Month: February 2018

On east side of U. S. 69/75 north of Durant near Caddo, ID’d by Greg Morris who won’t go to lunch with me so happy to treat my nephew Vince who contributes this photo from the interior:  

Sorry this post is going to sound like sour grapes and probably is, but when the title popped into my head I couldn’t resist.  “Wayne” is Wayne Greene, editorial page editor of the Tulsa World, the most recent in a line of Tulsa editorial writers who have had a truly positive impact on our community, in sharp contrast to their counterparts over the years at the Daily Oklahoman (the Daily Disappointment per Frosty Troy whose word on this I have always accepted as true without inflicting myself by actually reading their work).  My first encounters with local editorial writers occurred when I ran for the Tulsa School Board in 1976 and continued over the next quarter of a century with my political campaigns and efforts to pass initiatives like our city sales tax and charter change.  Some of the writers I remember include Jenk Jones and John Drummond at the Tulsa Tribune, Jim Goodwin at the Oklahoma Eagle and Alex Adwon, Ken Neal and Mike Jones at the World.  John was a personal friend through our church and his editorial endorsing me over the incumbent Mary Warner, titled “A Fresh Breeze”, likely made the difference in my 1980 election ( Voter Fraud Déjà Vu ) and successfully launched for me a fascinating twenty years of service as a local elected official.

One memory from those interactions was John, I think, telling me that they believed their “influence” was about 7%, meaning a Tribune/World editorial could sway about that percentage of voters.  I have no idea how accurate that was, or even if I remember correctly, but I do know that we mostly unknown local officials wanted to have those endorsements when running for election, and, I suspect, that influence today, given all the competing sources of information, is much, much less.  Another memory is from a visit a delegation of us from the City Commission made to the World probably in support of a third penny sales tax election, maybe in support of the charter change.   At the conclusion of our discussion I believe it was Alex who commented something to the effect “We are flattered that you Commissioners care enough about what we think to come calling on us.”  I was surprised at his modesty because we certainly thought their opinion mattered greatly in our efforts.  Now many years later I realize that political leadership and opinion writers have a kind of symbiotic relationship and that it could be as risky for an editorial writer to be out of sync with his audience’s political views as it could be for a political leader to be out of favor with local editorial writers.

So in Wayne’s World when a local political opinion leader, like former governor Frank Keating, offers a guest column Wayne will think twice before declining because he needs the major Franks of his World to view his editorial work as relevant and important for our state (which it is).   What to do then when a very minor Frank like me challenges the accuracy of a major Frank’s column, namely that nowhere, no how, is his statement correct that “In fact, through fiscal year 2016, Oklahoma public schools received more than $9.2 billion in revenue, a near record high.”  (That is unless “through fiscal year 2016” means something other than “during” or “for” fiscal year 2016.)  What I suspect Wayne did, following his journalist training, was to call Frank, or, more likely, one of the fellows at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs who ghost wrote the column, and ask about the difference between their number and the one I cited of $6.012 billion.  Here is what Wayne wrote appended to my letter to the editor concerning Frank’s alleged perfidy:

Editor’s Note

The $9.2 billion number cited by the column authors came from Oklahoma Department of Education’s cost accounting system reports and includes all sources of revenue available to schools — district, state and federal sources of revenue as well as any funds provided by debt facilities.

Prior to my letter and Wayne’s note being published I posted  Takes One To Know One and Make Oklahoma Adequate Again  where I display the actual Oklahoma Department of Education’s cost accounting system report for FY 2016 and demonstrate that nowhere, no how, does the alleged $9.2 billion appear.  In other words, and hope I’m shown wrong, Wayne just took their word for it.  And that’s part of his World—the fellows at the OCPA have street cred as a think tank in this state because they have Frank and other leaders on their Board and a nice budget, so Wayne should be able to trust what they say.  But you can’t and he shouldn’t.  As I’ve shown time and again they are sloppy at best, often engage in clear distortions and, sometimes, just make stuff up.  Which it is in this case we may never know till the real $9.2 billion makes itself known.

P.S.  Thanks, Wayne, for putting my letter first on the Sunday, February 25, letters page.

As always lunch is on me for the first to ID the photo location—unfortunately the Thinker sat on goatheads and left before the photo was taken.

