Month: April 2018

Trent England, my fave fellow at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, has posted “Legislation Lets Teachers Compete With Turf” supporting SJR 70, sponsored by Senator Bice, which I wrote about in “ The Bice Is Not Right ”.  My objection then was that lifting the restriction on uses (it’s not available for teacher compensation) of the 5 mill constitutional building fund levy will add little, if any, flexibility to school districts than they already have and is therefore more of a distraction than a help.  Now that Senator Bice and three-fourths of her colleagues have done the right thing by passing the historic teacher compensation increase I don’t worry so much about the distraction. 

Still, I think those, like Mr. England and Senator Bice, who are pushing this as a solution to something should answer these two questions.

1.  What districts can you name for which this will allow them to expend more for teacher or support personnel compensation than they already have the flexibility to do?  The only reasonable answer will be those school districts that have no Function 4000 (facilities acquisition and construction services) expenditures in their Building Fund and no  Function 2600 (operation and maintenance of plant services) expenditures in their General Fund.   Likely without exception, any district for which both are not true that claims it would pay staff more if only the building fund restrictions were lifted, is just using that as an unchallenged excuse, apparently accepted by the uninformed.  

2.  Do you support, in the name of operational equity, making the 5 mill building fund a “chargeable” in the state aid funding formula?  If not, why should this operational funding that is greatly skewed by local property wealth be exempt from equalization?  Upon passage of your constitutional amendment the 5 mill building fund levy will be indistinguishable from the other 39 mills that support school districts’ general funds.  All of that millage is a “chargeable” in the state aid formula, so this 5 mills should be also. 

Go ahead and spend the time and money to amend the constitution but don’t expect any real change to result, UNLESS you also make the 5 mill building fund levy a chargeable in the state aid formula.  Every legislator will know then which of their home districts have per student valuations above average (they’ll be against it like Edmond and Deer Creek) and which have below average (they’ll be for it like Piedmont and Yukon).  

Look at Catoosa’s OCAS reports for 2015, the year I think that has the OCPA in a tizzy:  Catoosa Expenditures 2015 and Catoosa Revenues 2015 .  It collected $764, 234 from its 5 mill levy; it expended $622,385 for Function 2600 (operation and maintenance of its facilities) in its general fund.  So Catoosa could have freed up that $622,385 for teacher compensation by shifting those expenditures to its building fund.  The state constitution didn’t prevent it from doing so; its own local priorities determined that—maybe buying a press box, maybe paying the utilities or insurance, we’d have to ask them.  But SJR 70 would not have changed it.  For Catoosa, arguably, the flexibility added is about $140,000.

Well that’s something you say.  But that’s not the end of it.  Catoosa is a “rich” district.  It’s valuation per student is $82,259 compared to the state average of $49,623.  Do the right thing and run its $764,234 through the state aid formula and that $140,000 flexibility will melt away into the general fund of a neighboring “poor” district or two which struggle to pay for utilities, insurance and custodial workers.  Equalization, possibly yes if Senator Bice will take the next step; flexibility, not much at all. 

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

John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park in Des Moines, IA ID’d by Juan Yanez-Lucero, and by my friend Tim Brown.

It must be hard times in the offices and hallways of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs to have their constant rant, that in spite of a decade of revenue reductions plenty of money was still available to fund teacher pay raises, soundly rejected by three-fourths of the Oklahoma legislature and our governor who approved the historic record teacher pay raise and the revenue to pay for it.   So in his April 19 post “School Shutdown Lessons” OCPA President Jonathan Small pivots and spins away from that harsh reality to reflect on the recent teacher walkout in Oklahoma and concludes with this muddle:

Another lesson is that context matters. Stories about Oklahoma losing teachers to Texas are true but omit critical facts. It is silly to argue that Oklahoma should increase our income tax to better compete for teachers with a state that has no income tax. Oklahomans now know that the minimum starting salary for a teacher in Texas is less than in Oklahoma.  How does Texas pay teachers more? It doesn’t. Local school districts do because they have greater access to property taxes – a far more reliable and stable revenue source than income or gross production taxes.  For the sake of the most vulnerable, we must do better.

