Our July/August issue includes a story by John Andrews on Joseph Ward. Ward came to Yankton in the late 1860s to spread congregationalism, but his legacy in South Dakota extends far beyond the church. Andrews collected several photos from the Yankton College archives for the feature. Here are some that we couldn’t fit into the magazine.
Twas’ the night before Christmas when all through the land
Every creature was stirring o’er a scholarship plan;
South Dakota needs workers, the shop bosses wail,
Without welders and wrenchers, gross state product will fail!
Liberal arts don’t make jobs, the Governor scoffs,
Kids lark off to college to become philosophes,
Shun nuts, bolts, and wires for bookish vocations,
Then chase luck and lucre in other locations.
So Denny the banker gives 25 Mill;
The Governor’s got tax dollars; match it he will!
The vo-techs will let kids take classes for free,
If they promise to work here for years summing three;
A noble plan, really, foresightful and true,
Generous and practical–I’d take it, wouldn’t you?
Kids get free schooling in practical trades,
Bosses get workers; the Dennys, accolades.
But imagine the student who says,”Just a min–
Let’s think this plan through: is this plan win-win-win?”
A two-year degree is nothing but nice,
But it may put your earning potential on ice.
Nationwide stats show kids who do college
Will squeeze higher pay from their post-high-school knowledge.
Grads from the U have an edge getting jobs
Over grads trained to wire and fiddle with knobs.
But if college ain’t fer ya, then what would you say
To nine K, or twelve K, or near 20 K?
Vo-tech beats high school anywhere, any day
Get it free, stay and work–in S.D., will it pay?
Crunch lots of numbers, and surely you’ll find
Some states and some jobs where three years of grind
Will earn you more pay than taking the deal
And staying and cutting our lumber and steel.
Wyoming pays off, Nebraska does not;
Radiologists find Minnesota is hot.
Some say cost of living saves Dakotans a bunch,
But data show prices here are no free lunch.
Sioux Falls and the Cities cost about the same:
Des Moines and Lincoln win the price game.
Your scholarship calc will take lots of math
To dictate which state’s the more profitable path.
But policy, sweet policy! What say Smith and Marx
On where to apply our few fiscal sparks?
Is the state’s proper role to train a job corps
Or raise Platos for voting and Spartans for war?
Less esoteric, will the scholarship work?
Will free school be enough of a perk
To o’erwhelm the forces that currently drain
The work pool the Governor aims to retain?
Fifty mill buys us three hundred a year
Who vouch the mere start of a fledgling career,
Work three years for less than experienced hands,
Then still maybe leave for more fruitful lands
Where Biz has a plan that works for all ages:
To draw better workers, pay better wages!
South Dakota won’t challenge its businesses hard;
We’ll make vo-tech free and play Sanford’s card.
Cheap school is good for an education promoter,
But you need higher pay to Build South Dakota.
Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a conservative perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard on this site.
Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.
So I’m sitting on the curb in Mission and a gal named for an Italian artist walks up and talks to me about eradicating institutional racism in South Dakota.
These things happen. Pull up a seat with us on the curb.
Morandi Hurst grew up in Rapid City. She majored in history at Vassar. She missed the Plains and wanted to benefit her home state and her community, so after graduating in 2010, she came home. But since she wasn’t into welding, jobs were scarce. With regret but needing to pay the bills, she got ready to leave for a job in L.A.
But a day before decamping, she got a call from a friend working for Teach for America at Spring Creek Elementary, by the Little White River on the Rosebud Reservation. Spring Creek needed a teacher’s aide (“paraprofessional,” we write impressively on rÈsumÈs).”Wanna come?” her friend asked.
Hurst saddled up, headed east and fell in love. Spring Creek, she says, is the most beautiful place in the world (and this from a gal who grew up in the Black Hills). Spring Creek kids and parents, she found, are delightful. She worked alongside Kate Haswell in a mixed grade 1–8 classroom and decided she wanted to be a teacher.
But adding teaching certification to her degree would take a year and cost about $10,000, and lovely as they are, the trees of the Little White River canyon grow neither money nor time.
Fortunately, Hurst found a quicker, cheaper option. The friend who recruited her was one of three Teach for America teachers at Spring Creek. All three inspired Hurst to join TFA, which would pay for her certification and put her in a classroom right away. It wasn’t easy: Hurst had to attend a five-week boot camp in Phoenix teaching children in summer school (talk about learning on the fly) and commit to cramming all the contact hours required for teaching certification around full-time work during the school year, but she did it.