 

Williams Park, Pawhuska, OK, ID’d by Shane Matson

In my last post,  Takes One To Know One , I promised to address another argument or two made by former governor Keating and a couple of other board members of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs in their Tulsa World rant titled, the online version, “Thinking differently about Oklahoma public school spending.”  Later I noticed the same piece in the Sunday Readers Forum paper version was titled “Revenue exists to fund state’s schools adequately.”  Interesting…whatever.  I devoted most of my post to summarizing my past critiques (A Dirge for a Surge , Purging the Surge and Return of the Surge )  of Scafidi’s work on the “surge” in non-teacher school employees because I readily recalled those, and also I pointed out that their revenue number of $9.2 billion is simply false.

I briefly took them to task for claiming “Since 2006, inflation-adjusted public school revenues have risen by more than $1.6 billion, or 21 percent.” primarily for choosing 2006 as the base for comparison instead of 2009 when state revenues were at a peak.  Turns out I addressed this same distortion by OCPA fellows Bond and Shelton (possibly the ghost writers for Keating) in my post Same Song, Umpteenth Verse  .  Here’s the data I used.

My data is taken directly from the Oklahoma State Department of Education’s online OCAS reports,  (https://sdeweb01.sde.ok.gov/OCAS_Reporting/StateReports.aspx) and is NOT inflation adjusted.  Adjusting for inflation can be helpful in some comparisons, but here its purpose is hidden by their use of false data.  You see there are several, three that I can readily name, inflation indices and none are created to meaningfully adjust for the mix of goods and services Oklahoma school districts purchase.  So I choose to look past that silliness, especially noting that their final revenue number is $9.2 billion and has clearly been inflated, not deflated by an index.  But remember these fellows often just make stuff up ( Done Waiting for Mr. Bond)

Here’s how a rational policy maker would approach this data.  First, you don’t include “non-revenue” in your total available revenue which the OCPA fellows usually do and which shows their intent to distort, not inform.  It’s labeled “non-revenue” for a reason, usually being inter-fund transfers, not new revenue, which I’ve explained before in earlier posts.  Second you don’t include “cash forward” which is clearly one-time money that shouldn’t be used for recurring commitments (they want to use it for teacher raises), not to mention that it is an ending cash balance on June 30 that is almost fully encumbered the next day, July 1, mostly for salaries.  Third, the correct number to use is “new revenue” as plainly labeled by SDE, which is $6.012 billion for 2016, meaning Keating and his fellows only got it wrong by $3 billion—an unbelievably gross error unless their real intent is to distort and make false statements.

So what about the 21% increase in school revenues?  Nowhere to be found in my chart since we don’t know what “adjustment for inflation” they have made to get it.  What you can readily see by looking at the last two columns is how cherry-picking a base year allows you to distort the data to support the narrative that our schools have plenty of money.  The column second from the far right shows the percentage change from FY2006, their base year, to FY2016; the far right column shows the percentage change from FY2009, our last “normal” year before the Great Recession, to FY2016. 

Using my preferred new revenue totals you see that in the ten years after FY2006 revenue grew by 27.3%, but only 7.9% in the last seven years, after FY2009, of that decade.  That’s because the Great Recession wiped out the growth that had occurred the first three years.  State and local school revenues across the country took a huge hit during the Great Recession but were able to avoid the worst effects because the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Obama’s stimulus package, made schools a priority.  As our economy recovered, so did state and local school revenues, at least everywhere except Oklahoma—see this all too familiar ranking:

But the new revenue row doesn’t tell the whole story.  Over this ten-year period student population has grown; the better measure of what has happened to school revenue is using per student amounts which are calculated in the last three rows of my chart.  Notice that new revenue per student, being $8,681 in FY2016, has increased only 0.4% since FY2009, an increase fully wiped out by the modest inflation since then.  It’s also telling that Keating’s per student number is $13,240, a distortion of such magnitude that it is also a falsehood.    

More telling is the abject failure of Oklahoma’s “state” revenue, i.e. the amount provided by the legislature, per student, having fallen 9.3% since FY2009.  That is the number that lands our state at the top (worst) of the other chart (my -9.3% is not as bad as the chart’s -26.9% because I include dedicated state revenues, not just appropriated).  Were it not for the growth in local and county revenues for our schools they would be in even worse shape because, unfortunately, the state fiscal policy promoted by the OCPA, namely cutting taxes in the face of revenue failures, has been followed by our legislature. 