Small is advocating more reliance on local property taxes, as determined by local school districts, to finance improvements in teacher compensation.  His reasoning, I think, is that property taxes are more reliable and stable than other sources, that local choice/empowerment is a good thing, and this would protect “the most vulnerable”.  Let’s think about each of these.

First, he cites no support for his belief that property taxes are more stable and reliable.  Anecdotally I’m confident we can find many examples of small and large property taxing jurisdictions experiencing the boom/busts of commercial, industrial and utility facility location decisions that belie his assertion.  Also the cyclical and other fluctuations of most broad-based revenue sources, i.e. taxes on property, income, sales, etc., can be mitigated with averaging approaches, think “Rainy Day Fund”, if lawmakers can maintain the discipline.

Second, allowing local taxpayers to decide to use more or less of their property tax capacity to finance teacher compensation, or any other government service, sounds like a nod to democracy and local decision-making, but with respect to school funding it is always a source of huge inequities.  For example, just in Oklahoma County a taxpayer in poor Bethany would have to pay nine dollars for every dollar paid by an Edmond taxpayer to fund the same teacher pay raise.

Yes, Texas relies more on locally generated and approved property taxes to fund its schools which quite likely contributes to having median teacher pay range across the state from just over $41,000 in the Abilene region to well over $55,000 in metropolitan Houston ( Texas Teacher Compensation ).  Sure part of that discrepancy may be due to labor market forces and cost of living differences as well; a real Think, not Stink Tank might try to sort that out before advocating the same for Oklahoma.

It also has resulted in years of protracted litigation (see Cockamamie? You Don’t Know Cockamamie! ) and what appears to this Okie as an enormously complex and likely contentious state school funding formula.  For example, see this from the Texas Education Agency’s website:

Chapter 41 of the Texas Education Code (TEC) makes provisions for certain school districts to share their local tax revenue with other school districts. For the purposes of the school finance system in Texas, districts are designated as either Chapter 41 or Chapter 42 districts. The relative wealth of the school district is measured in terms of the taxable value of property that lies within the school district borders divided by the number of students in weighted average daily attendance (WADA). Chapter 41’s provisions are sometimes referred to as the “share the wealth” or “Robin Hood” plan because districts subject to Chapter 41 of the TEC are required to share their wealth with other school districts. The funds that are distributed by Chapter 41 districts are “recaptured” by the school finance system to assist with the financing of public education for all school districts. 

Let me translate for the Limited Thinkers at the OCPA and anyone else advocating more reliance on local property taxes to fund education in Oklahoma.  Property valuations per student vary wildly among Oklahoma’s school districts.  Any proposal to rely more on property taxes to fund teacher compensation or general operations, if it is to be taken seriously, must address how to maintain reasonably equitable funding among wealthy and poor school districts so that all can provide quality education as promised by our State in these words:

“to provide the best possible educational opportunities for every child in Oklahoma…State support should be extended to all local districts regardless of wealth, for this not only develops a sense of broader responsibility, but also creates flexibility taxwise permitting the exercise of local initiative. State support should, to assure equal educational opportunity, provide for as large a measure of equalization as possible among districts. The taxing power of the state should be utilized to raise the level of educational opportunity in the financially weakest districts of the state.”  Excerpts from Title 70, Section 18-101.

Fortunately, those who drafted Oklahoma’s current system of financing our schools were not as shallow or ill-informed as Small appears to be.  It may well be time to provide more local flexibility to fund our schools, but glib one-liners filled with Texas envy that ignores Texas inequity are not the place to start.

Lastly I’m very curious to know about the “most vulnerable” who will be helped by relying more on local property taxes.  I don’t think they are the same owners of expensive housing that seemed vulnerable to Tom Coburn ( Dr. No’s Holiday (Home)?  ) recently because they would have to pay more.  Small needs to shed his Texas envy long enough to learn some facts and history.  Here are facts about Regional Taxes from the Tulsa County Assessor’s office:

Yes, Texas has no income tax but its property taxes are more than double Oklahoma’s.  The thing about property taxes, unlike income and sales taxes, is that homeowners have to pay them regardless of their ability to pay.  If you earn more and therefore buy more stuff you pay more income and sales taxes; earn less and you pay less.  By contrast your property taxes are not directly related to your yearly economic fortunes.  Which leads us to a history lesson for Small—California’s Proposition 13.

