Oklahoma Councilor for Public Accountability

Bridge at about 86th and Lewis into now closed Southern Villa Trailer Park where relatives lived for over 40 years.  ID’d by Greg Morris, Robert Franklin and Nancy Oswald.  We’ll have a fun Sandite lunch.

Having spent ten years as the first city councilor from Tulsa’s District 4 I do try to stay informed and was pleasantly surprised to learn that four qualified candidates are seeking election for the open seat in the upcoming August 28 nonpartisan primary.  I found information about them and a link to each campaign website here on Sustainable Tulsa’s site.  After reading the information about each I became even more uncertain about who would earn my vote so a friend and I decided to take matters into our own hands and host sequential neighborhood gatherings for all four.

After contacting each candidate, by the end of the following day we had scheduled Juan Miret followed by Kara Joy McKee on Thursday, July 19 and Daniel Regan followed by Barbra Kingsley on Wednesday, July 26, allowing each an hour to make their pitch and answer questions.  I learned later that there were candidate forum opportunities that I could have attended, but as a frequent candidate myself I was never fond of those events because you spent most of your time listening to the other candidates and thought each would appreciate having quality time to interact with several voters.  We had about fifteen voters each night with half that number attending both nights.

The four hours of local democracy at its best made it no easier for me to choose a candidate to support, EXCEPT I told myself in advance that, barring a clear favorite emerging, I would vote for the one who, without prompting, volunteered the most passion for improving public transportation in Tulsa.  Let me explain why.

Mayors everywhere are expected to fix most everything that is wrong, but what is actually within their responsibility is determined by the laws of their state and city.  Based on my fourteen years as an elected official with the City of Tulsa here are the primary functions of our city government and my brief evaluation of how well they work in Tulsa:

Airport:  we have one and you can fly lots of places on several airlines.

Cultural, Athletic, Convention and Entertainment Facilities:  we have the BOK, OneOk Stadium, the PAC, our convention center and Gilcrease Museum, pretty nice for our size city.

Police, Fire and Emergency Medical:  call 911 and well-trained professionals respond.

Floodplain and Stormwater Management:  we have a model system that was established after the 1984 flood and functions to prevent flooding like that which devastated our city in the 70s and 80s (knock on wood).

Land Use Development and Zoning:  we got it and it’s the rare homeowner who has to worry about a Sonic going in next door.

Municipal Court:  I’ve paid my share of tickets there and our judges are competent and honest.

Parks and Recreation:  forget the TV series, I love Woodward, Mohawk, River Parks and can’t wait for the Gathering Place.

Refuse Disposal:  it gets picked up on the appointed day with recycling to boot.

Water and Sewer:  turn on the tap and there it is, likely better for you than the bottled stuff you choose to pay for (so my dentist says); then you flush and it’s gone.

Streets, Expressways and Traffic Engineering:  I don’t like orange barrels either, but asphalt and pavement beat the gravel and dirt roads that still serve cities elsewhere on our planet, plus in midtown we’re 15 minutes from everywhere.

My point is we may have our gripes here and there and concerns with costs and choices for some of them, but fairly rated all of the above deserve at least passing grades and most much better than that.  The one exception for Tulsa city services, fairly rated, is our public transportation system.  I intend no disrespect for or disparagement of the work done by the good people employed by Tulsa Transit.  The reality is that Tulsa, for decades, has grossly under-funded public transportation and the result is it just doesn’t work well by any reasonable measure.

Linda and I lived four years in Philadelphia without a car and became very familiar with its transit system.  It had its problems and still does, but we were able to lead a pretty normal life, getting to work, school, shopping and entertainment seven days a week.  Just like turning on the tap, flushing the toilet, or dialing 911, the buses, trolleys and subway cars kept coming and got us where we needed and wanted to be; I don’t recall ever having to check a schedule.

Try to do that here in Tulsa; seriously, put your car keys away for a day or two and you will see what I mean.  Here’s how Linda and I would have managed our day on Friday, and we’re retired.

1. Walk a block from our house to catch the 112 northbound at Lewis and 17^th at 6:24 am. Get off at Freeway Café at 3^rd and Rockford about 6:34 am to meet friends for breakfast at 7.
2. Breakfast ends at 8 so hopefully catch the 112 northbound at 8:04, if missed catch it at 8:49. Arrive at 3^rd and Boulder to collect granddaughter from her mother’s work a few minutes later.
3. Walk a block to downtown transit station and catch the 112 south bound at 8:25 am arriving back at 17^th and Lewis about 8:45 am.
4. Decide to see movie at Circle Cinema at 2:20 pm so catch 112 northbound again at 1:54 pm getting off at 3^rd and Lewis where it heads downtown, then walk a block to the Circle. Movie ends two hours later so catch the 112 southbound at 4:54 pm back at 3^rd and Lewis arriving about 5:08 at 17^th Street.

Not too shabby, but very fortunate the 112 uses 3^rd Street to access downtown.  Now let’s pretend I work a 7-3 shift at St. Francis hospital.

I catch the 112 southbound about 6:25 am, a block from my house and get off at 51^st and Harvard about 6:38 am, hoping we arrive before the 210 southbound connects at 6:46 am, which gets me to St. Francis at 6:56 am, not too bad if I can clock in by 7 am.  If I don’t have any margin for error, then I start my trip 45 minutes earlier because these buses run 45 minutes apart.

To get home I catch a 3:13 pm bus easily connecting with the 112 by 3:54 pm and get home an hour after I began.   If my shift changes to a 3-11, I can make the 3 pm start by catching the 112 before 2 pm, but the last bus home that night leaves St. Francis at 11:05 pm and I get to walk the last half mile home.   I live close to several routes; try it where you live.

There’s another aspect to this—family economics.  Read Sunday’s article in the World about Tulsa’s high eviction rate.   An attorney handling evictions for landlords is quoted saying, “Nobody making $11 an hour can afford an apartment in Tulsa. Not on their own, anyway. They just can’t afford it.”

What does an article about evictions have to do with public transit?  These same individuals and families being evicted must also struggle with affording transportation, i.e. car payments and insurance and repairs.  This harsh reality, in my opinion, explains why around 25% of Oklahoma’s drivers are uninsured.  Imagine what a difference it would make in many families’ lives if they could get by with one less car or no car at all.  We did that for many years and the money we would have spent on operating a car went to purchasing a house.

Also a large percentage of Tulsans cannot physically operate a car—yet they get to pay sales and property taxes to maintain the streets we car owners drive and park on.  In cities where public transit works a huge financial burden is lifted from many and their lives are greatly enhanced.   I made these arguments repeatedly in many settings with Tulsa policy-makers during my fourteen years at City Hall, mostly falling on deaf ears because, I think without exception, none of my colleagues had ever been transportation dependent, as I had chosen to be earlier in my life, and just couldn’t get it.

