The South Dakota Blue Ribbon Task Force on education came to Rapid City last night.

This is what Governor Dennis Daugaard said about the task force when it was announced in March:

The task force, which was announced by the Governor and legislative leaders last month, will reevaluate the current funding formula and make recommendations to the 2016 State Legislature for reform.

“My hope is that the Blue Ribbon task force will focus on three goals,” said Gov. Daugaard. “First, we want a quality system of schools focused on student success. Second, we want a workforce of great teachers. Finally, we want an efficient, effective funding system that supports those goals.”

The initial appointees, made up of representatives of the Executive and Legislative branches, will conduct stakeholder input meetings through the end of May, including meetings with school administrators, school board members, teachers and parents. After those meetings, additional task force members will be appointed to represent those stakeholder groups.

These are the members of the task force:

Sen. Deb Soholt, Sioux Falls – Task-Force co-chair
Rep. Jacqueline Sly, Rapid City – Task-Force co-chair
Sen. Corey Brown, Gettysburg
Sen. Troy Heinert, Mission
Sen. Billie Sutton, Burke
Sen. Craig Tieszen, Rapid City
Rep. Justin Cronin, Gettysburg
Rep. Paula Hawks, Hartford
Rep. Mark Mickelson, Sioux Falls
Rep. Steve Westra, Sioux Falls
Dr. Melody Schopp, SD Secretary of Education
Tony Venhuizen, Chief of Staff to Gov. Daugaard
Jason Dilges, SD Commissioner of Finance and Management

The task force met at the Ramkota with educators, then business leaders, and lastly yesterday evening with members of the general public. The meeting last night was fairly well attended, with about 85 people present.

Some members of the executive branch were in attendance, including South Dakota Secretary of Education Melody Schopp.

In addition to the legislators who are members of the task force, several South Dakota legislators were on hand, including Senator Craig Tieszen, Rep. Dan Dryden, Rep. Chip Campbell, Rep. Lynne DiSanto, and Senator Phil Jensen. However, I was told by several legislators that it had been made clear to them that they were not wanted at the meeting, and had been instructed to keep their mouths shut during the meeting.

A number of people came to the meeting prepared to offer feedback directly to the task force regarding education funding, but they quickly found that the “conversation” on education in South Dakota was going to be a “managed conversation.” Those who follow politics in South Dakota will recognize that the task force is filled with Democrats and RINOs.

Meeting organizers used a technique that we are seeing grow more common in the last five years called the Delphi method. Rather than allowing members of the taxpaying public to speak directly to their leaders, the Delphi technique involves what was seen at the meeting last night: clusters of little groups of people who throw out bullet-statements to themselves, which are then prioritized into the “best” statements which are then presented to the main body.

If you are a student of history and have any cognitive experience with socialism, right away you recognize the Delphi technique for the touchy-feely “groupthink” way that Leftists like to operate, to give the unwashed masses the illusion that they are participating in their own government…while being utterly disregarded and shut out of their own constitutional republic.

Some of those I talked to last night called it a “managed conversation” and referred to the task force as the “Blue Ribbon Task Farce.”

Indeed, an experienced legislator said this about the Blue Ribbon Task Force on his Facebook page yesterday:

At its inception, the BRTF sounded like a good idea. Then, the deck was stacked. I have supported this Governor because I know him and his family to be good people, in fact, I would say they are top-notch. That notwithstanding, it is clear that the person who used to say, “This is a plan, not the plan” is now only interested in promoting an agenda, and he will stop at nothing to ensure that only those who will do his bidding are placed in positions to achieve his mission.

So, here’s to those of the legislative peasant class who can attend meetings but must hold their tongues! Perhaps the Blue Ribboners will award said attendees a green “participation” ribbon for observing Their proceedings in silence. Perhaps the rules will be changed next year to ensure that we do not speak on the floor…at least not on matters They deem too-important-to-fail.

This whole thing has become a sham.

Now, I never have liked Dennis Daugaard. I knew when he was lieutenant governor and running for governor that he almost certainly would prove to be another RINO governor.  He did not prove me wrong, and I’ve just never had any use for people who claim to be one thing (conservative), yet behave unrepentantly in another way (liberal). In fact, he is even worse than his RINO predecessor Mike Rounds.  I have heard an experienced legislator (not the one cited above) state that Dennis Daugaard is “Mike Rounds, only a lot smarter.”  Which makes him more dangerous.

Eagle Forum produced an article some time ago about the Delphi method, stating that it leads people “away from representative government to an illusion of citizen participation.”