California was experiencing such economic prosperity and growth that housing values escalated rapidly throughout the 1960s and into the 70s.  Many who bought their homes in the 1950s and since retired on fixed incomes found themselves facing property tax bills they could not afford.  That led to the granddaddy of modern anti-tax activism, California’s Proposition 13, which was likely inspiration for the Brown boys I describe in “ Brown Boys Dump Plan B on Oklahoma  ” who led the charge for the supermajority requirement to raise Oklahoma taxes AND the founding of the OCPA.

The legacy of Proposition 13 is more directly felt in Oklahoma with such provisions as the annual cap on assessed valuation increases and the senior freeze for low income Geezers.  Perhaps these protections are effective; perhaps they shift the property tax burden more to working families when they purchase a new home, or to renters whose landlords pass on the increases.  I don’t know, and neither does Mr. Small.  So we both remain clueless about the identity of his “most vulnerable” who will benefit from the higher property taxes he recommends.  Maybe someday he’ll decide to so some real research instead of just making stuff up.

As always lunch is on me for the first to ID the photo location, which isn’t in Texas but looks like it ought to be.

With my progeny’s return to school I had time to check on how the Limited Thinkers at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs are doing after the legislature approved the historic teacher pay raise and revenue increases to fund it (though some lacked the courage to do the latter, see Chuck has his cake).  It is not a pretty sight–same ole, same ole.  Here’s a summary of their recent output:

In “Turf Over Textbooks” Jonathan Small takes a break from the OCPA’s past harping about Catoosa’s stadium press box to instead harp about Owasso’s artificial turf implying if only local districts could use borrowed money to pay for teacher raises there’d be no need for legislative tax increases.  (See Done Waiting for Mr. Bond , Unbelievable! ).

New contributor Mike Brake expresses a concern shared with his colleagues at the OCPA in “School Districts’ Funding Confusing to Taxpayers”, namely that they don’t understand basic school finance in Oklahoma.  (See The Bice Is Not Right  , This Is Too Much Fun , Same Song, Umpteenth Verse and Piling On  ).

I’m feeling generous today so here it is in a nutshell Mr. Brake:  The General and Building Funds are for operations, more than 80% of which is for personnel.  Most of this money passes through the state aid equalization formula which largely levels operational revenues per student among districts, but also makes most school districts dependent on state funding, i.e. the legislature.  The Child Nutrition fund (and function 3000 in some general funds) is for feeding students and can’t be diverted to other operations.  Bond funds are borrowed money for school facilities construction and maintenance and for purchasing “equipment” as defined by the legislature.  The amounts available per student vary widely among districts depending on their assessed property valuation per student.  These funds are approved by local voters and paid for out of districts’ sinking funds.  Counting both the bond funds and the sinking funds, as the OCPA has consistently done ( Double, Double, Toil and Trouble ), overstates the amount of revenue available.  Other funds are tiny and for specific purposes, i.e. student activity and gift/endowment.

“Outsider Involvement in School Staff Protests” (or “Lions and Tigers and Bernie, oh my!”) is a not so veiled effort by the OCPA staff to link Senator Bernie Sanders’ support for Oklahoma teachers with the Department of Public Safety’s concern that certain unnamed groups might try to foment violence during the teacher walkout.  Look out, there may be a Socialist under your bed!

