues across the state.
That sounds like a recipe for reducing the professional authority of and respect for teachers and administrators and shifting ethics decisions from practicing professionals to cronies of Joe and Kristi.
Even parents could end up shorted by HB 1021. HB 1021 merges the seventh positions into one slot for either a school board member or a parent. Under HB 1021, it is thus possible that decisions on allegations of teacher and administrator misconduct would not include a single person with a child in our K-12 schools.
Teaching and administrating are separate professions. They cooperate in educating our children, but they do very different jobs and often act in adversarial tensions that warrant separate treatment of allegations of ethical violations in each field by professionals in each field who are most familiar with those disparate duties and challenges. HB 1021 is bad government, removing from each of those professions the autonomy they deserve to oversee and apply the standards of their professions the way other professions (medicine, law, cosme-freaking-tology) do.
In SD, it requires 1,500 training hours to receive a cosme-freaking-tology certificate. It requires 520 training hours to successfully obtain a basic officer certification, according to the AG’s website.
Teachers need a 4 year bachelor’s degree and must complete a teacher prep course, as well as pass a three-credit hour course in SD Indian Studies.
To become an administrator, SD requires a master’s degree and 15 graduate semester hours of state approved administrative courses.
Legislators must be qualified voters in their legislative districts, at least twenty-one years old, citizens, and residents of the state for two years immediately preceding election.
Sdsos.gov
Hey grudz – take note: This proposal is (in terms of Organizational Design Principals) adding DEPTH to this state function, while reducing BREADTH. Just sayin’ if you wannna look for where the ideological architecture of the “deep state” comes from, look no further to “conservatism”.
Great hair is vital.
There are way, way too many crony boards in South Dakota. They serve mainly to bolster the egos of campaign donors, which keeps the money flowing. Don’t ruin education by constructing another board of cronies from two working boards who seem to be doing the job.
Not whatcha know but who ya know. Book.licks who follow orders are not respected by those who they work against nor by those whose boots they lick. Not sure how they can get up and look themselves in the mirror every morning.
This is the panel that monitors the Seven Indisputable Levels of Teacher. We must ensure that any changes to the panel retain a consistent view of the SILT, so that when it is eventually used to give good teachers bigger raises, it is only the good ones and above that get that money. It is possible, if these fellows are being nefarious, they want to squeeze the SILT lower so there will be fewer teachers “above average” and save the schools some big bucks to repurposed for the administrators.
It’s bad enough that there are A LOT of “homeschool” kids that are actually “unschooled” kids in South Dakota, due to the lack of regulation/academic rigor.
They can’t read, they can’t comprehend, they can’t function in society, let alone join the workforce.
But go ahead, Joe, keep undermining educators in South Dakota.
Allowing educators to educate is too simple for KN’s nanny goats she keeps hiring. If Dr. Graves wants to blow money, ask teachers for input. They might be able to use a permanent reading instructor for early intervention with readers who struggle. Like, no doy.
Teachers are always assessing where their young readers are and areas needing work. Individual students require individual mixes of phonics, sight word memorization, fluency/movement/rhythm (CK points out the prevalence of readers with dyslexia, and teachers are able to use occupational therapy strategies in this area, as well as readers with ADD benefitting from these tactics), context clues, and apprenticeship/scaffolding. The tools teachers use to turn out proficient readers are vast and early intervention is imperative.
If you really want to help, ask educators to write a wish list and then attempt to cross off the items that are doable. Teachers don’t need more Hillsdale-esque programs shoved down their gullets.
I look forward to hearing in committee why the DOE wants to weaken educators’ ability to police their own professional practices, the way the state allows other professions to function. Do the teachers and administrators want this consolidation?
Not so sure . . . their is one board for the discipline of judges, justices, and lawyers — the state bar. Certainly there can and ought be one board for the integrity of teachers and administrators. That board ought comprise only active teachers and administrators and not extend beyond 7, with a teacher majority.
John, the state bar is not a government entity. The state is proposing taking the government’s control of the ethics of education away from educators — not giving it to educators sans government control like the bar. The state’s solution (to a non-problem) is the worst of both worlds.
Joe Graves has been Sec. of Education for almost a year now. Has there been any positive thing he has done for teachers in that year?
O: if it looks like and quacks like a state government entity it is a state government entity. See SD Chapter 16-17, The State Bar. And see, SDCL 16-19-24, Disciplinary Board of the State Bar, etc., et al.
It’s a give away that their web site features the state seal.
Mr. O, did not Dr. Joe Graves get a big pile of money for schools last year? Now, stuck in the craw of some is that the schools didn’t give the teachers their fair share. This is why the fatcat administrators are going to keep losing control, or their boards will get consolidated by the legislatures. 66 counties and hundreds of school districts in South Dakota? No, we need far fewer. And some way to make sure the teachers get their due up to the level that Dr. Joe Graves wanted them to.
My dear Grudznick, you may have to forgive me as my mind gives with age; I remember the Governor proposing a budget for education; I remember legislators making funding a part of the budget; I do not remember the Secretary of Education in that process — much less as an advocate for teachers. Can you point me to that testimony?
Well, my dear Mr. O, you know as well as I that it’s inconceivable Dr. Joe Graves was not hounding the Governor daily, leading the charge behind closed doors in the secret meetings, pounding on the tables with his own shoe, demanding that the Governor’s generously proposed budget was not enough, and ramrodding the legislatures into adding even more money for the teachers.
In fact, while soft-spoken and unassuming, at this here blue link you will find this quote:
https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/education/2023/01/09/south-dakota-deapartment-education-joe-graves-social-studies-standards-teacher-pay/69782732007/
Then, I’m told, he glared hard at the reporter, a steely glare, and growled menacingly “and I’ll be damned if I’ll be happy with that, so I will turn over every nickel until we find the ones with pennies hidden under them, and those pennies are only for the teachers on the higher level of the SILT.”
I do have a question about the relationship between SILT and compensation, Mr Grudznick, does higher salary work as a pull factor for high SILT-level teachers? Are our higher paying neighbors drawing the highest talent teachers from the SILT pool with their higher pay? Is that how compensation and quality interact? Is that the analysis Mr. Secretary Graves is sharing with Mrs. Governor Noem during what I can only assume are their regular meetings on the status of education in this fine state?
Although I’m glad he was pleased with the 5% from the Governor’s budget from last year, I’m more glad that our legislative friends did not settle for that and did better than Gov. Noem’s budgeted amount to the tune of 7% — if memory serves correctly. Again, age vexes details . . .