St. John Hospital, Tulsa, ID’d by Gini Fox.
A geezer injury has kept this Thinker off the tennis courts since mid-December so using a tennis metaphor in the title helps a little to sooth my frustration. Trent England penned a community forum Op-Ed piece “Free school districts to pay teachers more” that appeared in the Tulsa World, 3/24/2018, pushing fantasies that I recently debunked (The Bice Is Not Right ) so of course I have to respond. Trent is Executive Vice President of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs and a congenial Limited Thinker ( Unbelievable! and There You Go Again ) whom I’ve had the pleasure to meet for conversation. His argument was just another variation on the OCPA’s ongoing theme that there is plenty of money for teacher compensation and raises if school districts could and would make the right choices. He focuses on the “could” putting forth his belief that legal restrictions on certain funding sources are a major problem.
After pointing out, as the OCPA frequently does, that Catoosa has a nice press box to go with its football stadium, he argues that districts should be able to use the 5 mill building fund levy, one of the “silos” that seem to befuddle Limited Thinkers, for teacher compensation and that would be a big help. Here’s a letter to the editor I penned trying to explain, again, why it doesn’t:
If your quirky uncle pays $150 directly toward your $600 monthly rent would you argue that if he gave it to you instead you could join a club for $100 a month? Hopefully not, unless you plan to move where the rent is $500 or less. But that is the logic used by the World (3/17) and Trent England (3/24) in advocating Building Fund flexibility (SJR 70) as a way to fund teacher pay raises. Teacher compensation comes from school districts’ general funds which received $4.6 billion in new revenue for FY2016. Districts expended $570 million to operate and maintain school facilities (think custodians, utilities, light bulbs & property insurance) with $420 million from their general funds and $150 million from the $161 million generated by the five mill building fund levy that SJR would free up to “pay teachers more”. Allowing districts to use the $150 million for teacher compensation will not allow districts to “pay teachers more”, that is, unless districts lay off enough custodians to free up the funds—and guess who will then be expected to clean their own classrooms. Once again the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs offers fantasy instead of facts, and the World buys it.
If my analogy doesn’t help show why opening up the building fund to be used for teacher compensation is really much ado about nothing, then here’s some actual numbers from a real district, the state’s largest, Oklahoma City. Keeping in mind that its building fund 5 mill levy generated $10.6 million in 2016, the District expended just under $34 million from its general ($24.8 million) and building ($9.2 million) funds to operate and maintain its district facilities. That amount is 11.4% of its total new revenue, $297.3 million, which does not seem to be an extravagant portion.
The question then for Trent is how will being able to expend the $10.6 million from the building fund on teacher compensation help the District give pay raises? If the District wanted to free up $10.6 million for teacher compensation it can already do so by cutting the amount the general fund contributes to the operation and maintenance of its facilities from $24.8 million to $14.2 million; the math is simple. What is not simple is determining how to properly operate and maintain its facilities with $10.6 million less. That is fault number one.
Fault number two is that Trent talks about freeing up more local property tax millage to be used for teacher compensation without addressing the huge disparity that exists among Oklahoma school districts in their property valuations per student that, in Trent’s perfect world, would create extremes of “have” and “have not” districts. This first chart illustrates the problem. It shows data for four districts with student populations (ADM) near 2000, including Trent’s fave Catoosa, along with Elk City, McCloud and Bethany. The columns, using the most recent complete FY2016 data, from left to right are: district name, assessed property valuation per student, number of students, number of teachers, the student/teacher ratio, the new building fund (5 mills) revenue, that revenue amount per teacher, and a teacher raise it supports.
Notice Catoosa, having a valuation per student more than 60% above the state average at $82,259 can generate almost ten times the amount per student as can poor (literally) Bethany with a valuation per student of only $8,500; that’s with the same 5 mills effort by taxpayers in each district. So if Trent’s fantasy could play out, teachers in Catoosa could see a $4,400 raise while hapless Bethany will struggle to give $600 to its teachers.
While the Building Fund is 5 mills, districts can also vote bonds to generate funds for items as diverse as new schools, repairs to existing schools, school buses, band uniforms, textbooks, electronic hardware and software licenses, and Trent’s beloved press box at Catoosa. Districts are limited in a way that effectively sets about a 35 mill maximum on the revenue that can be generated. These funds, when approved by the taxpayers, are distorted in the same way that the building fund levy is, meaning a Catoosa can have a lot of nice stuff, while a Bethany will struggle to provide the basic classrooms needed.
By using bonds districts already have flexibility to relieve their operating budgets by purchasing such things as facilities repairs, technology, student equipment, textbooks, etc. that often are in those operating budgets as well. If Trent were to do real research he’d probably find a correlation showing districts with higher valuations per student have lower student teacher ratios and higher teacher compensation. So some of what he advocates already happens, but… The ”but” is if you understand that our state government and taxpayers are responsible for educating children throughout the state, whether they reside in districts with high valuation ratios or in districts with low valuation ratios, then do you really want to rely on local “flexibility” as the best way to fund teacher compensation?
Teacher compensation comes almost entirely from districts’ general funds which include 35 mills (that’s seven times the amount in the building funds) of local property tax funding. Additionally, to offset the disparity caused by the huge variations in valuation ratios, state aid is provided to essentially equalize per student funding among districts. Translated, the more property tax per student a district collects, the less state aid per student it receives. There are other revenues that are part of the calculation as well, but local property taxes and state aid are the largest. Look at this chart:
You see, in state aid world fortunes are reversed compared to property tax world, namely the have-nots receive more and the haves receive less, hence Bethany’s state aid per student is more than three times that of Catoosa’s. So any serious discussion about increasing the use of local property taxes for teacher compensation or other operational purposes must absolutely include discussion on how the wide disparities in property tax capacity among districts will be treated. If the discussion does not, as is the case with Trent’s commentary, it is not a serious discussion. But that is nothing new for the OCPA. Throughout the last two years when teacher compensation has been a top legislative priority they have offered a series of proposals ( see The Glib, The Bad and The Ugly ) that have all had two things in common, that there is plenty of money already available if districts just prioritized and that if you don’t understand “silos” and other technical or legal stuff, just make up your own facts to suit your conclusion.
It is nice to see that more than three-fourths of our House of Representatives have a better understanding of school finance than the OCPA.
As always, lunch is on me for the first to I D the photo location.