Ostensibly they have done so in the name of “supply side” economics and blind obeisance to the Laffer Curve (which they don’t understand), but upon reflection I fear the OCPA fellows are not really Limited Thinkers after all.  Their agenda of lowering state tax rates has been sold to the legislature as a way to improve our economy and increase state revenues.  But I think they know better and that the real agenda all along has been to “starve the beast”, i.e. to slash government services.  After all, who needs so many “slugs” teaching, driving and feeding our children.

As always lunch is on me for the first to ID the photo location.   

 

 

 

Blue Hole, Santa Rosa, New Mexico.  ID’d by Shane Matson

Actually I don’t believe that (“takes one to know one”), at least with respect to discerning the facts about matters of public policy, but given that one of the authors of the Tulsa World Readers Forum piece in today’s Sunday edition is Frank Keating, the former governor who famously referred to Oklahoma teachers as “slugs”, it’s hard to resist using playground language.  Frank and two other board members at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs lent their names to the writing that was most likely penned by one of the fellows at the OCPA.  Its arguments were regurgitations of the same faulty policy proposals I’ve been critiquing for the last year and a half in this blog, namely:

1.  Presenting teacher pay proposals that are either demonstrably stupid or politically impossible, see The Glib, The Bad and The Ugly  ;

2.  Distorting the amount of revenue available for discretionary pay raises either intentionally or out of willful misunderstanding of school law and finance, see Where to Begin?  , Unbelievable!  and A Rise By Any Other Name ;  

3.  Defending the cockamamie silliness, namely State Question 640, that has turned our legislature into a joke by requiring a 75% super majority to raise revenue for state services, Brown Boys Dump Plan B on Oklahoma  ; and

4.  Advocating a massive reduction in support staff at our schools without considering the legislative mandates that require their services or that the dedicated funding that supports their jobs cannot be used for teacher pay raises, A Dirge for a Surge  ,  Purging the Surge and Return of the Surge.

I’ll get to a couple of other jewels in future posts.  You can read “Thinking differently about Oklahoma public school spending” if you want.

So, encouraged on by my friend and veteran Letter to the Editor writer Carlton (Looking for Mr. James), I sent this letter off to The World: 

The Sunday Readers Forum rant by Frank Keating and others complaining that a recent article about Oklahoma’s state budget crisis in the Economist was “full of distortions and…demonstrably outright falsehoods” reminds me of the playground taunt “takes one to know one”.  Keating falsely asserts that in 2016 Oklahoma schools received $9.2 billion in revenue when the correct, undistorted, number is $6.012 billion according to the data published on the OSDE website.  He also peddles the research by Benjamin Scafidi who advocates funding teacher pay raises by laying off teacher assistants, bus drivers, custodians and cafeteria workers, based, apparently, on the premise that schools nationwide were properly staffed in 1992.  Keating appears oblivious to the policy decisions behind the “65-year binge in non-teaching staff hiring” such as the legislative mandates to provide special education services (teacher assistants and bus drivers), early childhood education (more teacher assistants) and school breakfast programs (cafeteria workers), to name those that readily come to mind.  Based on these and other distortions and falsehoods routinely promulgated by the fellows at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs who wrote Frank’s rant, readers should be skeptical of the rest of it as well.

As I mention above I’ve written many posts on Scafidi’s work so I won’t repeat my critique here.  I’ve also written several, some linked above, about the many times the Limited Thinkers at our state’s Stink Tanks have distorted the amount of revenue available to schools in Oklahoma, but let’s do it yet again.  Here’s what they say:

Revenue shortfalls are not the cause of Oklahoma’s education troubles. In fact, through fiscal year 2016, Oklahoma public schools received more than $9.2 billion in revenue, a near record high. Since 2006, inflation-adjusted public school revenues have risen by more than $1.6 billion, or 21 percent.

The first sentence is opinion which is to be supported by the “facts” that follow.  All I’ll say now about the third sentence is that calculating a percentage increase is all about the base year where you begin.  They pick FY2006 which preceded three straight years (Brad Henry was governor) of solid revenue growth.  Our funding woes began at the end of FY2009 with the Great Recession which is the base year any fair measure of how our state has recovered since would use.  If I had their data the “21%” would melt away.