I suspect all four Council District 4 candidates actually do get it, or readily would if challenged to, but the one who volunteered his experience and passion with improving public transportation in Tulsa was Daniel Regan.  He’s getting my vote.

As always lunch is on me for the first to ID the photo location, which is somewhere along the 112 route.

After proudly critiquing Kevin Stitt’s education platform in my last post cleverly titled “Stitt Strikes Out” I looked forward to more of the same reviewing the platform of his run-off opponent Mick Cornett.  While I don’t feel defeated by any means, this exercise has not been nearly as much fun.  First I struggled to come up with a clever name, trying hard for a meaningful alliteration playing off the musical instrument but finally settled on imagery that captures my more substantive frustration, namely that his website really says very little about his plans for education.  Here are his statements with each followed by my comments:

“Mick’s mother was a teacher and he understands the importance education plays in growing our economy, promoting a stronger workforce and creating better jobs that keep our kids and grandkids here.”  I can’t argue with a nicely stated platitude that invokes a mother for authority.

“Mick believes teachers deserve a raise. He would like to see salaries increased to the regional average with competitive pay increases for STEM teachers.”  Unlike Stitt who said he supports a raise for teachers but didn’t support the funding, Cornett remained initially noncommittal on the raise and funding package but in the end spoke out against the referendum veto effort.  He recognizes that the raise is a big deal and new revenue is needed to fund it.  But what’s this about singling out STEM teachers?  As a former math teacher I appreciate the thought; as a student of economics I understand the logic; but as a lawyer I don’t know that the facts are in evidence; and as one who appreciates the importance of well-rounded education including languages, humanities, the social sciences and fine arts, I question the wisdom of what this implies. 

“With advances in technology, education is a lifelong endeavor. Mick wants to raise the expectations for education in our state and create a culture that empowers families and individuals—regardless of age or income— to seek the best educational outcomes.”  Is this more platitudes or some code words for school choice?  Or maybe the “income” reference means he’s a fellow traveler with me wanting to assure equality of educational resources available to students in all districts.

To his credit Cornett has served as mayor of Oklahoma City for 14 years and has faced the reality of balancing budgets, assuring adequate revenues and making tough choices in a political environment.  Perhaps it is that experience that has taught him to keep his positions on issues, if he has them, “close to his vest” until absolutely necessary because there is somewhat less substance in his education platform than in Stitt’s.

As a side note, showing my turnpike rivalry mentality from 20 years of service as an elected official in Tulsa, I do want to point out that Oklahoma City’s MAPS for Kids funding, while certainly laudable, does not indicate greater support for education by the city’s political leadership in Oklahoma City than in Tulsa.  The Tulsa County Vision 2020 program that build the BOK Center included funding for area schools, and, more importantly, the Tulsa Public Schools have enjoyed a facilities construction and renovation renaissance since the mid-1990s when Tulsa’s Mayor Susan Savage led the campaign for the first major bond issue in over 20 years.  By contrast MAPS for Kids, as I recall, was conceived after Oklahoma City voters had rejected school district bond issue efforts.  The legacy of that success continues today as shown by comparing Tulsa’s sinking fund revenue, $69 million for FY 2017, which is almost double Oklahoma City’s $37 million despite Tulsa being the slightly smaller district in student population.

Because Cornett says little about education policy, let’s look at another area:  “Our Health” as he calls it.  Here’s his statement:

“Mick believes we must prioritize health and wellness to reduce medical costs and live up to our full potential as a state. Mick led Oklahoma City through a transformational shift in its approach to obesity. Relying on individual responsibility and improving the built environment, Oklahoma City’s health statistics have improved in nearly every measurement.  Mick wants to create a state that will attract the top doctors and medical care, and he wants all Oklahomans to have access to quality emergency care and hospitals… including rural areas.”

Nice aspirations and vague statements but, like his education platform, short on specifics.  Also he cleanly omits the most significant state issue that affects Oklahomans’ health, namely Medicaid expansion.  You see there’s evidence that the health of Oklahomans is getting worse, specifically that life expectancy for women is now falling.  There is also evidence that fewer people will die when more are covered with health insurance, a result that will increase life expectancy and means better health for those covered.

So how is Oklahoma City doing in achieving a high rate of its people being covered by health insurance?  Apparently not so well because the most recent (2014) State of the State’s Health publication by the Oklahoma Department of Health lists Oklahoma County as having a 22.3% rate of uninsured, making it the second worst of Oklahoma’s 77 counties.  We can conclude then that accepting Medicaid expansion is one concrete step that would improve the health of people in Oklahoma County and the rest of the state.

Where does Cornett stand on Medicaid expansion?  Predictably he’s against it.  But who needs health insurance when you can live in Oklahoma City and enjoy a “transformational approach to obesity” and “improvement in the built environment”, both sure to stop that cancer and reverse your heart disease.

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

Surprise, AZ, Cactus League home field for the Royals and Rangers, ID by Mitchell Kelough.

Having missed seeing the Yankees play the Blue Jays due to a dental malfunction while on vacation, I have baseball on my mind.  Oklahoma primary races decided last month included contests involving the subjects of two of my recent posts, Todd Lamb and Chuck Strohm, and each lost in primaries for governor and state representative respectively.  The losses were a surprise since Lamb is the sitting Lieutenant Governor and Strohm was the incumbent.  It motivates me to do more posts about positions advocated by some running for office this election cycle.  I’ll begin with the Republicans still in the running for governor, the position that proposes our state’s budget within which K-12 education is the largest expense.

Having done the campaign and election thing several times myself, I appreciate those who are willing to stand for election when their primary motivation is to improve our society and I believe Kevin Stitt falls in that category.  I also admire Mr. Stitt’s business success as it has been reported to us.  I suspect he worked very hard to learn what was needed to be successful in servicing mortgages, the area of business in which he chose to compete.  He must have learned it well since he was and is successful.  It is puzzling then to see that his position statements about education are shallow and disingenuous.  Here is what he says on his campaign website interspersed with my commentary.

 

Reforming Our Education System

Oklahoma leads the nation in cuts to education funding. Our teachers are underpaid and leaving the state in droves. Too much money fails to reach the classrooms and some school districts have resorted to four-day school weeks. Our leaders are failing our students, our families, and jeopardizing our future. Enough is enough. I will prioritize students and funding for the classroom and invest in the teachers that make a difference every day. It’s time to restore respect to teachers!

His generalities overwhelm me; I await the specifics.

1. Raise teacher pay so that it matches the pay of teachers in our six-state footprint.With 95 percent of Oklahoma children attending public schools, we must ensure those on the front lines of teaching our children receive the support they need to succeed.

