VIEWPOINT | Choosing excellence: A call to rebuild South Dakota's public education system

Guest column by Maggie Seidel

“Decline is not a condition; it’s a choice,” the late Charles Krauthammer once noted. Unfortunately for our great state, decline is unquestionably the best term to describe South Dakota's public education system. Ahead of the 2024 Legislative Session, we should all be demanding accountability and reform. 

The only publicly available report that provides objective and verifiable data on schools and school districts across South Dakota is something known as the Department of Education’s State Report Card. The 2022-2023 Report Card reveals incredibly disconcerting statistics: only 50 percent of students are proficient in reading, and just 43 percent are proficient in math. What’s worse, our scores are declining — down 3 percent in reading and 5 percent in math from the previous year. 

To date, there has been very little attention given to our systemic failure. But the consequences of continued indifference would be profound, affecting not only the present but also the future of our state and every community in it. Every elected official, parent, grandparent, and concerned citizen of South Dakota needs to get involved — we cannot accept the F grades we’re getting in both math and reading as the status quo. 

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Now, whenever education reform comes up, the first thing the state’s army of education lobbyists (serving not parents and children, but instead school administrators) say is they need more money. In reality, if you take into account our state’s cost-of-living and the fact that we’re spending more than a billion dollars every year on public school education, our system’s decline cannot be attributed to a lack of funding. We spend more and more each year, but our poor results just continue to compound. 

The actual cause of our systemic failure is our abysmal public school leadership. And the buck needs to stop with South Dakota’s superintendents, the executives responsible for each of our public school districts.

Most people probably don’t know this, but South Dakota superintendents are exceptionally well paid. Sioux Falls Superintendent Jane Stavem, for example, makes almost $400,000 a year. Our Pierre Superintendent Kelly Glodt’s compensation isn’t that far behind. And collectively, South Dakota superintendents compensation ranks in the top 25 percent nationally. Our school leaders’ results, however, are not commensurate with their compensation. In athletics (and virtually every other profession), when a coach fails to produce, they are replaced. But that rarely, if ever, happens with superintendents in South Dakota. That must change.