Here is some Mitchell Daily Republic's coverage on Monday's visit to Mitchell of South Dakota GOvernor Dennis Daugaard:
Gov. Dennis Daugaard said Monday in Mitchell that the state must focus on teacher quality, student performance and better training opportunities for both.
That will mean changing how teachers are evaluated, Daugaard said, and eventually lead to the end of tenure for South Dakota teachers.
During the governor’s State of the State speech last week in Pierre, he said he hopes to give students better opportunities through training and attracting better teachers to the state. He envisions a three-year implementation of the program.
Daugaard spoke Monday morning at the Highland Conference Center in Mitchell to a crowd of about 50 and later sat down with The Daily Republic editorial board to discuss his education goals, as well as other issues.
Daugaard compared education in 1971 to 2011. He said the number of K-12 students in South Dakota has dropped by 49,377, but the state is spending more per student.
In 1969, the state spent about $4,000 per student in today’s dollars, he said. Forty years later, the state was spending nearly $9,000 per student.
“It’s perfectly reasonable to assign more human resources or more dollar resources to any job,” he said, but he added that the extra investment should produce results.
The governor’s staff also compared state ACT scores from the last 40 years and found the scores have remained flat from 1985 to the present.
“We should not measure our schools based on the money we’re putting in or how many people are in the school,” he said. “We should measure our schools by what our students are doing.”
Daugaard said he cannot justify putting more money into what he termed the current ineffective educational system in South Dakota.
Then he shows his plan to throw tons more money into the monopoly:
The common set of core standards will be based on problem-solving and a higher order of thinking, he said. The budget will call for $8 million to train teachers on the common core standards.
The accountability system will test students at the beginning, middle and end of the year. This will enable teachers to understand how students have grown through the year.
The teacher evaluation system will include administrators looking at growth in test scores and classroom evaluation.
Daugaard said the new education plan will be implemented over the next three years, so by the 2014-15 academic year, teachers performing in the top 20 percent in each district will receive $5,000 bonuses.
“They could be eligible to earn it each year,” he said.
South Dakota also needs to train teachers to work in math and science, he said.
Last year, 179 elementary education teachers were trained in the state while two science teachers were trained.
“We need to incent them to choose high school science and math,” Daugaard said.
Starting in the 2013-14 academic year under Daugaard’s plan, math and science teachers in South Dakota will automatically receive a $3,500 bonus each year they stay in the field. Those teachers are also eligible for the $5,000 bonus.
Because this new system is based on evaluation, Daugaard said the tenure system must disappear.
Current teachers who have reached tenure status will keep it, but new teachers entering the field will never see tenure, he said, if the Legislature passes the proposal.
He said it’s an outdated concept that is difficult to defend.
“I don’t think they even know why they have it, other than it’s institutionalized,” Daugaard said.
Daugaard was accompanied by South Dakota Education Secretary Melody Schopp and Tony Venhuizen, his director of policy and communications, and he said all three will work to pass the package through the Legislature.
This is all smoke and mirrors. Governor Daugaard is implementing the National Governor Association's Common Core Standards. The bonus plan is a bone thrown out to get teacher support. Tenure is removed to get rid of the teachers who do not go along with the international based Common Core Standards. Expect costs per students to continue to rise and mediocrity to continue. As I said before, this is a world-wide plan to make all of us the same and under the control of the monoply capitalists.
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