Let’s get this straight.  Stitt’s lead off issue is that he wants to raise teacher pay, which is exactly what the 2018 legislature and Governor Fallin did, including stepping up to fund the cost.  Where was Stitt when the going was tough?  Just like now defeated Representative Strohm, he wanted to have his cake and eat it too.  He was for the raises but against the funding—now that’s visionary leadership.  STRIKE ONE.

 

2. Require line item budgeting for the Education Department.With added transparency and accountability, we will be able to better force more education dollars into the classroom room from the $2.5 billion that goes to the Department of Education.  

For “transparency” to be helpful the user must know how to read the state’s education budget, which apparently Mr. Stitt does not—or he hasn’t bothered to do so.  As required by Senate Bill 1600 here is the Oklahoma State Board of Education’s FY 2019 Budget:

That $2.278 billion under FY19 at the top is what goes directly into the state aid formula and then is budgeted by Oklahoma’s 500+ school districts.  Every one of those districts has a line item budget and their finances are fully transparent and audited annually.  Does Mr. Stitt plan to insert himself in 500 separate budgeting processes to “force” more dollars into the classroom.  By the way, note the $400 million increase in this amount over FY18—that’s the funding, which Mr. Stitt opposed, for the teacher pay raise which goes “into the classroom room”.

Then there are the line items of $33 million for textbooks, which I’m pretty sure are headed for classrooms, and $487 million for teacher and support employee health insurance—part of school employee compensation that Mr. Stitt says he favors but doesn’t want to fund, which also are budgeted by school districts, not the State Department of Education.  Those amounts are followed by $95 million for “School Activities”, a hodge-podge of various mostly state or federal mandated expenditures, the largest of which is $32 million for the Teacher Retirement System that is actually part of teacher compensation; here is the detail with citations to the mandates:

The two $3.5 million line items at the bottom are each legislative mandates, one for the retirement system which is effectively compensation and the other an incentive fund to reduce the number of school districts.  That leaves the $16 million for operation of the State Department of Education itself that Mr. Stitt might play with—a whopping one half of one percent of the almost $3 billion OSBE budget.  The line items are there and they are mandated; and they are managed by elected school boards across this state.  Mr. Stitt’s proposed “line item budgeting” and “transparency” are just cover-ups for the fact that he hasn’t done the hard work to understand what’s going on.

STRIKE TWO

 

3. Review ways to empower local communities to best fund the needs of their local schools. I love what we are seeing in Western Oklahoma where energy development is taking schools off the state funding formula and allowing for higher teacher pay. But we still have many counties without these commodities. I like the policy proposed by a conservative group of House legislators to give schools the flexibility to use part of their current property tax revenue on teacher pay instead of being restricted to buildings and infrastructure.

I’ve written repeatedly about this, first showing that the well-intentioned state question to allow school districts flexibility with their building funds is much ado about nothing, and most recently critiquing Todd Lamb’s proposal to require all districts to expend at least 65% on instruction.  Many school districts in Oklahoma, whether because they are off the state aid formula due to their “commodities” income (gross production tax) or because they enjoy a property tax base valuation per student that is well above the state average (like Pryor at three times the average due to Google’s investments), already have the ability to use their good fortune to enhance teacher pay and put more resources into the classroom.  Apparently Mr. Stitt is aware of several that are doing so.

What Mr. Stitt apparently is not aware of is that for the vast majority of Oklahoma school districts whose valuations per student are near or below the state average, his proposal does nothing, nil, nada.  His proposal essentially tells local school boards that they would have plenty of funding for their classrooms if they would just buckle down and make their communities a lot richer.  In fact, in FY2019 those school districts will have more funding for teacher pay raises through the state aid formula, thanks to Governor Fallin and the 2018 Legislature, but no thanks to Mr. Stitt.

STRIKE THREE

His website has two remaining education policy proposals, but in baseball you only get three strikes—I’m done.

As always lunch is on me for the first to ID the photo location AND its relation to baseball.

My inspiration for starting this blog two years ago came from my earlier review of the sloppy work done by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs when they were leading the charge to eliminate all of Oklahoma’s public employee pensions so I like to update how the largest plan, Oklahoma Teachers Retirement, is doing from time to time.  Last year I wrote in opposition to efforts by legislators to greatly diminish the benefits for new teachers as a cynical way to push them into less efficient individual retirement accounts.  Fortunately, that effort failed and was not revived this year.

The pleasant reality is that recent changes to OTRS have placed it on a clear path to being mostly, if not fully, funded by 2034.   That is in dramatic contrast to the federal Social Security retirement plan which the recently released 2017 Trustees’ report projects will exhaust its trust fund resulting in reduced benefit payments as early as 2034.  In recognition of this dramatic divergence of the two pensions I am grateful to receive, I wrote a post that was picked up by the online newspaper NonDoc.com which you can read here.

This is something Oklahomans can be proud of and teachers thankful for—our legislature has set in place a combination of benefits moderation, namely making it difficult for unfunded COLA’s to be approved, and dedicated funding supplements, namely 5% of some major revenue sources, that assure the state will keep its promises to current retirees and teachers and maintain a competitive retirement plan that will help recruit and retain teachers in the future.  This is worth both thanking legislators and encouraging them to stay the course.

By contrast Oklahoma’s Congressional delegation, led by supposed fiscal conservative James Inhofe, have known as long as each have been in office that Social Security is on a collision course that, the longer ignored, will inflict much pain on either or both of workers who will be asked to pay more and retirees who will see benefits slashed.  There have been several “commissions”, dating back to 1981, that have made thoughtful recommendations, always advising that acting sooner than later will lessen the pain.  Yet Inhofe and the rest have managed to do nothing about this greatest fiscal challenge facing our nation.

So I conclude:  It was the best of pensions, it was the worst of pensions, it was born in the age of wisdom, it was buried in the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, our grandchildren had nothing before them, we were all going to retire happily, we were all going to work till we die – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities (think Inhofe) insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of hypocrisy only.

As always lunch is on me for the first to ID the photo (a bust of FDR whose vision brought financial security to millions in their old age) location. 

 

 

 

 

Hardesty Regional Library, Tulsa  ID by Vince Taylor

First published at Nondoc.com

Because I know an article written by a geezer about zippers could be scary for some let me assure you this has nothing to do with clothing malfunctions.  As a 45-year Tulsa mid-towner my usual city driving is all about four or six lane arterials and expressways.  Then two summers ago, as Uber driver for my grandchildren, I began negotiating South Tulsa’s many two lane streets feeding into six lane intersections and back again to a two lane street.

