From the Unfortunate Juxtaposition Department, Governor Dennis Daugaard is away in Connecticut trying to convince gun manufacturers that South Dakota is a great place for guns. Meanwhile, South Dakota law enforcement scrambles to deal with gunslingers whom we shouldn't trust with guns.

First, a guy with a history of domestic violence and alleged mental illness shoots two people and himself in Clear Lake:

Brett M. Pommer barricaded himself in his home after allegedly shooting two females before 9 p.m., according to the South Dakota Attorney General’s Office. SWAT teams from Codington County and Highway Patrol found Pommer’s body after no contact was made when they attempted to negotiate.

...Three women, including Pommer’s then-wife, have filed protection orders against him since 2003. Pommer and his wife divorced earlier this year with the wife citing adultery and irreconcilable differences, according to Deuel County court documents. The couple had married in 2005 and lived at 925 Third Ave., the same address where the shooting took place.

Last September, Pommer’s wife filed a protection order against him in Deuel County after he allegedly threw their son on a basement couch while the two were watching TV, according to court documents. His wife stated in the documents that they were in the process of getting a divorce and Pommer was bipolar and did not always take his medication [Dalton Walker, "Clear Lake Shooting Suspect Had History of Domestic Violence, Documents Show," that Sioux Falls paper, 2013.06.18].

And in West River, police have to shoot a rifle-toting two-time three-time DUI convict and parole jumper:

Travis Will Ross, 43, was shot after he brandished a rife at two Pennington County deputies and a South Dakota Highway Patrol trooper about three miles east of New Underwood on U.S. Highway 14/16.

...According to the South Dakota Department of Corrections, Ross was paroled from a third-offense felony DUI conviction on Nov. 30, 2012. He was paroled to Newell, but was listed as absconded from parole on March 27.

Ross had two third-offense DUIs in just over two years, according to court records.

Ross received a probationary sentence for a third-offense DUI arrest in Pennington County in June 2009, but violated his probation. As a result, he was sentenced to two years in prison in November 2009.

He was apparently on parole when he was again arrested for third-offense DUI in Jackson County in August 2011. That arrest earned him an 18-month sentence that was served consecutive to his parole violation [Andrea J. Cook, "Man Shot by Officers Wanted for Parole Violations," Rapid City Journal, 2013.06.19].

As far as I can tell, South Dakota law doesn't prohibit guys like Pommer and Ross from possessing firearms, because holy cow, you never know when you'll need bipolar child abusers and habitual drunks to join the militia and fight North Korean invaders. You've got to be convicted for a crime of violence or felony drug activity to lose your gun rights in South Dakota. Domestic violence will forfeit your gun rights for just one year.

So come on in, Colt, Stag, and friends! The shooting is fine in South Dakota!

Pat Powers predictably snarkificates on U.S. Attorney Brendan Johnson's opening of a Twitter account:

...isn’t raising his profile though the use of social media a political move for someone viewed by many Democrats as the future savior of the South Dakota Democratic Party? And wouldn’t an increased profile keep his name in play…… say, if a current candidate for US Senate named Rick Weiland were to drop out of the race unexpectedly?

I’m just saying [Pat Powers, "Non-Political Brendan Johnson Now on Twitter @Brendan_SD. In a Non-Political Way," Dakota War College, 2013.06.18].

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Pat. You're just saying the same nonsense you've been peddling for months with your oxygen-wasting Brendan-bashing and thoroughly debunked placeholder hypothesis.

Google "Twitter U.S. Attorney." You'll find all sorts of U.S. Attorneys (Massachusetts, Connecticut, North Texas) doing the same thing Brendan Johnson is doing: using social media to connect with the public he serves. Heck, Pat's old boss, Secretary of State Jason Gant, does the same thing. Are we to dismiss the social media accounts Pat set up for Jason as blatant politicking on the public dime (an activity on which Pat and Jason are experts)?

Powers's criticism of U.S. Attorney Johnson's adoption of social media (hey! Brendan's on Facebook, too!) is hypocritical and inimical to open government. Instead of needlessly and baselessly impugning his motives (which will only drive more politicians away from social media), we should welcome Johnson and all other public officials to speak directly to the people they serve through the wonders of the Web.

The City of Madison has put off a pretty strong public demand for a public vote on the special maintenance fee that the city wants to impose on property owners for road repairs. The City has claimed the pretext of seeking an attorney general's opinion on whether this new tax is a referrable legislative decision or a non-referrable administrative decision.

On a pure snark level, note that at the May 20 Madison City Commission meeting, when petitioner George Lee promised that the new fee would face a referendum, no one on the commission warned Lee that a referral might not be legal. Either this administrative-action argument only popped into the commissioners' heads after passage of the special maintenance fee, or they kept this card up their sleeve just to let protesters go through the petition process for naught.