Spring Creek didn’t have an opening during her first year in TFA. She thus taught and obtained her certification at Littleburg Elementary (still in the heavily Native American Todd County district), then transferred to Spring Creek for her second year in TFA.
TFA recruits serve two years. But Hurst, like a third of TFA’s alumni since 1990, remains in the classroom. She is starting her third year as a teacher at Spring Creek Elementary, this time teaching grade 6–8 reading and math. And like every proud teacher, she rattles her Spring Creek students’ accomplishments: four students on full scholarships to Phillips Exeter Academy summer school; an eighth grader studying earth science through the University of California-Irvine on full scholarship; another eighth grader winning a national poetry award; three Spring Creekers winning the statewide science fair; half the students enrolling in Saturday enrichment classes taught by teachers volunteering their time…. All of those accomplishments and more, Hurst says, belie the bad reputation that too many South Dakotans give to Indian students and schools.
Hurst loves her work and her school. But why do it here, in South Dakota? She says she believes we all should serve our home, and her passion is here.
And then, as we sit on the curb in Mission, she says we need to fight this fight.
“What fight?” I ask.
“The fight for educational equity for Native American students,” Hurst says. That means giving her Spring Creek kids the same opportunities as white kids. That means seeing Indian kids graduate at the same rate as white kids. That means making institutional racism no more.
“And how do you erase institutional racism in your classroom?” I ask.
“I don’t,” Hurst says.”I live through my students, help them learn, and help them build a strong sense of self and community so they can fight that fight themselves.”
So that’s how we eradicate institutional racism. Funny the things we learn on the curb in Mission.
Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a conservative perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard on this site.
Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.
I have made this argument before. Sandy-eared ostriches in the Legislature require that I make it again, and again….
The South Dakota Legislature this week considered a resolution–not a practical, policy-changing bill, mind you, just a resolution–that acknowledges a shortage of teachers in South Dakota due in part to low teacher pay. HCR 1002 passed the House over some objection from Republicans with poor reading comprehension. No Senators spoke against the resolution, but the Senate killed it Tuesday 15‚Ä’19.
Evidently some problems are too brutal for a majority of Senators to talk about, let alone solve.
The teacher shortage resolution didn’t explicitly call for raising teacher pay, but it should have. Recent data show South Dakota is last, last, last in teacher pay, stunningly last, 30 percent below the national average, 10 percent below 48th-ranked Oklahoma, and six percent below 49th-ranked Mississippi. According to 2013 Quarter 3 data, South Dakota’s cost of living is only 0.5 percent below the national average.
HCR 1002 mentioned the drop in young people choosing to work in education in South Dakota. Who can blame them? Our perennially low teacher wages make it harder for South Dakota graduates to deal with another ongoing problem, our high rates of student debt. A new report confirms reports from 2010, 2011, and 2012: South Dakota college graduates lead the nation in student debt, with 78 percent of our graduates carrying student loans. Their average debt is “only” $25,121, a middling amount compared to other states. But for those hardy young souls who go into teaching, why would they pass up the chance to move one state in any direction and pay off their student loans much faster with an average $8,000 to $18,000 pay hike?
Why won’t we invest? Why have we let ourselves be this cheap for this long?
Why don’t we rouse a campaign to erase our shameful status of stiffing our teachers? Let’s see teachers, parents and students marching down the streets arm in arm, crying “Forty-Ninth! Forty-Ninth!” Let’s see candidates for governor and legislature vow, “We’re not shooting for the moon, just Mississippi!” Pegging a minimum wage for 9,200-some South Dakota teachers to Mississippi’s next-worst in the nation would take $22.4 million a year. It would take $42.1 million to beat Oklahoma. (Get out the Saturn V to reach Minnesota: we’d need $154.4 million, a 39 percent increase in Governor Dennis Daugaard’s proposed state aid to K-12 for FY2015.)
Money doesn’t grow on corn stalks. But South Dakota found a million dollars to hand to a floundering beef plant, even as the state faced a crushing $127-million deficit. This year the Governor is finding $30 million to pour into his economic development fund sooner than planned.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. The debate over HCR 1002 shows that South Dakota lacks the will to even talk about being better than worst in paying teachers what they are worth.
Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard on this site.
Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.
A Canadian friend visited my family at Lake Herman this weekend. Wanting to pack as much South Dakota into one weekend as we could, we toured Madison, spent one afternoon at the Laura Ingalls Wilder homestead in De Smet, and spent another afternoon at the Sioux Empire Fair. (I love playing tour guide.)
