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House Education Committee Kills School Merit Pay

The House Education Committee had the good sense yesterday to kill one of the ugly ghosts of last year's failed education "reform" package. House Bill 1166 would have thrown merit pay at the 10% of school districts with the lowest rates of graduates taking college remediation classes. Eleven of the fifteen House Ed members recognized that such bonuses, based on a single limited metric, would fail to measure all of the important work teachers do. Such bonuses would also fail to reach many of the people responsible for even that one good metric, like the kindergarten teacher who instilled a love of reading in today's college freshmen but who retired ten years ago.

The only three House Ed members who voted for HB 1166 yesterday were three Republicans—Reps. Hal Wick, Jenna Haggar, and Jacqueline Sly—who stuck with the Governor on merit pay and his other school-wrecking plans last year. Another Republican who backed the Governor's agenda last year, Rep. Jim Schaefer of Kennebec, saw the light and voted to kill HB 1166 (not his first outburst of good sense this session!). Everyone else on House Ed is a freshperson legislator, and every one of those freshpeople (with the exception of Rep. Dan Kaiser, who was out taking a phone call from the Ron Paul Revolution search committee) heard the voters, too, and voted against the merit pay that South Dakota made clear last year it does not want. Thank you for listening, legislators!