Permit me to be generous: Madison's commissioners really may not know if a referendum applies here. They are dealing with an entirely new and untested law. The special maintenance fee is one of the special assessments authorized by 2012 House Bill 1156, brought to you by a unanimous Legislature and Governor Dennis Daugaard. 2012 HB 1156 repealed a bunch of statutes and created a bunch of new ones.

Section 66 (out of 158) of that bill became SDCL 9-43-148, which authorizes municipalities to assess special maintenance fees "upon the lots fronting and abutting any improvements within the municipality that are maintained by the municipality." Such fees are to be used "for the purpose of maintaining or repairing public improvements." (Citizens concerned about Madison monetary monkeyshines will be relieved to know that SDCL 9-43-124 restricts the transfer of special assessment money to any other municipal fund; if assessed, Madison's special maintenance fee can only pay for road work, not a bronze statue of Jerry Prostrollo riding a buffalo down the median of Highway 34.) The resolution creating Madison's special maintenance fee specifically cites SDCL 9-43-148 as its authorizing legislation.

That citation makes answering the whole referendum question easy. Section 14 of 2012 HB 1156 created SDCL 9-43-86:

Twenty days after publication of the adopted resolution of necessity, unless the referendum is invoked or unless a written protest is filed with the finance officer signed by the owners of more than fifty-five percent of the frontage of the property to be assessed, the governing body may cause the local improvement to be made, may contract for the improvement, and may levy and collect special assessments as provided in this chapter.

There's your answer, Mayor Lindsay. The new special assessments chapter says a referendum can delay implementation of special assessments like Madison's maintenance fee. Call off the Attorney General, stamp those petitions, and hand out ballots!

How does John Thune make his policy decisions? With tequila!

A tequila cocktail called the "sugar daddy" was on the menu at a Wednesday night fundraiser for U.S. Sen. John Thune, R-South Dakota, and lobbyists for Verizon Wireless and AT&T were reportedly licking their lips in anticipation.

The fundraiser, held at Del Frisco's Grille on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, allowed the two carriers to contribute to a lawmaker who is fighting Democratic plans to help Sprint Nextel Corp. and T-Mobile USA Inc. win airwaves at a U.S. auction in 2014, Bloomberg reports [Galen Moore, "'Sugar Daddy' Cocktails Flow as Verizon, AT&T Lobby for Airwaves," Boston Business Journal: Morning Buzz, 2013.06.13].

AT&T and Verizon, which placed over 80% of the bids at the big 2008 spectrum auction, are lobbying Republicans for their crack at the lion's share of this newly offered spectrum. Sprint and T-Mobile are lobbying Democrats to keep the bigger dogs out. The Justice Department wants to spread out spectrum to more operators. Senator Thune says a laissez-faire approach will maximize revenue for the government, but T-Mobile counters that capping the spectrum AT&T and Verizon can capture will invite more players in the auction, increase competition, and generate higher bids.

I have a tough time picking a favorite in a battle between big corporations and bigger corporations. Maybe a good stiff drink will help me find a phone and decide.

Teaching to different learning styles is a big deal in education. During the last two years teaching French at Spearfish High School, I received formal evaluations that included items like "preparation for student learning differences" and "motivation and direction of students’ learning styles" (according to my February evaluation, Mr. Heidelberger "meets standards" on those items). I received reports from the SHS guidance office assessing the learning styles of my students (e.g., visual, auditory, kinesthetic). Reformer Albert Shanker, in his call for a teacher bar exam, says tests of our pedagogical chops should assess our "ability to apply educational principles to different student developmental needs and learning styles." The Danielson framework for evaluating teachers, which South Dakota is imposing on all school districts, expects teachers to teach to all learning styles.

Teaching to different learning styles may also be an effort to sprinkle pixie dust. In its darning assessment of teacher training programs, the National Council on Teacher Quality says a big factor dragging down the quality of teacher training is the focus on learning styles, which NCTQ says are bunk:

...the lesson planning guidance provided in most programs can only be described as voluminous and incoherent. And once one sifts through the volume—as we did to evaluate the standard—few of the requirements we looked for are to be found, even once. Requirements are overly general in some documents (e.g., “Differentiate instruction to deal with the diversity of your classroom”), or unrealistically expansive, asking the candidate to delineate means of differentiating instruction for students with a dozen or so specified characteristics in a daily lesson plan.

In the midst of very little consistency even within each of the sets of program documents evaluated on this standard, and certainly across sets of documents from programs in different institutions, one element of consistency does emerge: the direction to teacher candidates to plan for instruction that considers students’ “learning styles.” Unfortunately, this recommendation has been thoroughly discredited by research as
ineffectual and distracts the candidate from more productive planning considerations. Nonetheless, the “pseudo science” that learning styles be considered in planning lessons is advocated by three-fourths (74 percent) of programs [emphasis in original, Julie Greenberg, Arthur McKee, and Kate Walsh, "Teacher Prep Review," National Council on Teacher Quality, June 2013].

