Legislature's New Year's Promise: You're Fired!

This public school teacher wakes up on the last day of 2006 to find the legislature may be eliminating his job. Keloland.com reports that the 2007 South Dakota Legislature will consider mandating consolidation for school districts with fewer than 200 students.

At my place of employment, the Montrose School District, where enrollment sits too precariously close to 200, we've been expecting this move for some time. The governor has hinted in this direction previously. It doesn't surprise me that the state has waited until after Governor Rounds's re-election to make this move. (Hmmm, I wonder what other interesting and controversial legislation our governor might pursue now that he doesn't have to face his small-town constituents at the polls again.)

We have to keep in mind that this legislation can only be justified on fiscal, not educational grounds. Senate Republican Leader Dave Knudson from Sioux Falls has stated (in the Sioux Falls newspaper that advertises smut) that it's hard to get a quality education in schools that small. If that's the case, then how does Senator Knudson explain Montrose producing two SDSU Briggs Scholars (SDSU's most prestigious academic award to incoming freshmen) in the past two years, or Montrose making its annual yearly progress goals under No Child Left Behind?

The State Aid Study Task Force final report from this fall offers a little more perspective. Small schools* outperform larger districts on the state's own NCLB assessments. The report notes, "The differences in performance are more pronounced at the elementary level, less so at the middle grades, and disappear at the high school level." The report does show a full one-point advantage for large-school students on the ACT over their small-school counterparts, a reflection of the advantages large schools have in offering more college-prep courses in addition to the required curriculum. However, the report also shows that in the last two years, small-school students have tied or bettered their medium-school counterparts on the ACT. The task force report itself points out that since consolidation will turn small schools into medium schools, not large schools, we should weigh the educational impacts of consolidation by comparing achievement results of small and medium schools. When we focus our attention on that data, we find no educational reason to mash small schools into fewer, larger schools.

So don't let your legislators fool you: they aren't acting in the educational interest of our children. School consolidation isn't about education; it's about money. Legislators like Senator Knudson aren't asking whether kids learn better in small schools (or they are ignoring their own data, which seems to suggest that students, especially the younger ones, enjoy significant benefits from education in smaller districts). The legislators pushing consolidation are asking just how much we are willing to spend on education... and the answer seems to be, "Not enough to keep small schools -- and small communities -- alive."

Please note that while my job hangs in the balance -- even if my teaching and coaching position would survive consolidation, I'm not terribly interested in teaching in a larger school district, and I certainly don't want to have to commute further to a consolidated school in Canistota or Salem -- I am open to the fiscal debate on school consolidation. I would argue that in a state where people can afford RVs, half-million dollar lake homes, and other proliferating luxuries, the money exists to expand funding for all of our schools and bring teacher pay up from the national cellar. However, the Legislature may be able to produce evidence that the state cannot justify drawing more tax dollars out of the economy to prop up the existing statewide school district structure, which already gives extra funding per student to the small schools. Even with that extra assistance, small schools still shortchange their teachers, who earn an average of $1500 less per year than their medium-school counterparts and $7000 less than their large-school counterparts. I am open to the argument that small schools, while educationally effective, are not sufficiently efficient for state fiscal purposes.

The Legislature should definitely have an open and studious debate about the best way to fulfill its State-Constitutional duty to provide a free and uniform education to all of its children. However, let's be honest in that debate. The evidence shows that small schools educate their students just as well as, if not better than, the medium-size schools into which consolidation would transform them. The real debate is about whether the legislators and taxpayers of this state are willing to pay for the good education those small schools produce.

*Some perspective for my friends from the big city: on South Dakota's very human scale, "small" means up to 200 students in the district. "Medium" means 201-600. "Large" means a school district with more than 600 students. [back to text]