The 2016 sales tax for teacher pay deal was supposed to be a historic reform of K-12 school funding that would pull South Dakota teacher pay out of the chronic gutter and be a lasting feather in practical workhorse Governor Dennis Daugaard‘s and crafty deal-saving legislator Lee Schoenbeck‘s caps, despite the inferiority of their plan to more progressive Democratic proposals.
Alas, as has been apparent since shortly after its passage and more so since Kristi Noem succeeded Daugaard, the teacher pay plan has failed, leaving teachers (and the rest of us) paying higher regressive sales taxes (though legislators this year knocked that hike down from 0.5% to 0.2% on top of the 4% we were paying before 2016) out of their still bottom-of-the-barrel paychecks.
Education reporter Makenzie Huber post-mortemizes the 2016 plan and hears from former teacher and legislator Jacqueline Sly, who was instrumental in developing the plan, that the Legislature bears some blame for this failure:
Teacher salary projections made by the task force depended on 3% or higher annual increases in state aid.
“That got us off track right away,” Sly said. “That piece of it was really vital initially, because then we moved up on the ranking and then went back down and are at the bottom again.”
The Legislature tightened its belt after the 2016 sales tax increase in response to lower than expected sales tax revenue in 2017. That year saw a 0.3% increase in state aid to education. The following year was also a tight budget year, but an unexpected influx of revenue pushed the increase to 1%. Education funding received a 2.5% inflationary increase during the 2019 legislative session and 2% in 2020 [Makenzie Huber, “Why South Dakota’s Landmark Teacher Pay Law Failed,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2023.12.30].
Huber also mentions inflation, turnover, and pay raises for other staff as factors in the plan’s failure, but those factors are not unique to South Dakota. Minnesota, Iowa, and every other state of the Union have had to deal with rising costs and shallower labor pools. With all those things being equal, South Dakota’s 2016 reform should have given us a leg up in competing with other states amidst those macroeconomic factors. Instead, we’ve remained behind all of our neighbors in paying teachers what they are worth:
Rodeo Princess Noem in her budget address this month blamed school boards and administrators for not passing increased funding along to teachers. She is at least proposing a 4% increase on top of last year’s 7% increase for K-12 funding, but the only clear innovation for K-12 investment in her budget address is the extension of a federally funded program to improve literacy, which won’t pout any money in teachers’ pockets and will only pay the consultants who make their living telling teachers how to teach.
Good policymaking is like good teaching: you can’t show up for one lesson, put on a bang-up show, and then show movies and coast for the rest of the semester. Good teachers give it their all every day, every school year, to maintain their students’ learning. Legislators exerted themselves in 2016 on teacher pay, then seemingly washed their hands of the problem. 2024 legislators need to get back on that horse and come up with new initiatives to put South Dakota on track for the competitive teacher pay that we were promised eight years ago.
Cory wrote: “Legislators exerted themselves in 2016 on teacher pay, then seemingly washed their hands of the problem.”
Exactly. When state employee pay was raised in the 1980s, it took the better part of a decade of constant attention from the Governor and the Legislature. It was made a priority, and the Governor and the Legislature held themselves accountable each year to make progress toward the goal of making state employee salaries comparable to those in the private sector. That did not happen with teacher pay. Stupid ideas, like fireworks at Mt. Rushmore, unnecessary security and TV studios, seemed more important to the Governor.
Another boondoggle that detracts from raising teacher pay: the Governor’s Cup Rodeo. Stop this insane spending on nonsense and you would have the money to raise teacher salaries.
Proportional raises based on the SILT are the destiny. Bring back the law bill 1.2.3.4
That any teachers still work in South Dakota remains a mystery.
Once again class, today’s lesson is spelling and phonics
All right now, and stay in unison and enunciate
Spell South Dakota.
MISSISSIPPI
Class dismissed.
South Duhkota
Far South South Duhkota.
I just ernt a A+.
Teachers are compensated well in South Dakota – Democrats lie ALL FULL TIME TEACHERS get a lifetime Retirement, and Health Benefit. A for the part timers – they may want to try harder, and work their way into Full Time Positions, and stop being lazy leftist-instigators.
Individual School Districts manage the salaries based on what they can afford, and not afford, giving to the PEOPLE the ability to self govern their own political subdivisions, to which they elect their own governing boards, and appoint their Officials – President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary, etc.
47th in pay in the United Snakes of America.
https://wallethub.com/edu/best-and-worst-states-for-teachers/7159
Controlling education is one of Dominionism’s Seven Mountains.
Mr. Zitterich, few are as willing as grudznick is to point out that teachers are whiners especially when it comes to pay for the best of them and those lowest on the Seven Indisputable Levels of Teacher. However, are you sure that all full time teachers (“ALL FULL TIME TEACHERS”, is there such a thing?) get a lifetime health benefit?
I do like the cut of your trousers where you type “try ward, and work their way…”
Good on you, sir. Good on you. You might be the lowest of precinct people in South Dakota, but you are spot on with your blogging there, sir, and you kept it tight!
The EASY remedy is tying teacher pay to that for SD Highway Patrol troopers. Problem solved.