The data I do have is from the Oklahoma State Department of Education website showing this for all school districts’ statewide revenue for FY2016, the year they use and the most recent available on the site:

Their revenue number is $9.2 billion.  You can’t get there from here.  My number is $6.012 billion which is clearly shown as all “new revenue” received by schools in FY 2016.  You can make a falsely higher number by adding in the fund balances in the 6000 sources, but for many reasons that is not a wise or helpful source for recurring expenditures like teacher pay raises; still you only get to $8.061 billion, even with that distortion.  The last category, clearly labeled “non-revenue receipts”, has often been added in by the limited thinkers at the OCPA to exaggerate the amount of funding available, but even adding in that $750 million leaves you several hundred million shy of their $9.2 billion.  So I’m stumped, but not surprised.  As I’ve shown before, my faves being limited thinkers Bond (Done Waiting for Mr. Bond) and Anderson ( You’re Not in Kansas Anymore  ) these fellows just make stuff up if it suits their fancy.

So once again, Tulsa World, you need to Fact Check your contributors.

As always lunch is on me for the first to ID the photo location.   

Ruth Ann Odom by Comment, Trent England by email and my high school buddy Gary Monteith by Facebook all ID’d the Petrified Forest in Arizona; this thinker is too limited to figure out who’s on first (I only know Watts on second) so will spend my Social Security COLA having lunch with friends.

After I published my last post, Let’s Be Frank About It , chiding the fellows at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs because their most high-profile board member, and former governor, Frank Keating had signed on to Step Up Oklahoma asking for tax increases to keep our state functioning, Frank himself penned a letter to the editor published in the Tulsa World on February 6; here it is:

I am a frustrated Oklahoman. We have suffered two revenue failures. We have done little to reduce the size of government and have done less to reform the bloat that we have. We want to give teachers a raise but we’ve given away the revenue base to the able-bodied on Medicaid, the wind industry and a cash-sucking public school and higher education bureaucracy that argues with straight faces that 500 school districts, scores of colleges and universities and off-campus campuses are spending our money prudently and educating our students well, despite the fact that our math, science and reading scores and graduation rates show us to be high on failure and low on achievement.

What to do?

It should come as an embarrassment to our political leaders but the business community has stepped up to say that enough is enough. They propose an assortment of reforms and taxes to avoid further state embarrassment. They are right to demand a bipartisan agreement. They have brought us to the table. We can no longer clear our throats and look out the window. Step Up Oklahoma should not be a package. It ought to be a process. Democrats want a $5,000 pay raise for teachers. Conservatives want Medicaid cuts, educational savings accounts, merger of career tech and community colleges, dramatic reduction of school districts and a cap on administrative overhead. To avoid shortfalls, the business leaders ask for sin taxes and restoration of a portion of the gross production tax. An increase of the income tax causes pain to working people so why not cover this piece with an end to the wind giveaways? Everything ought to be on the table. Nothing should be off the table. Both parties must give. It is summer 1787. Philadelphia. It is time to fix this place or it will fix us.

Wow!  That’s a lot to unpack, so just a few cold Saturday morning thoughts before I post another Thinker photo.

I didn’t realize Governor Mary Fallin is now a Democrat since she is asking for $289 million to fund $5,000 pay raises for teachers (would be the first increase in the minimum salary schedule in ten years).

Statewide the “cash-sucking public school…bureaucracy” is $165.6 million out of just over $6 billion recorded expenditures in FY 2016 which is 2.75%, and not enough for the teacher pay raise.  My “bureaucracy” measure is Function 2300, General Administration, that includes every dime spent on superintendents and other mandated general administrative services.  The total expenditures of $6 billion is Functions 1000 through 4700 only to avoid Double, Double, Toil and Trouble (double counting); see how easy it is, OCPA fellows.  I’m not saying 500 school districts are necessary, though I suspect the better arguments about consolidation are rooted in what’s best for the children served.  I also find it ironic that “conservatives” who whine about administrative costs are the same ones who grant Oklahoma’s “virtual” charter schools, i.e. no brick and mortar and no supervision of children while parents work, the same per student funding as is given to public charter schools that do operate buildings and supervise children—no bidding, competition or negotiation it seems is needed.