Having served as an elected City of Tulsa Commissioner and Councilor for fourteen years and having listened to many presentations by city engineers about street construction projects, this seeming incongruity did not surprise me.  The City simply did not have the financial resources to expand city services at the same pace as commercial and residential development was occurring.  Other than required right-of-way donations there was no favored mechanism in place to secure funding for the expansion of streets and intersections.  Water, sewer, storm-water and refuse disposal were better positioned so most public concern seemed to be about the traffic congestion resulting from Tulsa’s southward growth.

Most of those years I represented downtown and midtown areas so mostly I just listened to South Tulsa woes while privately thinking “it was your choice to move there” and that we “established” neighborhoods would also have to pay for the costly street-widening that was demanded.  I remember clearly in those meetings hearing city engineers emphasize that intersection improvements were the logical priority which made perfect sense to me since intersections are more likely to be a bottleneck than the streets leading to and from.  But I gave little thought to how one moves from a two-lane street through a six-lane intersection back to a two-lane street because where I mostly drove were four and six-lane streets.

My primary driving experience with losing a lane, until recently, involved highway and expressway driving, often related to closures due to construction.  I confess that I always opted for the “polite” approach, and still do, choosing to merge out of the lane to be closed sooner than later.  In addition to being rude when traffic is slowing down, it also seemed potentially reckless to continue on at a high speed not knowing whether a safe opportunity to merge would occur at the point of road closure that was not always clear.

Then I read about “zipper” merging, I think based on the practice being encouraged by the Minnesota highway department.  The main focus, as is much of what pops up in a Google search, is on improving traffic flow when a highway/expressway lane is closed due to construction.  Engineers argue that flow can be improved as much as 40% if drivers continue in both lanes, at reasonable speed, to the point of closure and then merge every other car in a zipper like move.  I still struggle with that, especially when the line has already formed.  Here’s a sign:

But it did come to mind two years ago when I began driving daily on far south Tulsa streets.  After weeks of following my polite instincts and sitting through sluggish signal cycles, I consulted my engineer daughter whose children I was transporting and we agreed that using both lanes to clear the intersection, followed by zipper merging, was the right and efficient action to take.  Hence she and I, and a few others, regularly drive “rudely” but in a way that moves traffic more efficiently and helps everyone.

So I perked up when this letter to the editor appeared in the Tulsa World, May 31, 2018:

Anyone who regularly drives on area streets plays the two-lane squeeze all too often. Intersections widening from two to four lanes only provide passing lanes for those who never learned to wait their turn or want to show how their fast car can dart in front of you. It’s only slightly better going from six to four lanes.  These situations are road rage incubators. Then again, to paraphrase one local councilor, “We knew the poor shape our roads were in when we moved here.”  It is apparent that it is more important to develop our cities in ways to attract and please strangers and visitors than to make the quality of our neighborhoods better through carefully planned road construction and traffic control.  These are thoughts developed while sitting through lengthy signal cycles at numerous locations in Tulsa and Broken Arrow. I can and do avoid those streets and intersections whenever possible as well as the businesses on those streets and intersections.  It seems the avenue for growing a strong economy and investing residents with pride and confidence in their city and neighborhood is to develop better streets.

Here is the letter it inspired me to submit in response:

As a mid-towner rarely driving anywhere with less than four lanes I had a rude awakening when I began Ubering my grandchildren around far south Tulsa and encountered the plethora of fully developed intersections fed by two-lane roads about which John Paul Day wrote in “Develop Better Streets”.  I first followed the “polite” protocol lining up in one lane awaiting my turn wondering why traffic engineers insist that intersections be developed first when the two-lane bottleneck remains.  Then I read in the World about “zipper” merging and realized, as a Google search confirms, that the intersection, not the two lane road, is the greater bottleneck so clearing the most cars during a signal cycle works best.  Since then I move to the lane with fewer cars knowing I am less likely to impede a car behind me from getting through the next cycle.  Usually the natural spacing that occurs when cars accelerate from a stop allows me to easily zipper in; occasionally I encounter a driver outraged that I broke the “polite” protocol.  By being “rude” I help move traffic; “polite” drivers are preventing cars behind them from clearing the intersection.  The City should erect signage that will guide drivers to zipper and reduce congestion.

I also reached out to the City of Tulsa engineers to see if there is an official position on zippering after moving through an intersection but got no response.  We did encounter zipper, or alternate merging, instructions heading south on I-49 from Kansas City this week where bridge work takes it from two to one lane–it didn’t help since the heavy traffic backed us up to a complete stop.  Meanwhile I’m getting a bumper sticker that says “Zipper Is Quicker”.

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

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.

Statue of Meredith “Music Man” Wilson, Mason City, IA, ID’d by Tom Spencer

In a May 22, 2018 post Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs contributor Mike Brake extolls the virtues of our southern neighbors and oozes Texas Envy  through commentary about the Fort Worth school district’s billboards inviting Oklahoma teachers to cross the Red River and sign up.  He includes comments from a Fort Worth Schools spokesman as support for frequent OCPA talking points about which I’ll now comment.

Brake reports Fort Worth focuses on teacher pay, making that a priority.  The events in Oklahoma this past legislative session should make it clear that Oklahoma districts, if the resources were available, want to do the same, but Brake is not convinced.  He demonstrates Texas’ priority by citing this 2016-17 data from TXsmartschools.org to show that 61% of their $50.8 billion in education dollars go to instruction:

He compares that 61% to the 53.7% cited by the Oklahoma Office of Educational Quality and Accountability for 2015-2016.  The clear message is that if Oklahoma school districts just cared as much about putting dollars in the classroom, our teachers would be paid more.  Here’s the OEQA chart:

But interstate data comparisons are problematic for many reasons that a real research and policy organization would take care to point out.  I looked for low hanging fruit that might narrow the gap and can only document $64 million of capital (function 4000) expenditures included in the OEQA calculation that should be removed for comparability which increases Oklahoma’s percentage to 54.4%.  I’m confident further inquiry would turn up other discrepancies that make Brake’s comparison useless because data for both states, compiled using the same methodology, from the National Center for Education Statistics tells a very different story, the most recent year being 2013-14.  Here it is:

The calculations in the margin are mine, showing Instruction Expenditures as a percentage both of Total Current Expenditures for which the Texas-Oklahoma gap narrows from 7.3% down to 3.7% and almost disappears to 0.5% using Total Expenditures—must be that Friday Night Lights stadiums in Texas put Catoosa press boxes and Owasso turf to shame (the primary difference between Current and All is capital expenditures, you know–classrooms).

So here’s the real difference, with a simple calculation to illustrate.  The most recent (2013-14) Oklahoma State Department of Education Annual Report shows Oklahoma districts employ just over 52,000 certified staff.  Funding an average raise of about $6,100, which Mr. Brake says would put Oklahoma pretty close to Texas’ average teacher salary, costs (with 17% for employer burdens) about $370 million.  If at least 85% of that goes to Instruction it raises Oklahoma’s percentage of the Total Current Expenditures using NCES data to 58.1%, essentially even with Texas.