I check NCTQ's end notes on their remarkable equation of "learning styles" with "pseudo science" and find NCTQ cites this 2008 lit review:

...our search of the learning-styles literature has revealed only a few fragmentary and unconvincing pieces of evidence that meet this standard, and we therefore conclude that
the literature fails to provide adequate support for applying learning-style assessments in school settings. Moreover, several studies that used appropriate research designs found evidence that contradicted the learning-styles hypothesis (Massa & Mayer, 2006; Constantinidou & Baker, 2002). Finally, even if a study of a particular learning-style classification and its corresponding instructional methods was to reveal the necessary evidence, such a finding would provide support for that particular learning-style classification only—and only then if its benefits surpass the high costs of student assessments and tailored instruction [Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork, "Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence," Psychological Science in the Public Interest, December 2008, p. 116].

Another psychologist agrees:

Psychologist Dan Willingham at the University of Virginia, who studies how our brains learn, says teachers should not tailor instruction to different kinds of learners. He says we're on more equal footing than we may think when it comes to how our brains learn. And it's a mistake to assume students will respond and remember information better depending on how it's presented [Patti Neighmond, "Think You're an Auditory or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It's Unlikely," NPR: Shots, 2011.08.29].

If these psychologists are right, it could be a great relief for us teachers. One teacher in a room of 20 or 30 students can individualize instruction only so far. When you're giving your all to one student or one group of students, you're probably not giving much to the rest. Even if we all have preferences for learning certain ways, I would think we teachers have an obligation to help students learn in as many ways possible; after all, you may prefer to learn by doing things with your hands, but life won't always be nice and give you a supervisor and co-workers who will train you with hands-on activities. Your boss may hand you a manual, say "Read it," and expect you to be ready to do what the manual says the next day.

So what do you think, fellow educators? Are we ready to challenge our bosses and ask that differentiating instruction for learning styles be stricken from our teacher evaluations until someone produces evidence that such differentiation makes a difference?

The National Council on Teacher Quality has issued a report on teacher education programs nationwide. Unlike many of the teacher prep programs they surveyed, NCTQ did not inflate the grades. Out of 1,200 elementary and secondary teacher training programs surveyed, NCTQ gave only four a four-star rating (Furman, Lipscomb, Ohio State, and Vanderbilt universities).

Here's how South Dakota's public teacher education programs rated:

Dakota State, Northern, and the U made the honor roll with their three-star secondary education programs. That honor roll included 9% of the school surveyed nationwide. None of our public universities made the elementary prep honor roll. SDSU and BHSU almost made the NCTQ "consumer alert" list with their one-star ratings in elementary teacher prep.

NCTQ based its ratings on eighteen standards, which they say are based on eight years of development and ten pilot studies. Under those standards, here are NCTQ's biggest beefs:

• It is far too easy to get into a teacher preparation program. Just over a quarter of programs restrict admissions to students in the top half of their class, compared with the highest-performing countries, which limit entry to the top third.
• Fewer than one in nine elementary programs and just over one-third of high school programs are preparing candidates in content at the level necessary to teach the new Common Core State Standards now being implemented in classrooms in 45 states and the District of Columbia.
• The “reading wars” are far from over. Three out of four elementary teacher preparation programs still are not teaching the methods of reading instruction that could substantially lower the number of children who never become proficient readers, from 30 percent to under 10 percent. Instead, the teacher candidate is all too often told to develop his or her “own unique approach” to teaching reading.
• Just 7 percent of programs ensure that their student teachers will have uniformly strong experiences, such as only allowing them to be placed in classrooms taught by teachers who are themselves effective, not just willing volunteers [Julie Greenberg, Arthur McKee and Kate Walsh, "Teacher Prep Review," National Council on Teacher Quality, June 2013].

The complaint about lax admission standards may apply to South Dakota. Josh Verges reported earlier this month that students in our public university teaching programs have a slightly lower average ACT score than the general student population. His breakdown of teacher candidate ACT scores by campus finds an interesting though imperfect alignment with the NCTQ ratings. Higher-rated USD has the highest teacher candidate ACT average, 0.1 points higher than its general student ACT average. Lower-rated SDSU has the lowest teacher candidate ACT average, 1.6 points lower than its general student ACT average. But note that DSU's teacher candidates have a slightly lower ACT score than their general campus population without managing to drag DSU's rating down to SDSU or BHSU levels.