At the fair, we found the South Dakota Tea Party booth. My Canadian friend picked up a flyer titled “Common Core Standards” and skimmed through the propaganda branding this education reform a federal power grab, United Nations indoctrination, and Soviet-style teaching.
Then she found this quote:
Common Core is just the latest flavor of business and government busybodies getting in the way of teachers teaching and students learning.
The source of that quote?
Cory Allen Heidelberger, Veteran South Dakota Teacher
“Cory!” my Canadian friend exclaimed, mirthfully aghast. “You’re on a Tea Party flyer!”
Yup, I am. I know South Dakota Tea Partiers. On practical policy, they are mostly wrong. Their John Birch paranoia about the United Nations is as irrelevant to South Dakota education as it is to environmental policy and economic development.
But on Common Core, I’m lined up trepidatiously with my Tea Party friends (“Friends?!” frets my Canadian friend). Common Core is fuss and feathers that won’t improve South Dakota’s schools.
Common Core won’t make good teachers better. Common Core simply writes down what good teachers already know and do. After spending an in-service day talking about Common Core standards and aligning them with existing lessons (been there!), a good teacher won’t be any better prepared to teach your kids the next day or write engaging curriculum for next year.
Common Core won’t make bad teachers better. Suppose you have a teacher who knows how to teach but is lacking on what to teach. Figuring out what to teach requires a teacher to study more than will ever fit into one school year, then critically evaluate what to teach and what to skip. That hard decision-making process makes a more thoughtful professional. Common Core standards short-circuit that professionalizing process and leave novice teachers on cognitive crutches.
Common Core wastes resources and distracts teachers from helping kids learn. Common Core may also give Wellstone Democrats and Tea Party conservatives a chance to find common cause and cooperate to improve our public schools… assuming, of course, that Tea Partiers want to improve our public schools.
My Canadian friend found the rest of literature in the Tea Party booth alarming. Her alarm makes me wonder if we hopeful liberals can collaborate with such fearful conservatives.
But overall, my Canadian friend enjoyed her tour of South Dakota, especially of that funny twist in the road that led to my name on a Tea Party flyer.
Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.
Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.
I didn’t attend preschool. Neither did my daughter. But I see why South Dakota needs preschool… and I see how we are shooting ourselves in the foot at the state and national level by not investing in preschool.
An article by Stanford professor Sean F. Reardon says that family income now explains more of the differences in student achievement than race. Our public schools are helping poor kids improve their academic performance, but rich kids are boosting their test scores even more, thanks to their parents’ ability to invest more resources in their learning. A working family may be able to save up for piano lessons or dance lessons; a rich family can afford both, plus a good summer camp and a private writing tutor.
That education gap comes from the income gap, and as income inequality increases (it’s not as bad in South Dakota as nationwide, but it’s happening), ever-richer families can give their rich children ever more opportunities that give them an ever-greater edge when they grow up to compete for the spots in colleges and companies. The rich thus stay rich, and the poor stay poor. That’s not the American dream of equal opportunity for all.
Reardon says restoring that equal opportunity starts with investing in good childcare and preschool programs that poor and middle-class families can afford. South Dakota is already behind that curve: we are one of eleven states that do not fund preschool, thanks in part to some strange conservative recalcitrance that seems to fear public preschool will give those darn public school teachers a chance to indoctrinate kids into godless Communism earlier.
The states that do fund preschool dropped that investment half a billion dollars during the last school year. Given the widespread and well-attested benefits of preschool, these budget cuts seem short-sighted.
The Obama Administration wants to spend more on preschool, which will be nice if the plan can get through Congress. But Congress and the President have, via sequester (the game of budget chicken where everyone loses), cut Head Start 5%. Here in South Dakota, 200 children will lose those preschool services. Deadwood loses Head Start completely; I hear from friends that Lennox and Worthing will also have to shut down their Head Start programs. Nationwide, the sequester will throw 70,000 kids out of Head Start.
South Dakota Congresswoman Kristi Noem rushed with her colleagues to undo the sequester cuts that threatened to delay their flights to and from Washington. Perhaps they can find similar political will to undo the preschool cuts that threaten our kids’ equal opportunity and social mobility.
Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.
Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and is currently teaching French at Spearfish High School. A longtime country dweller, Cory is enjoying “urban” living with his family in Spearfish.
Thank goodness for SDSU and March Madness. South Dakota needs something to clear from the national headlines the embarrassment wrought on our state by our own Legislature.