See the game here, the classic chicken or egg.  “Teacher salaries would be higher in Oklahoma if only we prioritized Instruction”; or is it “Adequately funding teacher salaries in Oklahoma is the right way to increase spending on Instruction.”  Translated, our teacher salaries are low because our teacher salaries are low.

Next Brake’s Texas Envy really kicks in arguing that if only Oklahoma relied more on property taxes like Texas does then we too could have Texas sized teacher pay.  Here’s how he says it:

“If Oklahoma schools received the same dollar amount in both state and federal funds—and if local areas increased their share of support to K-12 public schools (from 42 percent to 49 percent) to match the share local areas contribute in Texas—it would result in an additional $824 million in support for local schools.”

Besides Texas Envy he doesn’t explain why this would be an improvement (other than a nod to stability with not a word about inequity).  My response, as the song lyrics go, “You really ought to give Iowa a try.”  Their teacher salaries are higher even than Texas salaries and they get there with 51.7% coming from state revenues.  Using Brake’s logic all we’ve got to do is keep our federal and local revenues the same and push our state share a percent higher than Iowa’s and we gain the same $824 million.  The algebra is simple, though it apparently impresses Brake.  Either way what he proposes is raising taxes by $824 million.

Then he doubles down on his discovery that increasing the share of spending that goes to Instruction is also a way to increase teacher pay and lower class size by advocating a 65% requirement.  Such a simple statement, devoid of any definitions or specifics, is just bluster and adds little to the conversation.  I explained why such simplicity doesn’t cut it in How Do I Leap The (60% that is)? Let Me Count The Ways .

He advocates school district consolidation with which I have no quarrel because I suspect it can improve opportunities for students; I doubt it will fund teacher pay raises.  Where’s the OCPA’s consolidation proposal?

After this, salivating envy, he lauds a series of statements by the Fort Worth spokesman:

Texas, with its anti-union traditions, doesn’t permit school employees to bargain collectively.  Though if increasing teacher compensation is the goal, I suspect teacher pay is highest in states where private sector unions are the strongest.

Texas has an elementary class size requirement of 22.  Is Brake aware that Oklahoma law, written almost 30 years ago ( House Bill 1017 25th Anniversary  and Once Upon A Time ), requires 20, but Oklahoma funding, decimated by OCPA style state finance, doesn’t support it ( see this on my friend Rick Cobb’s blog:  https://okeducationtruths.wordpress.com/2015/04/27/remembering-hb-1017/  ).

And, of course, the real source of Texas Envy—it has no income tax.  Brake clearly interjected that thought into the conversation and opines that our Okie going south would “get an extra 5% raise” because there is no income tax.  This, despite the fact that the Oklahoma income tax on $52,000, single, standard deduction, one exemption is $2,045 which is 3.9%, not 5—but I haven’t read an OCPA Limited Thinker yet who really makes facts a priority.  Also our fleeing teacher will need to prepare for property taxes that are double the rate in Oklahoma.

It’s a good thing that Brake calls attention to the Fort Worth billboards; hopefully the good work of our legislature is sustained and the $52,000 seems less attractive to Oklahoma teachers.  It’s a bad thing though that Brake, on behalf of a supposed “research and policy” organization that is financed by tax exempt donations, continues to put out poorly researched misinformation.  It is fine for the OCPA to advocate for greater reliance on property taxes, even with local options as Texas appears to have, but to do so repeatedly with no mention of the vast inequities in property tax valuations among school districts or the years of litigation that have embroiled Texas school finance over those inequities, is simply not informed or honest work.

One more good thing, maybe having seen the TXsmartschools.org data they will reform their own data tool and get rid of their double counting and inflated numbers.

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

 

The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs has a new look to their website and one would hope that would come with a new commitment to accuracy and thoughtful analysis—not holding my breath.  The lead page is “2018 Legislative Victories” which lists two for Education, “Funding Silos” referring to SJR 70 about which I’ve written before ( The Bice Is Not Right , Trent’s Double Fault and  SJR 70, A Solution In Search Of A Problem ) and “Union Opt Outs”, referring to SB 960, about which I have not written, though I have been a card carrying member of both the OEA and AFT, engaged in a legal strike of several weeks, and crossed picket lines when it became illegal.  I suspect SB 960 is some ALEC legislation which Stink Tanks are expected to promote in the name of liberty, freedom and the right of workers to remain poor.  Still I will leave this issue to others or another day.

What’s most notable about this short list is that it says nothing about the historic Education legislation increasing teacher and support employee compensation OR the funding measures passed to pay for those increases.  This despite the OCPA’s “support” during the process for an increase, yes INCREASE, in the gross production tax.  Back to this later.

I worry, too much probably, about the Fellows at the OCPA who, surpassed only by their Texas envy, are obsessed with Oklahoma’s school funding “silos” and have convinced themselves that they are a major barrier to properly funding public education in our state.  Their obsession is either an intentional distraction from the real barrier, inadequate resources, or shows their failure to comprehend how Oklahoma’s schools are financed.  I’ll try one more time; here’s what they write, emphasis added:

“The Legislature adopted Senate Joint Resolution 70, which will let Oklahomans vote to begin breaking down the funding silos in our state’s public education system. If voters pass SJR 70 on the statewide ballot later this year, local voters and school boards will gain new flexibility with a portion of local school ad valorem funds. Money that would typically be available to school districts only for buildings and athletic facilities could also be used for teacher pay, textbooks, classroom supplies, or whatever a school district needs most. (This measure would not apply to bond funding.)” 

Contrast “buildings and athletic facilities” with this statutory language stating what the 5 mill Building Fund levy can actually be used for:

“…may be used for erecting, remodeling, repairing, or maintaining school buildings, for purchasing furniture, equipment and computer software to be used on or for school district property, for repairing and maintaining computer systems and equipment, for paying energy and utility costs, for purchasing telecommunications utilities and services, for paying fire and casualty insurance premiums for school facilities, for purchasing security systems, for paying salaries of security personnel, or for one or more, or all, of such purposes.”

Using FY 2016 data the Building Fund 5 mill levy, statewide, accounted for about $161 million of just over $5,110 million in new revenue received by school districts in the four primary “silos”, being their General, Co-op, Building and Child Nutrition funds.  Of that $161 million, here is how 90.3% of it was used:

There’s maybe $15 million, at best, statewide that would have been “freed up” by SJR 70, being less than a third of one percent of the new operational revenue for Oklahoma school districts.  I may vote for its passage, mainly because it should bring focus on the huge disparity in property tax capacity among school districts; still there’s little there, there.  What is truly in play is not a silo, it’s barely a grain sack left in the barn.