So what do we do to improve teacher training? NCTQ makes these recommendations:

1. Get prospective teachers to apply to the school NCTQ rates highly. To South Dakota's benefit, NCTQ recommends the USD, NSU, and DSU secondary ed programs not just for their quality but as bargains!
2. Get school districts to include NCTQ ratings in evaluating candidates (heck: there go my chances, thanks to my SDSU degree!).
3. Place more student teachers with highly qualified teachers, not just willing volunteers.
4. Increase teacher program admission standards: take only students in the top half of their class, and require teacher programs to have average student GPA of 3.2 and ACT of 24 (that would put all South Dakota programs on alert!).
5. Impose tougher tests for teacher licensure (like the teacher bar exam we discussed here in January).
6. Base state funding of teacher prep programs on performance rather than enrollment (and NCTQ notes that South Dakota is moving in this direction).
7. Cap the number of teaching certificates issued each year (since apparently, we're graduating more teacher candidates than we need).

Making teacher preparation more rigorous should be more politically viable in South Dakota than policies targeting our public schools directly. It doesn't cost as much to tighten admission and licensure requirements as imposing more standardized tests or other "reforms" on 152 school districts. Getting less qualified teachers out of the system at the front end, before they even get into a classroom, would solve a lot of the problems that Governor Daugaard's ill-starred pile of school-wrecking 2012 reforms purported to address.

The only problem tougher teacher training would bring is a smaller, even more talented pool of South Dakota teachers who would be even tougher to keep on the job with our last-in-the-nation wages. How about it, South Dakota: if our universities train better teachers, are we willing to pay them the wages they'll demand and deserve?

The City of Madison last week received a petition with 525 signatures to refer a new property tax road fee to a public vote. Citizens seeking a vote need 281 valid Madison voter signatures. Last night the Madison City Commission acknowledged receipt of those petitions but issued no certification that they are valid. Instead, Mayor Roy Lindsay says Madison residents may not be entitled to vote on this tax increase:

Lindsay said the commissioners had requested that the South Dakota Attorney General's Office provide guidance on whether passage of the special maintenance fee was a legislative or administrative action. If the commission's passage of the fee resolution was a legislative action, then the decision is referable to voters. If the attorney general determines that the resolution was an administrative action, then questions arise concerning a public vote.

"At this point, we're waiting for further information," Lindsay said. "We're waiting to find out if we're making the correct decision" [Chuck Clement, "City Acknowledges Referendum Petitions, Officials Wait for AG's Opinion," Madison Daily Leader, 2013.06.17].

Legislative vs. administrative—Mayor Lindsay is looking to South Dakota Codified Law 9-20-19 to keep Madisonians from voting on the city's tax increase. That law reads as follows:

Any legislative decision of a governing body is subject to the referendum process. A legislative decision is one that enacts a permanent law or lays down a rule of conduct or course of policy for the guidance of citizens or their officers. Any matter of a permanent or general character is a legislative decision.

No administrative decision of a governing body is subject to the referendum process, unless specifically authorized by this code. An administrative decision is one that merely puts into execution a plan already adopted by the governing body itself or by the Legislature. Supervision of a program is an administrative decision. Hiring, disciplining, and setting the salaries of employees are administrative decisions.

[I'd link to the statute, but the whole dang state server seems to have gone haywire this morning.]

The City of Madison apparently contends that imposing an additional tax levy on property owners is not a decision of permanent or general character but is simply putting into execution some already adopted plan. That's the distinction that the South Dakota Supreme Court made in 2011 in turning back a referendum push by Grant County residents opposed to county zoning changes.

But does that distinction apply to tax increases? South Dakotans can refer property tax increases in the form of opt-outs, though that referendum power is specifically authorized by SDCL 10-13-36. This tax increase isn't an opt-out, although it seems to work that way, since it is an amount the city can take from each property holder without counting toward the property tax levy limit. And unlike the basic property tax levy, which I can see argued to be an administrative decision carrying out the general policy of obtaining funds for city operations through property tax, the road fee is a new component of the tax, distinct from the normal levy. That sounds like a general, legislative decision to me.

The Fort Pierre City Council is mirroring Madison's argument in rejecting referral of a "deferred development fee" for the Riverwalk development. Petitioners there are taking the city to court. The Madison City Commission is seeking cover from the Attorney General before issuing its rejection.

Mayor Lindsay suggests that the city is in dire straits and has to get new money for road repairs somewhere. But trying to dodge a public vote on getting that money seems nboth legally tenuous and politically unwise. Madison has had enough of shutting out the voice of the people. Let this vote happen, and have a discussion with the voters about the wealth, budget, and practical needs of the city, not the finer points of referendum law.

Exploratory GOP Senate candidate Annette Bosworth gives up the Custer vote:

Perhaps Bosworth is competing with Kristi Noem to be the next Sarah Palin.