Take a Brake, Please!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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