The “able-bodied on Medicaid” are a tiny fraction of that cost also.  Medicaid is mostly about nursing home costs, health care for the disabled, children and pregnant women.  See Making Medicaid Great by economist Robert Samuelson.  I’m all for eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in any government program, as long as the efforts to do so don’t cost more than we’re likely to save.  I suspect the Oklahoma Health Care Authority’s ability to do eligibility audits has been greatly hampered by agency cut-backs in recent years (think Pogo).  Kind of like the last couple of years I’ve enjoyed driving our state highways knowing there are few troopers out there to inhibit my freedom to speed—at least until something happens and I need their help.

I wish it were “summer” but am glad it’s not “1787 Philadelphia”, see Who Wants to be a Billionaire?  (though 1972 Philadelphia was a pretty cool time and place to start our family at Penn’s hospital).  I doubt our founding fathers ever discussed imposing a 75% constitutional requirement to enact taxation; I wonder where Frank was in 1992 when our state’s “conservatives” set us on the road to failure.  See Brown Boys Dump Plan B on Oklahoma

As always lunch is on me for the first to ID the photo location.

 

 

White Sands Nat. Mon., N. M.; ID’d by Linda Ford Murphy

Since my last post this Thinker has been traveling and mastering QuickBooks so I have had little time to check up on the Limited Thinkers at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs and their echo tank the 1889 Institute.  However, I have new thinker photos to share and I saw the announcement this week that five former Oklahoma governors, including Frank Keating, are endorsing the Step Up Oklahoma initiative to address our state’s budget crisis and to fund teacher pay raises.  Here it is:

State’s five living former governors proclaim support for Step Up Oklahoma plan…Former Gov. Keating described Step Up Oklahoma’s proposal as a “lifeline.”

You see Frank Keating is on the Board of Directors of the OCPA which, for the almost two years I’ve been following their “research”, has tirelessly pushed the narrative that there is plenty of funding available for teacher pay raises and anything else essential for state government to do if we’d just cut out the waste, fraud and abuse and prioritize services using markets, freedom and liberty to guide us.  So it is quite funny, to this Thinker anyhow, to see the OCPA’s highest profile board member come out in favor of raising more revenue, yes increasing taxes, to right our state’s structural budget deficit and fund teacher pay raises.

Thus motivated I tore myself away from the intrigues of QuickBooks to check out the OCPA’s latest “Education Freedom” blog posts and was rewarded with The Truth About Education Spending, Relax School Regulations, Expand Parental Choice in Education, Give School Districts Flexibility to Raise Teacher Pay, and a couple of anti-OEA (the big, bad teachers union) posts thrown in for good measure.  They seem to be on a tear pushing their conclusions without, as usual, any real research, just a biased survey here, one bad apple school district there, and a regurgitation of stuff educators are required to do (see Accountability at a Glance from the State Department of Education website).  But all together it is more “sound and fury, signifying nothing” that will fund teacher pay raises or right our state’s budget.

A year ago, after the failure of the Boren led penny sales tax initiative (State Question 779), I wrote The Glib, The Bad and The Ugly  , summarizing my earlier critiques of how the OCPA has advocated funding teacher pay raises:  with a made up $100 million (the Glib), by imprudently using one-time fund balances to finance recurring salaries (the Bad), and by laying off teacher assistants, bus drivers, cooks and custodians in sufficient numbers to free up the money (the Ugly).  I’ve addressed their other feeble efforts in posts such as  Shooting Fish in a Tank  .

So now when the chips are down at the Capitol, why isn’t Frank advocating one or more of the “fellows” proposals?  More to the point why does Frank lend his name to the OCPA’s ongoing silliness so bereft of actual thought, research and understanding?

It must be a nice gig to be an OCPA fellow–just show up each day, hammer out a few hundred words of text, interspersed with a few buzz words like “markets”, “choice”, “freedom”, “entrepreneurial”, etc. and get paid for it.  But now when the highest profile member of your Board ain’t buying your drivel and instead is advocating tax increases, perhaps the limited thinkers are getting a little nervous.  At least they should be embarrassed because, Frankly, the real thinkers in our state aren’t catching what they’re pitching.

As always lunch is on me for the first to ID the photo location.