Washington Irving monument on Edison in Tulsa, ID’d by Jim Campbell.
When Governor Fallin issued an executive order in January directing the State Board of Education to compile a list of every public school district “that spends less than sixty percent (60%) of their budget on instructional expenditures” I wrote a post showing that, using statewide data, the percentage spent on instruction could be as low as 36.4% or as high as 68.6% depending on the definitions of “instructional expenditures” (the dividend) and “their budget” (the divisor). So naturally I was amused to see a political ad for Todd Lamb, candidate for governor, touting his plan to “maintain a focus on improving academic achievement, and reduce administrative costs so we get a minimum of 65% of every education dollar spent directly with teachers in the classroom.”
His website goes on to say:
Based on reports from the State Department of Education, currently fewer than ten of Oklahoma’s more than 500 school districts are spending at least 65% of their education dollars in the classroom. The low number of districts reaching even that modest threshold potentially understates how inefficiently our schools’ finances are being spent. One study shows that on a statewide basis, less than 45% of total education expenses went to instruction in 2016. For this reason, Todd Lamb will work to create a more transparent and accountable system for our schools so we will know we are getting the appropriate funds directed to the classroom. In-classroom expenditures include teacher salaries, textbooks and smartboards.
What candidate Lamb seems to believe is that a very few “districts are spending at least 65% of their education dollars in the classroom”, while statewide, according to “one study” less than 45% went to instruction. That means there are just a handful of superstar districts making the right choices while the vast majority are wasting our education dollars on stuff that doesn’t benefit kids or teachers or classrooms. I suspect the “fewer than ten” count came from the State Board of Education’s response to the executive order but I have not seen the list and don’t have access to the data in an easy to compute format (Excel), so I went in search of the few superstar districts by hand calculating the percentage for some districts from a list of those that do not receive state aid. I think those 39 districts are on the list because they receive enough local property taxes that they don’t qualify for state aid, meaning these are property tax wealthy districts. That also means they have a robust building fund that can be used for many non-instructional expenditures, like insurance, utilities and custodians, that poorer districts must pay from their general funds. I’ve written about this in several posts. When non-instructional expenditures are off-loaded from the general fund to the building fund then the instructional percentage increases in the general fund. After checking fewer than ten of the 39 I found two of the superstars, independent district Pryor in Mayes County and dependent district Banner in Canadian County.
What is it about these two districts that distinguishes them from the 500 others that expend less than 65% on instruction? Is it their local school board’s commitment to following Todd Lamb’s goal of putting more resources in classrooms, a commitment the other 500 don’t share? Or maybe, just maybe, it has to do, as I suspected, with their property tax wealth. Pryor, which serves about 2700 students, has benefitted greatly from the 2007 decision by Google to construct a data center there. Since then Google reports having invested $2.5 billion in the facility. No wonder then that its property tax valuation per student is $160,545, more than three times the statewide average of $49,471. Banner serves about 230 students and enjoys a property tax valuation per student of $246,403, five times the state average. The school facility appears to be located near several major industrial and supply firms with access to I-40 between Yukon and El Reno; it only takes a little good luck to skew Oklahoma property tax wealth for a very small district.
The specifics of why these two outlier districts are so property tax rich doesn’t matter. What does matter is having a governor who has some basic understanding of school finance since he or she should drive the policy discussions about how to fund and improve Oklahoma’s public schools which are our largest state service. If Todd Lamb wants every school district in Oklahoma to be like Pryor and Banner he should explain how he is going to multiply our state’s property tax wealth so every district can be that far above average.
What is also notable about Lamb’s “plan” is that while he pays lip service to the goal of having competitive salaries for Oklahoma’s teachers, nowhere does he take a position on whether voters should sign and/or vote for or against Dr. No’s referendum veto petition that would strip away the revenues passed by three-fourths of our 2018 legislature to fund teacher pay increases that will truly move us toward competitive salaries. He also wants a “transparent and accountable system for our schools so we will know we are getting the appropriate funds directed to the classroom.” We already have transparency through financial reports that are regularly published online and are open records available to all citizens; we have accountability through locally elected school boards, State Department of Education financial reporting requirements and annual financial audits. The information is there but shallow politicians like Todd Lamb will never take the time to “know” much at all about how school funds are used because facts get in the way of the agenda handed to them by their puppeteers who write the checks for their campaigns.
The fact is that if the funding for the teacher pay raise survives the veto referendum then the percentage expended on instruction in every school district will increase because teacher salaries are the largest component (In my post I show how the statewide percentage arguably will be 70%). Another fact is that if the funding does not survive, then the percentage expended will increase for “non-instructional” purposes, like utilities to light, heat and cool classrooms, like insurance to enable school districts to rebuild classrooms destroyed by fire, flood and windstorms, like motor fuel and parts to assure students get to the classroom, and many more essentials that will increase in cost with or without a teacher pay increase. Still another fact is that Lamb’s precious 65% does not include the services for students performed by librarians, speech pathologists, counselors, nurses, school secretaries and principals, custodians, bus drivers and the list goes on for both mandated and necessary support provided at the classroom and school levels.
If you are interested in the future of public education in this state and want the next governor to lead the discussion about how to best educate our state’s children for their, and our, future, you should not be interested in the shallow Lamb “plan” that only shows his failure to grasp how school funding in Oklahoma works and to do his homework with the transparent resources available to us all. He needs to get the wool out of his eyes and start reading.
As always lunch is on me for the first to ID the photo location.
Shari Lewis & Lamb Chop’s Plan: Lamb Chop Goes Back To School & Learns To Count
I still owe you lunch from 2016 photo ID you made.
When I first stated reading this, I immediately thought Banner….I already decided not to vote for Lamb because he was in office during the struggle this past spring. He was noticeably silent.