Additionally–and here I opine with no research other than having read SJR70 and my memory–I am not sure that if the Constitution is amended that the building fund will immediately be available for the proposed “operations” without each district holding a new election to activate the broader definition.   My logic is that the current five mill levies were specifically voted on as “building fund for erecting, remodeling or repairing school buildings, and for purchasing furniture”.  So perhaps districts who want to take advantage of the new language will be required to “reauthorize” its levy with a new election.  If that is the case I suspect few will risk doing so since, as I’ve shown, there is already great flexibility available.

After the OCPA takes its victory lap for having found a grain sack outside one of those silos, where might they turn next? Here is a succinct and accurate summary using new revenue for FY2017.

 

The “logic” behind the silo complaint alleged by the OCPA has been that there’s plenty of money for teacher raises if only districts could look beyond their General fund where most teachers’ compensation is funded to all the other silos that have money being wasted on frills and unnecessary stuff.  So what’s in each those mysterious silos that befuddle the good fellows?

Co-op Fund:  This is primarily for instructional and student support programs that school districts manage together in the interest of efficiency.  Expenditures are simply an extension of the districts’ general funds and reported separately because multiple districts are mixed together.

Building Fund:  Already 90% same as the general fund, may soon be 100%.

Child Nutrition Fund:  This is primarily federal funds AND families’ payments with some state matching mixed in—all earmarked to feed students, not to pay teachers.  You could take away the accounting silo (it has its own function coding) but not one more dime would be made available for teacher salaries.

MAPS  & Municipal Funds:  Very few districts receive this local money about which I know little and at 0.1% not enough to fill a grain sack much less a silo.

Bond & Sinking Funds:  Here’s the there, there, where Texas envy meets Silos.  If you read an OCPA rant that shows amounts way greater than the $681 million reported, being 11.2% of total new revenue that year then they’re double counting again ( Double, Double, Toil and Trouble  ) and don’t merit your attention.  Bond funds are borrowed money approved by local voters in each district; the Sinking fund is property taxes used to pay the loans back.  It is presently neither legal nor smart to borrow money to pay for current expenses like salaries; it can be smart to use borrowed money to pay for the acquisition and construction of new facilities which is what over three-quarters is used for.

Student Activity Fund:  This revenue is from football game ticket sales, band turkey sales, FFA sausage sales, elementary school cookie dough sales, etc.  You fellows really want to go there?

Endowment, Agency & Trust Funds:  I managed two of these for my district, one we used to segregate significant gifts to the district so we could more easily show donors we were carrying out their wishes, the other was an accounting pass-through managing a workers compensation settlement made years before.  Sorry fellows, this 0.5% has nothing for you.

Their silo talk is silly and has always been, either by design or ignorance, a distraction from the core issues of whether Oklahoma schools have adequate resources and whether they are effectively using the resources they have.  What I’d like to know from the good fellows at OCPA is where they stand on the referendum veto effort led by Dr. No.  Was their support for raising revenue to finance teacher pay raises sincere, or are they now rooting for revenue failures to “starve the beast” and gleefully watch implementation of the required teacher pay increase by school districts that will have to dig way deep into their fund balance (the Bad in The Glib, The Bad and The Ugly  ) and reduce support employee staffing (the Ugly in The Glib, The Bad and The Ugly  ), both serious proposals made repeatedly by the OCPA in the run up to the 2018 legislative session.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

The “logic” behind the silo complaint alleged by the OCPA has been that there’s plenty of money for teacher raises if only districts could look beyond their General fund where most teachers’ compensation is funded to all the other silos that have money being wasted on frills and unnecessary stuff.  So what’s in each those mysterious silos that befuddle the good fellows?

Co-op Fund:  This is primarily for instructional and student support programs that school districts manage together in the interest of efficiency.  Expenditures are simply an extension of the districts’ general funds and reported separately because multiple districts are mixed together.

Building Fund:  Already 90% same as the general fund, may soon be 100%.

Child Nutrition Fund:  This is primarily federal funds AND families’ payments with some state matching mixed in—all earmarked to feed students, not to pay teachers.  You could take away the accounting silo (it has its own function coding) but not one more dime would be made available for teacher salaries.

MAPS  & Municipal Funds:  Very few districts receive this local money about which I know little and at 0.1% not enough to fill a grain sack much less a silo.

Bond & Sinking Funds:  Here’s the there, there, where Texas envy meets Silos.  If you read an OCPA rant that shows amounts way greater than the $681 million reported, being 11.2% of total new revenue that year then they’re double counting again (double) and don’t merit your attention.  Bond funds are borrowed money approved by local voters in each district; the Sinking fund is property taxes used to pay the loans back.  It is presently neither legal nor smart to borrow money to pay for current expenses like salaries; it can be smart to use borrowed money to pay for the acquisition and construction of new facilities which is what over three-quarters is used for.

Student Activity Fund:  This revenue is from football game ticket sales, band turkey sales, FFA sausage sales, elementary school cookie dough sales, etc.  You fellows really want to go there?

Endowment, Agency & Trust Funds:  I managed two of these for my district, one we used to segregate significant gifts to the district so we could more easily show donors we were carrying out their wishes, the other was an accounting pass-through managing a workers compensation settlement made years before.  Sorry fellows, this 0.5% has nothing for you.

Their silo talk is silly and has always been, either by design or ignorance, a distraction from the core issues of whether Oklahoma schools have adequate resources and whether they are effectively using the resources they have.  What I’d like to know from the good fellows at OCPA is where they stand on the referendum veto effort led by Dr. No.  Was their support for raising revenue to finance teacher pay raises sincere, or are they now rooting for revenue failures to “starve the beast” and gleefully watch implementation of the required teacher pay increase by school districts that will have to dig way deep into their fund balance (the Bad in   ) and reduce support employee staffing (the Ugly in    ), both serious proposals made repeatedly by the OCPA in the run up to the 2018 legislative session.

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

 

 

 

 

 

Artist Cha’ Tullis hilltop sculpture of Indians on horseback Hominy, OK; be sure to visit his gallery in town.

This Thinker just finished reading “A Higher Loyalty:  Truth, Lies and Leadership” so a part where James Comey shares some regrets from his college days came to mind as I decided on a sophomoric title for this post, namely that after writing previously about the “Texas Envy” rampant among the fellows at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, I needed to more carefully examine the OCPA’s tool, “Data Tool” that is.  Go to their website homepage, select “Projects” at the top, then “Data Tools”, and lastly “Oklahoma Education Spending and Revenue”.  It used to be prominently displayed, but now is more hidden, so you can miss it and I’ll next explain why you should.  Also, if you bear with me to the very end, we’ll find what I think is the source of Frank Keating’s $300 million distortion when he wrote “In fact, through fiscal year 2016, Oklahoma public schools received more than $9.2 billion in revenue, a near record high.”  ( Takes One To Know One  and  Wayne’s World )

The “tool” purports to provide data about “Education spending, student enrollment, and spending per student from 2005-2006 to 2016-2017”.  I’ll use the “Note” following to organize my analysis.