In “The $106K Teacher” by Jonathan Small and “Teacher Shortage?  Not Here” by Brandon Dutcher, they would lead the uninformed reader to conclude that charter schools, by getting their priorities straight, are able to pay teachers better than traditional public schools.  What they don’t bother to share is that their poster child Epic Charter is primarily a “virtual school”, meaning its students mostly stay at home and do their work online; possibly an adult is home as well, or maybe not.   The reality is that the legislature, in its wisdom, awards virtual charter schools the same funding as brick and mortar schools so Epic has at least 95% of the operational funding that is available to its two closest, in size, school districts, namely Enid and Yukon.  Epic staffs at 23.5 students per teacher compared to Enid at 13.8 and Yukon at 14.1 (using SDE FY 2017 data).  Additionally, how many custodians, bus drivers and teacher assistants do you suppose Epic employs–not.  Yes, if schools no longer had to staff for supervising, transporting and cleaning up after our children, we could pay those left manning the call centers a whole lot more (and have lot’s left over for Epic’s private partners).  Not only that but on the State’s vaunted school report cards, EPIC earned two D’s and a C, while Yukon received 6 A’s and 5 B’s and Enid 2 A’s, 5 B’s, 6 C’s, and 2 D’s.  I could conclude that Epic’s families aren’t getting much value for that $106k, but that would be about as logical as Small and Dutcher implying that traditional public schools are rampant with unchecked bullying. 

I’ve tried repeatedly to help Curtis Shelton ( The Education of Little Thinker  , Piling On and Same Song, Umpteenth Verse ) understand how to work with data, apparently with little effect.  In “With A Raise, Where Do Oklahoma Teachers Rank In The Region?” he takes Fiscal Year 2017 average teacher salary data for the states in our region, which shows Oklahoma at the bottom, and adds the $6100 average pay increase for FY 2019 to Oklahoma’s FY 2017 average and concludes we are now number two—behind only Texas.  Obvious to all except Mr. Shelton I guess, that assumes the other four states have no increases in FY 2018 or FY 2019.  Still, the enacted increase is substantial, appreciated and long overdue since the last in FY 2008.

Trent England in “Can We Trust Local School Districts?” continues to look fondly across the Red River with “Texas Envy”.   He alleges “The only reason a first-year Texas teacher makes more than an equivalent teacher in Oklahoma is that local districts choose to pay teachers more—and they have the money.”  That’s an interesting conclusion given that Texas also has a minimum salary schedule, admittedly well-below Oklahoma’s, and that the vast majority of Oklahoma’s teachers are on local schedules that exceed the state minimum.  The part of Texas school finance he envies, more reliance on local property taxes, has kept that state embroiled in school equity litigation for decades (see Cockamamie? You Don’t Know Cockamamie! ), so by repeating Trent’s Double Fault, he forfeits the match.

As always, lunch is on me for the first to ID the location, with particular specificity this time.

One of this Thinker’s pass-times is serving as Uber driver for teen grandchildren who attend Jenks Middle School, so this past week involved more trips down South Lewis Avenue and time in far south Tulsa than this mid-towner is used to.  The highlights of the week were granddaughter’s carrot cake:

And grandson’s attack by a rat snake on the banks of the Arkansas River.

The grandchildren and I decided that Monday we will go to the Capitol and join the effort to get back to our old lives.

So it is a bit of serendipity that my attention was called to a post by Representative Chuck Strohm at http://chuckstrohm.com/inside-the-captiol/   I doubt Strohm will have time to meet with my progeny, but it will be good conversation on the drive to OKC to share with them what I’ve learned about their state representative.  You see, turns out he had the “courage” to vote for the teacher pay raise, but not for the tax increases that will pay for it.

His post, ostensibly about his dismay when a constituent asked him ‘What can we pray about so that the legislature is willing to fix the injustice that has been done to our teachers.’, is really a lightly informed effort to justify his obvious attempt to have his cake and eat it too.   Here are the questions he attempts to answer, interspersed with my commentary: 

What is the injustice he was talking about?  If this misunderstood representative had also voted to pay for the funding that makes the teacher pay raise possible, I’d give him lots of love, along with his colleagues who truly merit it, because, after a full decade of stagnant salary schedules, Oklahoma’s teachers definitely deserve and need the increase.  The three-fourths majority in both houses of the legislature and Governor Fallin who had the political courage to do the right thing certainly surprised this Thinker.   It was an awesome, historic accomplishment for our state and public education.   The only “injustice” here is that Representative Strohm gets to campaign for reelection touting his vote for the teacher pay raise out of one side of his mouth while using the other to tout his votes against the taxes that pay for it.

