Stitt Strikes Out

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.