OCPA says:  Data for this application are compiled from the Oklahoma Cost Accounting System (OCAS) and provided by the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE). 

My comment:  I am intimately familiar with the OCAS used by school districts for financial reporting to the State Department of Education.  It is the best source for financial data, though it can be easily misunderstood as it often is by the OCPA.  Here is a table that intersperses expenditure and revenue statewide totals from the OCAS site and the OCPA’s “data tool”.

You will note that for no year, neither revenue nor expenditures, does the OCPA “data tool” report the correct number from the OCAS data.  “Compiled” is the key word here.  They couldn’t just provide a more user friendly access to OCAS data, rather they had to “compile” it to fit their narrative about how Oklahoma schools have lots of money to spend.

Some of the differences we’ll try to understand later, but for now look at the “ocpa revenue” column compared with the “ocas revenue” three columns to the right; the numbers differ greatly.  Part of the explanation is that the OCPA ignores the obvious, that “nonrevenue” is not part of total revenue, and adds it in anyhow.  I have written about this many times (see  Double, Double, Toil and Trouble  ) so won’t elaborate except to point out that borrowed money, i.e. a district selling bonds to finance construction of a new school, is not income, rather it is an advance of income, local property taxes, to be levied later to retire the debt.  There is no reason to include the “nonrevenue” totals as part of total revenue except ignorance or deception—if the shoe fits…

OCPA says:  Visitors to the OSDE website will notice a sharp drop in expenditures after the 2015-2016 school year. This is due largely to HB 1202, which codifies NCES current spending as the official definition of per-pupil spending. 

My comment:  I noticed this change in the “State Reports” and commented on it in my post  The Bice Is Not Right earlier this year.   Here’s the SDE page we’re talking about.

Here is the 2016-2017 Expenditure Report  I assumed it was an error in uploading the data and would eventually be corrected.  Simply stated no Function 4000 or 5000 amounts are reported for FY 2017, but they are for all the prior listed years.  I see nothing in the legislation that requires this omission.  It only requires that “per pupil spending” be reported using “current expenditures” which means, of course, eliminate double counting by exclusion of Function 5000, and include no “capital” expenditures being Function 4000.  But defining the per pupil spending calculation that way doesn’t require not reporting those excluded transactions.  Anyhow my 2017 “ocas expend” amount is way low for that reason—OCAS simply does not report those functions for 2017 on the state reports.   However, check this out.

SDE does report the data both ways for each individual district, namely “District Expenditures Report per HB 1202” which omits functions 4000 and 5000, and “District Expenditure Report” which includes them.  I expect that eventually SDE will add a report to its State totals that will again include those functions. 

OCPA says:   However, in order to maintain transparency and year-to-year consistency, this application will continue to report nearly all spending. 

My Comment:  I assume the OCPA must have called SDE and obtained the missing data so their “tool” remains consistent. 

OCPA says:   (One notable exception: hundreds of millions of dollars in annual state contributions to the Oklahoma Teacher Retirement System. This money bypasses the school districts’ payroll and is sent directly to TRS.) 

My Comment:  There are two payments to OTRS that bypass school district payrolls.  One is budgeted for by the State Board of Education, $27.7 million in FY 2018, which pays a percentage of all teachers’ required 7% contribution, according to a years of service scale that was part of a compensation package many years ago.  It requires effort to continue, ought to be eliminated with some appropriate offset, but is truly part of current payroll costs.  So that statewide amount does escape notice in most calculations.  If the OCPA fellows are referring to this, they are correct, sort of.

The other payment is from the State itself, a dedicated 5% of four major revenue sources being sales, use, corporate income and individual income taxes.  In FY 2017 that amounted to $278.9 million—a very large sum.  You can see in this excerpt from the FY2017 OTRS Actuarial Report where it fits in; note the $27.7 million “state credit” is referenced as part of “Member contributions”.

In the lead up to the 2017 legislative session I wrote a couple of posts (see What’s Up Doc? or Should Teachers Eat A Carrot?  ) explaining how all this fits together so I’m not going to repeat it here.  Bottom line is that for FY 2017 out of the essentially $1 billion ($998 million) in “Contributions”, only $450 million of that was needed to support the retirement commitment to teachers and other school employees currently employed; their contributions paid for $293 million of that with the balance of $157 million coming from the employers and/or grant program contributions.  That means that ALL of the State’s direct contribution, the $278.9 million, and $271.1 million of employers contributions went to pay for the State’s unfunded future obligation to current retirees, like me.

So if we want to be accurate here in determining what it costs to fund Oklahoma’s public schools, then we should include the $27.7 million from the SBE budget paid in to OTRS; but we should not include the “hundreds of millions” the OCPA refers to AND we should subtract about $270 million from payroll costs, BECAUSE if the State didn’t spend another dime educating its children going forward, it would still bear the legal obligation of its past retirement promises costing the $550 million per year for an estimated 17 additional years. 

OCPA says:   All spending and revenue graphs and tables on this application are adjusted for inflation using the CPI Inflation Calculator of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

My Comment:  In other words the numbers in their “tool” are “compiled”, i.e. distorted, by being multiplied by an inflation factor.  They don’t disclose the base year.  They don’t disclose how often they engage in this silly exercise.  They don’t examine whether the CPI is even a relevant measure of inflation for school district expenses.  This silliness makes their tool of no use except to intentionally distort what public education receives in revenue and expends each year—and their intent, as shown by their consistent double counting and other misrepresentations, is to inflate the actual numbers.

Look again at the table I compiled above.  The last two columns, “cpi rev” and “cpi exp” are the result of dividing “ocpa revenue” by “ocas rev+nonrev” and “ocpa expend” by “ocas expend” respectively.  The results should be the CPI inflation factor used to inflate each OCPA data entry from whatever mysterious base year they are using.  If their (and my transcription) math is correct then the two columns should be identical from 2006 through 2016; 2017 is distorted as discussed above.  Interestingly only five of the eleven years match and my hunch is the OCPA fellows simply botched the annual adjustments they make to this data.  Also, unless prices actually declined year over year, the numbers should rise from 2016 through 2006.   They do except between 2009 and 2008, the Great Recession, so that deflation makes sense.