Who sets teachers’ salaries?  Strohm tries to get legalistic here saying that because “actual” teacher salaries are determined by local school boards, “if you are unhappy with your salaries, your fight should be with them.”  I suppose if he was your landlord and you had no heat because he hadn’t paid the gas bill, he’d tell you, “it’s the gas company that turns your gas on and off, if you are unhappy, your fight should be with them.”  When it comes to teacher salaries the revenue available to school districts is determined by our state constitution and the legislature.  Without increased funding from property tax growth or sources controlled by the legislature, teacher pay raises are only possible if a school districts cuts expenditures for something else.   Maybe Strohm will help the Jenks Public Schools Board pay its teachers even more by using his math skills to delineate exactly where the money is to come from.  

Do all districts pay the minimum salary schedule?  Strohm says, “Absolutely not! The narrative that all Oklahoma schools pay the minimum is simply not true. No one is allowed to pay less and many pay more.  That is the trouble with minimum wages, instead of allowing the free market to set teacher salaries through competition, we have a minimum wage mindset that keeps wages low.”    I can’t tell you the joy this brought to my heart.  You see Strohm is an engineer and I come from a family of engineers—grandfather, father, uncles, brother, all were engineers.  I was the rebel who studied economics (partly redeemed by having an engineer daughter).  If Strohm would take a minute to read what conservative economists have to say about the impact of a minimum wage on labor markets, or a half minute to look up the definition of “minimum”, he’d have a good laugh at his own expense.  First, duh, you don’t enact a minimum wage to keep wages low, rather a minimum wage is intended to increase wages above a market level that is deemed too low.  Basic economic analysis shows that a minimum wage, set above the market wage, will cause a surplus, i.e. unemployment, in that labor market.  So if Oklahoma’s minimum salary schedule is indeed effective, what we would see are lots of quality applicants for teaching positions throughout the state—not.    

Does Strohm support a Teacher Pay Raise?   Yep, we already know this.  He likely supports everything government does that is good, as long as he doesn’t have to vote for or pay the taxes that support it. 

How much does a teacher pay raise actually cost?   The good engineer, having learned that a $1000 teacher pay raise, for the almost 50,000 who would receive it, costs about $57 million, has concluded that if you didn’t know that also, you must be a socialist—seriously. 

Details about the Pay Raise from last week:   Here he partly redeems himself by pointing out that the pay raise he supported, but won’t pay for, will help make our state more competitive in attracting and retaining good teachers.

A little math…. and who is telling the truth?   He says, “The problem with engineers is that we actually run the numbers rather than just believing what we are told.  So, let’s do a little math.”  He then calculates the student/teacher ratio to be 16.3 and concludes:  “Teachers have been telling me all week that they have 28 – 30 kids per classroom, yet the NEA data says we have 16.3 kids per classroom. I would say we have a problem.”   Yes, and the problem is this legislator doesn’t understand the legislative mandates that require lower class sizes for many classes, such as special education and early childhood and the engineer doesn’t understand that 16.3 is an average so that the 28 students in the 5^th grade regular classroom is averaged with the 10 in a special education classroom.  If only 12 students enroll in the high school calculus class apparently the engineer would combine them with the 12 taking French to avoid a lower student/teacher ratio.  Unlike his fantasy engineer world where every teacher and student would be interchangeable round pegs fitting into round holes, and you could discard the misfits, the real world and schoolhouses of public education have a lot of square pegs.  And here’s a late addition I thought of while driving back from the Capitol (grandchildren didn’t get to see him because it was so crowded we couldn’t get inside).  Particularly secondary schools are required by accreditation standards to have planning periods for a teacher.  So while you can count students as a 1 when dividing, teachers don’t have classes all day so they must be counted as a fraction.  If, for example, that fraction was 5/6 (one plan out of six periods), immediately the engineer’s 16.3 goes to 19.6.  As any engineer should know, “garbage in, garbage out”.  You can do the math correctly, but if it’s with the wrong numbers you get garbage for an answer.