Consistent use of this technique to control public participation in our political system is causing alarm among people who cherish the form of government established by our Founding Fathers. Efforts in education and other areas have brought the emerging picture into focus…

…First, a facilitator is hired. While his job is supposedly neutral and non-judgmental, the opposite is actually true. The facilitator is there to direct the meeting to a preset conclusion…

… If 50 people write down their ideas individually, to be compiled later into a final outcome, no one knows what anyone else has written. That the final outcome of such a meeting reflects anyone’s input at all is highly questionable, and the same holds true when the facilitator records the group’s comments on paper. But participants in these types of meetings usually don’t question the process.

Why hold such meetings at all if the outcomes are already established? The answer is because it is imperative for the acceptance of the School-to-Work agenda, or the environmental agenda, or whatever the agenda, that ordinary people assume ownership of the preset outcomes. If people believe an idea is theirs, they’ll support it. If they believe an idea is being forced on them, they’ll resist…

Indeed. I heard it said last night among those who weren’t keen on spending still more millions of taxpayer dollars on a failing education system that, like most things in South Dakota’s RINO-controlled government, the outcome and the course of action were already predetermined; this meeting was held only to give the illusion that the people were involved in their own government. It becomes more palatable for a “Republican” governor and a “Republican” legislature to raise your taxes if they can say “Well, I didn’t want to, but the people insisted we raise their taxes!”

The way the Delphi technique took place at the meeting  last night was that the people gathered at the round tables in the room were given a predetermined “question” to address, were instructed to throw out ideas, put them on yellow sticky notes, then decide at each table which of those ideas were the “best.” After about 15 minutes were allowed for addressing this “question,” each table was allowed to read one if its “best” ideas. Then each table picked its best three sticky notes and took them to a big board on the wall. Then the group moved on to the next question.

Instructions to those in attendance included: Be fully present at the meeting, make room for everybody’s voice, and listen to understand.Those in attendance were asked to address three questions:

1. What possibilities are there for meanignfully funding K-12 education for our kids and our communities?
2. When you think about funding schools in your local community, what is important to you?
3. What ideas or new approaches might make those priorities more possible for schools in your community?

It was made clear at the beginning of the meeting that things like Common Core–which will cost the state millions to implement for dubious results–would not be discussed at all in the meeting.

I don’t recall any mention of cutting wasteful spending, cutting programs that don’t deal directly with educating students on real knowledge, getting by with less than the latest in computers and other equipment, and there was relatively little discussion of consolidation.

Of course, one of the biggest way to better fund education is one that I addressed in my column in the Rapid City Journal about eight years ago:

U.S. Department of Education statistics say teachers make up only 50.6 percent of elementary and secondary education staff, or about 65 percent if you throw in guidance counselors and aides. If the product is classroom instruction, the remaining 35-49 percent seems like a high ratio of support staff, to me.

Cutting overhead would be a great way to save money and get more money into the pockets of teachers–and that includes the education bureaucracy itself. But of course, our “leaders” aren’t interested in cutting that, because they might be cutting their own jobs, and the jobs of some of their good campaign contributors.

People who say they truly care about education should take note of the fact that homeschool families, in addition to paying taxes for schools they don’t use, manage to produce better-scoring students with a fraction of the money spent per pupil than the public education system.  If money was really the answer, the D.C. school system (for years, the biggest spending) should be producing the brightest students in the country…but it’s usually ranked 51st in academic performance. People who say they truly care about education should take note…but they don’t.

Meetings like the one last night draw out mostly people within the education establishment who stand to gain financially, and liberal members of the public who are fanatical about “education” (usually because they correctly see the education system as a way to force politically-correct Leftist ideas on young, impressionable minds, away from the “corrupting” influence of their more conservative parents).  The few conservative voices that tend to show up at meetings like this are the small number of people who realize (a) the incredible waste that goes on in the “education” system, and (b) the indoctrination apparatus the “education” system has become in America.

If the citizens are to successfully protect their pocketbook and their minds from the Left, they are going to have to get far more involved than they currently are.  Because it has become apparent in the past five years that the people cannot count on the “Republican” Party to protect them from the bad ideas of the Left anymore. Because the “Republican” Party in South Dakota is almost as full as tax-and-spend liberals as is the Democrat Party.

In South Dakota, you don’t need Democrats to tax you, waste your money, and push Leftist ideas on you: the “Republicans” will eagerly do that for you. As the saying goes, with friends like these, who needs enemies?

*** Bob Ellis *** Is a conservative author  and Life and Liberty News contributor