One of the few external realities that made managing school district finances from 2006 to 2016 easy was the absence of inflation like that which rocked our economy in the 1970s.  When we went about the business of projecting expenditures and revenues general inflation measures were simply not relevant.  Student population growth mattered; legislative appropriations mattered; employee compensation changes, namely none, mattered; the closing of a major manufacturing facility mattered; but not once did I think to see what the CPI index was up to—it just didn’t matter.  Using it to distort the real numbers does nothing helpful to assist policy makers.

Here’s what it does do.  It provides some plausible justification for Frank Keating to write that school district revenues in 2016 were “more than $9.2 billion” when in fact, even using the OCPA’s double over counting, they were $8.812 billion (my table, ocas rev+nonrev).  But, you say, the ocpa revenue number for that year is only $8.964 billion.  Here’s what I think Frank did.  He was writing in February, 2018 so when he asked for the 2016 revenue amount, which is the OCAS number $8,812,222,077, the clever fellows at the OCPA couldn’t resist inflating it by the CPI.  Here’s the CPI Inflation Calculator for January 2016 to January 2018.

Multiply that real OCAS number (includes double counting) by 1.04622 and, drum roll please, we get $9,219,522,981—or, “more than $9.2 billion”.   I think Frank’s distortion is solved, and it was simply an indefensible distraction from what was a very serious statewide discussion about the future of our public education system.

What is really sad here is that the OCPA has invested some resources in having the OCAS data in an online program that could provide some useful and interesting features for policy makers.  But it is of no practical use because the numbers are distorted for no reason other than to exaggerate the investment Oklahomans make in public education.

Fantasy Epilogue:  An OCPA fellow goes into his year-end 2018 performance review with Frank as chair of the personnel committee armed with the latest CPI Inflation multiplier being 1.03 (3% inflation).  The fellow, whose salary is $100,000, states that his salary should be increased to $103,000.  Frank responds, “Well that’s perfect because I see here that, according to our “OCPA Salary Data Tool”, that adjustment has already been made!  Thank you for your service.”

As always lunch is on me for the first to ID the photo location, a blown up version of the last one.  It’s just too good to go unclaimed.

 

Artist Cha’ Tullis hilltop sculpture of Indians on horseback Hominy, OK; be sure to visit his gallery in town.             (This post also published at www.nondoc.com )

With a flourish Dr. No, the retired Senator Tom Coburn, reappeared on the state’s public stage in late March to express his outrage that the Oklahoma Legislature might have the gall to actually fund a teacher pay raise, the first in ten years, by overcoming the absurd 75% threshold required.   I critiqued his critique in Dr. No’s Holiday (Home)?  and then watched our legislature actually put its money where its mouth is.  For almost two years I’ve been reviewing and critiquing the pitiable arguments put forth by fellows at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA) that on the one hand proclaimed support for raising teacher compensation, but on the other hand provided no real source of funding to pay for it ( The Glib, The Bad and The Ugly ).  Some legislators ( Chuck Has His Cake and Eats It Too ) kept the OCPA faith to the bitter end.  Now that the miracle on NE 23^rd Street is a reality the OCPA fellows are on to other matters, but Dr. No’s think-a-likes have formed Oklahoma Taxpayers Unite! to attempt repeal the new funding approved by the legislature.

After the legislature approved the tax increases OTU announced they would soon file their petition for repeal AND would demonstrate where several hundred million dollars could be found to pay for the teacher pay raise.  Their Facebook page has a post:

STATEMENT:  Oklahoma Taxpayers Unite! is NOT, I repeat, NOT working to take away teacher’s pay raises. We support teachers and education. We believe the citizens of the great state of Oklahoma should have the opportunity to vote either in favor of or against the huge tax increases passed by the state legislature.

Nowhere have I found their “plan” showing where the money will come from.  I have heard their statements about requiring performance audits of all state agencies, or something like that, and their vague assertion that requiring school districts to expend a certain percentage on instruction ( How Do I Leap The (60% that is)? Let Me Count The Ways ), but no specifics.  I doubt we’ll see anything out of them any more realistic than were the OCPA’s proposals mostly dismissed by the legislature.  Also we can expect Dr. No to make periodic appearances spouting the same “truths”, i.e. he loves teachers but there’s plenty of money for education in Oklahoma if we just cut out all the waste.  This from an Oklahoman whose work career has been in the private practice of medicine and the Congress where national health care policy is written.

When I contemplate Dr. No leading the charge to undo what a courageous legislature has done to advance public education in Oklahoma, I think it is fair to ask how our health care system in Oklahoma has fared during his tenure.  My thoughts about this ( A Spoonful of Sugar  Dennis Not The Menace  Not An Old Geezer Yet   and  Looking for Mr. James ) are succinctly summarized by this quote from my friend Carlton James, “Note the following facts:

1.  The U.S. is the only industrialized nation that does not have universal healthcare.
2. As a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, the U.S. spends about 13 percent on healthcare; the next nine countries average less than 9 percent. Annually the U.S. spends $4,600 per person on healthcare. The next nine countries average $2,200.
3. Life expectancy in the U.S. is the lowest of the G-7 industrialized nations.
4. Universal healthcare is not an issue in the other industrialized countries.”

These stark facts came to mind upon seeing the recent Oklahoman article “Oklahoma Women Can Expect Shorter, Sicklier Lives Than Their Mothers, New Study Shows” published also in the Tulsa World April 29, 2018 ( Oklahoma Life Expectancy ).  An important measure of successful health care is life expectancy, a statistic that is measured with accuracy.  This shocking article, questioning the belief most of us Geezers hold that, as it has been for us, life will be better for the next generation, shows that despite amazing advances in medical technology and science and talented providers, our health care system is failing us in Oklahoma.

That article was followed by Paul Samuelson’s Op Ed in the Tulsa World May 3, 2018 ( Samuelson on Health Care Costs ) wherein he concludes, as have others ( Bitter Pill How Medical Bills Are Killing Us ) that we simply pay health care providers way too much, including doctors like Dr. No was/is.  Samuelson cites the studies that have convinced him that we should move our health care system toward universal Medicare pricing.  I can add to his proof, borrowing from the OCPA playbook (they endlessly cite Catoosa’s costly stadium press box to prove Oklahoma’s schools are adequately funded), by citing a recent story ( How A Urine Test After Back Surgery Triggered A $17,800 Bill ) on National Public Radio about a $100 urine test for which a woman was billed $17,800 and actually paid $5,000.

So Dr. No, who has every right as the citizen he is, holds forth now as an expert on how to finance public education in Oklahoma by giving teachers raises without raising taxes.  I think he should re-read Matthew 7:1-5,

7 “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. ² For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. ³ Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s^[a] eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? ⁴ Or how can you say to your neighbor,^[b] ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? ⁵ You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s^[c] eye.

Or, as Luke 4:23 more simply puts it, “Physician, heal thyself.”

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