The definition of a Teacher.   We all, of a certain age, remember the line “It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.”  Our engineer is in a jazz believing if he could exclude administrators from the definition of “teacher” when allocating funding for pay raises that would solve something.  He also alleges, “Oklahoma has had significant growth in administrative staffing that is much greater than the increase of student population.”  His allegation is true or false depending on the start and stop of your comparison.  Using the data reported by the Oklahoma Office of Accountability, the most recent fiscal year being 2016 and oldest 1999 available on their website, since 2002 student population grew 9.2% while administrative staff grew 13.2%; but since 2009 students grew 5.6% while administrators only 2.3%.  So what does he think that has to do with teacher pay raises?  I think, but am not sure, that if Strohm had his way, the amount of funding determined for a statewide teacher pay increase would not include compensation for administrators.  So either school boards would adjust teacher pay while leaving administrators’ compensation flat, or they would have to come up with the money on their own.  I suspect he thinks that would be an incentive to hire fewer administrators.  I expect that the approved teacher pay raise will be implemented in the same way the last one was in FY 2009 which I handled for a school district.  True, the amount statewide was totaled up according to a definition that included certified administrators, but that statewide amount was then dumped into the state aid formula where the money is paid out according to the number of weighted students served, not the number of adults employed.  The engineer should understand that does not reward an individual district for having more administrators or teachers.

Let’s do a little more math.  In 2016 statewide there were 3595 administrators, 516 school districts and 1761 school sites.  If we allow one superintendent for each district and one principal for each school site, then that accounts for all but 1318 administrators.  Eliminating those administrators would certainly free up enough funding for a $1000 pay raise, but not $2000; AND that assumes there are no assistant principals, no assistant superintendents and no athletics directors even in the largest districts.  Good luck selling that to school boards and the public.  Likely there are some administrative positions statewide that could be eliminated without impacting student safety and education.  I doubt it would pay for as much of a teacher pay raise as would going to a unicameral legislature.

Integrity – what are we teaching our children?   I can relate to Strohm’s Charlie Brown analogy with Lucy moving the football—that’s exactly how those of us responsible for managing school district budgets since 2009 have felt when faced with repeated “revenue failures”, partly caused by our “Lucy’s”, the legislators who believed the supply side economics nonsense that lowering taxes would increase state revenue.  This folly since the Great Recession has distinguished Oklahoma as the state with the largest reduction in state formula funding per student, a hole we may now climb out of in spite of the engineer wanting to dig it still deeper.

To paraphrase his query back at him, “I would like to ask our engineer legislator who voted for a teacher pay raise costing about $400 million, but didn’t support the tax increases needed to pay for it; what message are you teaching our children?  Is it OK to take credit for mandating a teacher pay raise, but not provide the funding to cover its cost?  Isn’t this the “essence of Socialism” that stems from a political culture of spending in an election year without any fiscal accountability.”

So what is the teacher walkout really all about?   Again, I agree that the teacher pay raise passed by the legislature, and funded without help from Representative Strohm, is historic and deserves to be celebrated.  All thanks to the 75%.

The battle is with the School Board and Superintendents, not the legislature.   Here’s an open invitation, I’ll sit with you to conduct an honest review of Oklahoma school finance data and will demonstrate that, short of laying off large numbers of teacher assistants, bus drivers and custodians, the only way to finance the teacher pay raise is with new revenue from the state.  Please stop claiming there is plenty of money in current school budgets for teacher pay raises and realize that your offered solutions simply do not add up. 

It’s time for REFORM.   There is always room for improvement and school districts can do a better job.  But the key to successful schools is having talented and dedicated educators and leadership in each and every school.  We have the best chance to employ effective teachers for our children if we can offer competitive compensation.  Changing the definition of “teacher” isn’t reform, nor is requiring expensive audits and transparency of financial records that are already open to the public; rather these are just more distractions from school districts’ core mission–and more talking points for a legislator who likely has little else to show for his time at the Capitol.  So I would say to his constituent, “Pray for a legislator who will take the time to understand basic school finance and who has the integrity to fund the spending he mandates.”

Here’s hoping the engineer gets to meet my grandchildren on Monday.  

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