We made the New York Times, CNN, the Huffington Post, Fox News, the BBC, and Emergency Management with House Bill 1087, the new school gunslinger law. (The bill text specifies that the newly authorized gunslingers be called school “sentinels”; I refuse on principle to this Marvel-Comics marketing-speak and the fantasy-hero complex that lies behind this nomenclature.) To observers around the country, we have declared, “We’re so afraid we can’t even hear our educational experts telling us almost unanimously that they don’t want guns in our classrooms.”
For the record, not one professional educator testified in favor of the school gunslinger bill. Nine superintendents of districts in and around the Sioux Falls metro said publicly at a Chamber forum last week that they don’t anticipate their school districts seeing a big need for HB 1087 in their districts. Supt. Don Kirkegaard told the NY Times that he doesn’t see any evidence that even the isolated schools in his sprawling Meade County School District would be safer with armed teachers.
Even if no school in the state takes advantage of this unwise policy, the Wild West gun ethos that plays so well in our legislators’ minds undoes South Dakota’s image elsewhere:
… it’s easy to imagine a situation in which a heroic teacher with a gun takes a crazed gunman down, action-movie style, because we’ve seen that movie many times. But in the nonfictional world, where real schoolchildren live, it’s much easier to envision amateur shooters spraying bullets as wildly and ineffectively as, say, New York City police officers, and getting themselves and others killed.
We are not in Deadwood anymore, and who would want to be? [Lawrence Downes, “Welcome to Deadwood,” New York Times: Taking Note, 2013.03.08]
Who would want to be in Deadwood? It’s hard to counterprogram lines like that (“Come to Deadwood–no, really, you won’t get shot!”)… but we bring it on ourselves. As long as we elect legislators who think that schools need more guns, that women can’t think on weekends, and that economic development incentives boost wages and workforce (not to mention the Legislature’s classic headline-making belief that global warming comes from astrological forces), South Dakota Tourism will struggle to keep our brand polished.
Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.
Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and is currently teaching French at Spearfish High School. A longtime country dweller, Cory is enjoying “urban” living with his family in Spearfish.
Most years, the beginning of March brings me to the South Dakota State Debate Tournament. Last weekend, I had the pleasure of judging that august event in Yankton. Short of snuggling with my beloved, I am hard-pressed to think of a better way to spend a winter weekend than listening to some of the sharpest kids in the state debate transportation policy, the goals of the criminal justice system and the dangers of a rising China.
These young debaters conduct themselves with exemplary class and civility. While their schoolmates can barely stand to tuck in their shirts, the debaters argue and hustle and relax between rounds in neckties and dress shoes as comfortably as Mad Men. As they debate, I never hear them resort to the personal or ideological attacks that I see adults lob daily in our blogospheric conversations. Our high school debaters respect their opponents and focus their vigorous arguments on evidence and logic (with, I will grant, the occasional forays into wild suggestions that increased spending on highways will lead to nuclear war).
At State Debate and tournaments throughout the speech season, our kids often do more work than they will do in an entire semester of speech class. When I teach speech, I usually have students do five or six big speeches in a semester. Debaters may make ten or twelve speeches in one tournament. Debaters make these speeches in front of judges from other towns. After the majority of their speeches, debaters take fire from competitors determined to prove them wrong. After every tournament (except State, of course), the debaters read their ballots, review their notes, do more research and load up for another weekend of verbal battle.
South Dakota’s high school speechmakers develop a vital academic skill that I hear degraded all too often in school. We teachers often say, “There’s no one right way to teach.” But we often hear fellow professionals denigrate teaching by lecture as the wrong way to teach. “I don’t want to just stand here and lecture,” say too many educators. I get the impression lecture gets a bad rap from bad lecturers who never took debate and learned to give a good speech.
One of the best teachers I ever had was Dr. Rodney Bell, history professor at SDSU. I don’t know if he did high school debate, but he could give a heck of a speech. He came to class armed with a briefcase full of well-worn notes. He held forth all class period on the ancient Greeks, the stirrup, or the Roaring Twenties. He spoke as if history mattered. If he had ever stopped after ten minutes and said, “But enough from me; how about you students pair and share your feelings about Sparta?” I’d have said, “No, sir! Please keep talking!”
More teachers should teach like Dr. Bell did. More students should take debate to learn how to give good speeches. Every student should learn the vital skills you can see on display each year at the State Debate Tournament.
Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.
Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and is currently teaching French at Spearfish High School. A longtime country dweller, Cory is enjoying “urban” living with his family in Spearfish.
In response to the school shooting in Connecticut, Rep. Betty Olson of Prairie City and Rep.-Elect Scott Craig of Rapid City have suggested passing a law to allow teachers and other school personnel to carry firearms in school.
If you want an armed teacher, I’m not the right teacher for your school district. I choose to teach like Gandhi, King, and Jesus, not Wayne, Willis, Schwarzenegger. I reject the call to “Arm the teachers, in the meantime bulletproof the kids,” because such a cry is based on a desire to sell product, not educate children:
Studies have shown that highly visible efforts to increase school safety, such as cameras and armed guards, decrease students’ feelings of security, said Eric Rossen, a clinical psychologist and administrator at the National Association of School Psychologists. That’s another risk with bulletproof backpacks, he said. Children who don’t feel safe also don’t feel connected or understood, ultimately undermining their ability to learn and to form trusting relationships, he said [Caitlin Dewey, “Since Newtown School Shootings, Sales of Kids’ Bulletproof Backpacks Soar,” Washington Post, 2012.12.20].
Folks who want me to carry a gun in my classroom are asking me to gamble on the “payoff” of the one-in-a-million event of an armed attack on my classroom at the cost of the daily psychic damage of the gun on my hip saying to kids, “We’re not safe. Be afraid.” I don’t gamble in general, because I understand that the house always wins, but at least in Deadwood, there’s some entertainment value in gambling.
I get the distinct impression that calls for guns in the classroom aren’t based on a desperate desire to protect children’s safety at all costs. They seem based on a desire to turn schools, one of the safest, most peaceful places in the community, into an affirmation of gun worship.
Schools can protect children better by making them feel loved and connected. Yet our schools pass policies that prohibit teachers from hugging kids or contacting them on social media. We fear our teachers’ expressions of caring, but we encourage expressions of fear and aggression.
If Rep. Betty Olson and Rep. Scott Craig toss their “arm the teachers” bills in the hopper, I will go to Pierre. I will testify before committee with my usual enthusiasm and exaggerated hand gestures. The staid members of the committee will watch my spectacle, think, “We want to put guns in this guy’s hands?” and quickly kill those bills… as well they ought.
I’ll do my part to keep guns out of our schools. Legislators, help me out. Let teachers be symbols of peace and civil society, not fear and isolation.
Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.
Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and is currently teaching French at Spearfish High School. A longtime country dweller, Cory is enjoying “urban” living with his family in Spearfish.
Last January, Melody Schopp, South Dakota’s education secretary, said she didn’t think great teachers were motivated by monetary rewards. She then spent the rest of this year advocating her boss Governor Daugaard’s scheme to motivate teachers with monetary rewards.
South Dakota voters shot that nonsense down at the polls. “The voters did speak on the issue,” sighed Secretary Schopp the next day, “but I don’t think, though, that in the long term it will change the important work we’re doing moving forward.” Secretary Schopp then went on a retreat with her Department of Education staff (and oh, how I enjoy using the words “retreat” and “Department of Education” in the same sentence) and settled on some slightly more coherent language. She now tells the press that DoE’s focus in the coming legislative session won’t be “reforming” education but “supporting” education.
Whew! What a relief. Secretary Schopp appears to be abandoning the “change for change’s sake” rhetoric that she and other gubernatorial water-carriers mustered in defense of the Governor’s toxic education reform package. But now that our schools don’t need “reform,” what sort of “support” do we need?
Let me help you out, Secretary Schopp. I do this school thing for a living. Support means putting South Dakota’s money where its mouth is. Support does not mean more task force meetings or workshops or expensive software. Support means pay.
South Dakota has paid the lowest teacher salaries in the nation for at least two generations. Here are the numbers:
You want to support education? Raise teacher pay. Give each teacher the $11,000 raise that would get us to the regional average. Give us each the $4,300 that would tie us for last place with Oklahoma.
Paying teachers more isn’t about boosting our motivation or performance (though even $4,300 would go a long way to getting teachers’ minds off looking for a second job to cover the car payment). Paying teachers more is about admitting and erasing the far-too-long-standing shame of valuing teachers less than any other state in the Union. It’s about paying us what we are worth.
Secretary Schopp, thank you for your support. Now show us the money.
Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.
Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and is currently teaching French at Spearfish High School. A longtime country dweller, Cory is enjoying “urban” living with his family in Spearfish.
