Central High School in Topeka, KS, which the Thinker wrongly thought was the school involved in Brown v. Board of Education; ID’d by Clark Frailey.
I’ve been commenting on gubernatorial candidate platforms and other matters of interest to me which has taken me away from my usual foils, the good fellows at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, for over two months. So it’s past time to see what silliness they have been up to. Three articles caught my attention.
The first by Mike Brake, Official Says Some Assessors Shortchange Schools, Counties, reports on a study done by the Oklahoma County Assessor’s office that looked at valuation practices in 12 of Oklahoma’s 77 counties. The study finds wide variations in assessment practices that are consistent with the 2013 Equalization Performance Audit commissioned by the State Board of Equalization which found 35 counties out of compliance. Since the OCPA seems otherwise to be on a tear to greatly increase property tax revenues in Oklahoma as a way to fund public education, a state responsibility, it is a good thing that they take an interest in making sure assessment practices are consistent across all 77 counties. Simply stated, if assessment practices are allowed to vary widely then the whim of individual assessors will thwart efforts to achieve fairness among taxpayers and adequate funding for schools statewide. I’ve requested a copy of the Oklahoma County Assessor’s study and may have more to say later.
The second, Distorting Facts To Fit A Narrative, by Jonathan Small could be funny if it weren’t so disingenuous. Mr. Small is annoyed by a politician half a continent away who probably did distort facts and misuse terminology, but Small, who lives in a house made of glass, should not talk like a kettle because he need only look down the hall, or in a mirror, to find examples of authors “distorting fact to fit a narrative”. As I’ve repeatedly documented in this blog, he and his colleagues so consistently distort facts and misuse terminology that it is notable only when they don’t. In the recent two-year run up to the teacher pay raise this spring the fellows at the OCPA, and sister Stink Tank the 1889 Institute, consistently pushed the narrative that there was plenty of funding available for raises by distorting the facts in a variety of ways, including counting the same revenue twice, referring to teacher aides and cafeteria workers as “administrators”, implying that fund balances are recurring revenue, inflating numbers without disclosure and, my favorite, just making stuff up.
The third, Flood Of Federal Dollars Damages Accountability, by Trent England is arguably another example Mr. Small could use of distorting facts (“Nobody is ever on the hook”) to fit a narrative (Government wastes the money it spends), but it’s hard to argue he is distorting facts when he presents little of them. He includes the State Department of Education as one of those agencies receiving the corrupting hundreds of millions of dollars so let’s look at some facts about those programs.
Here’s the total federal revenue, $693 million (out of the total $6.091 billion from all sources–local, county, state and private) flowing through SDE to Oklahoma school districts for the 2016-2017 fiscal year.
Three programs clearly dominate and fit the “hundreds of millions of dollars” that concern Mr. England. The largest is $239 million for breakfast and lunch programs in school cafeterias statewide; the mandatory state match for this program was $3.1 million that year. Our poor legislators were bullied by the U. S. Department of Agriculture into spending almost a penny and a half for every dollar of food Oklahoma’s neediest children consumed. To quote a most compassionate commentator, “womp, womp”. Mr. England, the accountability here is pretty simple, if you don’t like how the school lunch programs is run at your school, take it up with your school district, or if you don’t think there should be a school lunch program, take it up with your elected representatives in Congress.
The next largest is $191.7 million for “disadvantaged students”, a program which began as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The funding is allocated to school districts nationwide primarily based on the incidence of poverty as measured by U. S. Census Bureau, specifically their Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates. To my knowledge there is no significant financial match, or distortion of priorities, caused by this funding at either the state or local level.
I taught remedial mathematics for two years during the early 70s in a Tulsa junior high school program that was funded with these dollars. With my faithful assistant Alice (who humiliated me on the tennis court) and a class size of twelve we were able to teach students, often one on one, who otherwise would have been buried in a classroom with over thirty other students. It seemed to work well with many returning to the “regular” classes the next semester. Mr. England, the accountability here is pretty simple, if you don’t like how these programs are run at your school, take it up with your school district, or if you don’t think this federal program should exist, take it up with your elected representatives in Congress.
The third largest is $136.1 million to support compliance with the federal “Individuals with Disabilities Education Act” first enacted in 1975. This is the law that requires school districts throughout the nation to serve students with disabilities according to federal standards. Working at a public high school as I did in 2005 was in marked contrast with my experience as a student at Nathan Hale High School in 1965, my senior year. I don’t recall interacting with any students with disabilities and don’t even know if they were allowed to attend.
I suspect that the educational services provided to students with disabilities across the country varied widely, with some states and districts working hard to educate all children while other states and districts were doing as little as they could get away with. Regardless, for whatever reasons, Congress determined in 1975 that there should be a national standard for the educational services to be provided to students with disabilities at all public schools. That is what Congress does, whether Mr. England likes it or not, it passes laws that it believes are necessary and proper for the good of the nation.
According to public school world which I’ve inhabited as a teacher, an administrator, a school board member and a lawyer for almost 50 years, part of the bargain in 1975 was that the federal government would help fund the costs of providing the additional services for students with disabilities mandated by the new law, and that it would do so at the approximate level of 40%. According to the National School Board Association the actual level is now about 16%.
Let me translate that for Mr. England, who might go to the OCPA’s silly data tool and calculate the total of program 239 expenditures statewide in FY17 and subtract from that the $136.1 million in federal funding for education of Oklahoma students with disabilities to see how much Oklahoma school districts, with state and local funding, expended to meet this federal law mandate. He might then search for a school board member, administrator, parent of a student with a disability, who thinks Oklahoma school districts receive too much from the federal government to help meet the mandate.
Mr. England, just like the other two programs that spend hundreds of millions of dollars, the accountability here is pretty simple, if you don’t like how educational services for students with disabilities are provided at your school, take it up with your school district, or if you don’t think educational services for students with disabilities should be a federal mandate, take it up with your elected representatives in Congress.
I hope I’ve provided some transparency about the education programs guilty of using federal funds. I suspect it would be fairly easy to do the same for the other programs he mentions, those administered by the Department of Health and Health Care Authority, using hundreds of millions of dollars. So I spent less than ten minutes perusing the Governor’s FY17 budget proposal and quickly found that the Health Care Authority is dominated by Medicaid programs, namely health insurance for low income families and the disabled, and long term (nursing home) care for the elderly. It’s pretty damn transparent that Mr. England would rather whine about accountability than just simply state that he doesn’t think taxpayers should help finance health insurance for children or provide long term care for the elderly who can’t pay for it. Let them beg in the streets.
The Department of Health operates a myriad of programs that readily appear to be efforts at prevention, like nutrition for infants, immunizations to prevent contagious diseases, medical services for pregnant women, and many more that doubtless help avoid much greater costs to us all in the future. What is Mr. England’s vision–a return to a time not so long ago when infectious diseases killed more people than cancer, when a high percentage of children died before reaching adulthood (check your family history), when childbirth was a major cause of death for women? These advances in public health we’ve accomplished, some of it even during my life time, are not without expense, without laws that restrict our “freedoms” or even without bureaucrats administering public health programs.
If your narrative is that federal funds corrupt state level decision-making, then be transparent (give us the facts) about the programs those federal funds pay for and tell us which ones you’d be willing to eliminate and how the state would pay for the ones you’d keep. Now that would be accountability and transparency by example. Otherwise you are just “distorting facts to fit a narrative.”
As always lunch is on me for the first to ID the photo location.
Topeka, HS
Yes, you are right. Look forward to meeting you.