Districts do provide health insurance (not care) to employees; most often, that does not cover nearly all the costs of health care for an employee, much less a family. That cost comes directly from the pool from which salaries also must be paid. I don’t think any school district is bragging about the extravagance of their health care plan. The life time retirement kicks in only AFTER the career of underpayment; one is not the compensation for the other. Teachers do not have the ability to defer expenses until retirement — “when the big bucks start rolling in.” A pine box ought not be a worker’s only retirement option, Mr. Zitterich. Your continued spread of misinformation is almost a refreshing change to a non-sequitur screed on state rights historical fiction, so full marks there.
When I was at USD at the School of Education many, MANY years ago, the dean told our class that teachers in SD would at least make more than the average SD college graduate. Even that meager promise cannot be kept in SD.
Comments posted by Mike Z. continue to be quite far from reality. Teachers get no health insurance or other fringe benefits on retirements but they do get a retirement check based on the defined benefit retirement plan that covers all public employees who worked under SDRS. The change pushed through by republicans in the early 80’s to a defined contribution system (think IRA’s) did a real dis-service to most of the lower and middle class workers. The revised formula passed in 2016 would have worked slightly better if all schools would have been mandated to put the money saved when a higher paid teacher retired or left a district was replaced by a less well-compensated new instructor back into salaries. Formula was never going to work unless annual raises were not inflation + 1%.
Pay no attention to zits rambles. He is like his daddy, just talks to hear himself. Teachers are the lifeblood of our economy and should be paid for their craftsmanship. It takes an artist to create a mind.
Teachers are not well compensated in Northern Mississippi.
Public employees receive lower wages than their private sector counterparts. Even after accounting for
pensions and other benefits, on average, state and local workers receive 7% less than those in the private
sector.3
More specifically, teachers are paid 14.3% less than comparable private sector workers—and this
pay gap has increased in the last decade.4
Teacher pensions play an important role in offsetting the financial
impact of lower salaries
She is known out west as our Buckle Bunny.
Noem Nothing shut down another teacher revenue stream by not accepting funds for summer lunch program. Teachers can’t shake down kids who have no money, now can they? (snark)
Zitterich exemplifies the disdain for teachers, intellect, and public schools that pervades his party and explains why the 2016 plan was neglected and left to fail.
The vast majority of teachers are neither lazy, left, nor instigators. They’re working too hard grading papers and working second jobs to make ends meet to have much energy for political instigating. That’s another reason the 2016 plan languished and failed: teachers are too busy (and often too intimidated by political pressures) to wage persistent and effective lobbying and campaigns for candidates who consistently support public education.
Expect the Republican Legislature’s primary response to this critique and failure to be to propose extending the ban on collective bargaining to K-12 public schools. They’ve nixed union action at the universities and the vo-techs; soon they’ll turn their attention to fully defanging SDEA.
When you live in a fact-free world, you make statements like those of Mike Z. Everyone knows South Dakota is near the bottom in teacher compensation compared to other states’ teachers. To pretend otherwise is simply nonsense.
Mike Z’s lying comes from a place that I heard when I was running for the Rapid City school board in the 1990s. The thought of many South Dakotans goes along these lines: I don’t get paid very well at my stinking job, so why should teachers get paid well for their stinking job?. As a result, instead of worker solidarity, this South Dakota attitude encourages people to climb the ladder of success by kicking as many people down and throwing people off the ladder of success. If they succeed, it’s because they have proved to be good at kicking people down, not bringing them up.
You see this attitude all the time in mid-level managers and so-called “supervisors” in South Dakota. If they keep people from succeeding, they lessen competition for higher paying jobs. Of course, this hurts overall business success and business climate, but the people who kick people down seem to do well, and that’s all they care about.
Grudz’s attitude is similar. He likes having his bogus SILT plan to kick people down the ladder. He’s not really interested in making teaching better, because that takes money, and he’s not willing to pay taxes to actually improve education. These attitudes are why South Dakota is such a backwater , and why, once you figure it out, you get the hell out of state.
Thank you, Donald Pay.
The most commonly asked question I was asked when I moved to South Dakota was, “How do we keep our children from moving out of state?”. I suggest beginning with better funding for K-12 education and a free school lunch program. Let’s show children more love.
Donald Pay, I think you’re on point there. The reason that efforts to raise teacher pay fail is that most South Dakotans seem to think SD teachers are already well-paid, if not overpaid. Republican legislators might find it valuable to talk about increasing teacher pay but in general have little intetest in following through
If you wanted to make the same amount of money as a physician, you should have gone to medical school.
If you wanted to make the same amount of money as a lawyer, you should have gone to law school.
.
If you wanted to make the same amount of money as a retail store manager, you should have gone to Walmart.
Nobody ever said “if you want to make lots of money, become a teacher.” Nobody. That should have been your first clue. You made a career choice; now change careers or shut up.
Algebra, who are you addressing? Your argument doesn’t answer why teachers would not have the expectation that they should make a wage in-line with the average college graduate in SD: the people they do have the same “school” as your point seems to be. I’m also not sure how your assumption that underpaying teachers is OK; what good comes from that? Even the BRTF determined that pay is a factor for choosing the profession; low pay only excludes people. SD already has a shortage of teachers, so low pay only sends our schools and our students into a deeper hole.
Your point is well-taken that many if not most teachers could choose other career paths, career paths that are better compensated, but that doesn’t set up SD schools or students for success. SD schools and students should attract good professionals — not repel them. This is a worker shortage issue (shared by our State employees and long-term care professionals to name a few).