Like Weiners at the Bar-S Plant

As November comes to a close, and our newly-elected Legislature begins its charge of finding a way to close yet another budget hole, some among their ranks want to focus on a task that misses the mark entirely.

Yes, instead of finding funds for public schools, Sen. Kyle Loveless is busy trying to find funds for private schools. He’s spent his entire first senate term on this task, and it looks as if his second will be no different.

I’ll give Loveless credit for one thing: he puts himself out there. You don’t really wonder where he stands. He loves to bait people, and for some of us, responding is a compulsion.

Judge if you want; I know I should walk away.

I hate the term school choice, mainly because it’s inaccurate. It’s a euphemism. It’s a voucher that people can apply towards private school tuition if either (a) they can afford the remainder of the tuition, or (b) the school chooses to waive the remainder of the tuition. It’s not choice because the school doesn’t have to accept the bedraggled child that Loveless and his ilk choose they want to save from the failing public education system they turn around and claim to want to help.

As to my friend Kenny Ward’s point on Loveless’s post that the poll has some bias because the pollster hates public education, well there’s some truth to that.

That was me trolling his Twitter feed yesterday. Then Bill Shapard, Jr. lashed out at the lot of us.

Look, guys! We’re number one! We even published an article about it one time!

Yeah, well #oklaed is number one too. In budget cuts, that is. It must be true. It was in the Oklahoman.

Oklahoma’s cuts to general education funding since 2008 continue to lead the nation, according to the latest report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Nearly 27 percent of state per pupil funding, adjusted for inflation, has been cut since 2008. That figure not only leads the nation but is nearly double the percentage of cuts made by Alabama, the second worst state for educating funding reductions.

Shapard feels the compulsion as well, I guess. He keeps attacking Tyler Bridges, Ward, and me.

Yes, he says he wants to open 12 Corn Bible Academy type schools in Clinton, and he compares public education to a wiener factory. That’s the guy running Sooner Poll. That’s the guy who claims his work is not reflective of his bias.

Maybe looking at the polling language would be instructive, then.

“Educational choice gives parents the right to use tax dollars associated with their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school which best serves their needs. Some people favor educational choice because they believe that parents, not government officials, have the moral right to determine a child’s path. Other people oppose educational choice because they believe it drains money from public schools and allows only a select few students to choose a different school. Which viewpoint comes closest to your own?”

FAVOR — parents have the moral right to choose … 51.5%

OPPOSE — it drains money from public schools … 37.3%

UNDECIDED … 11.2%

First of all, the question compares two things. It should read, “Which viewpoint comes closer to your own.” As long as it’s an education question, a basic grasp of middle school grammar would be nice.

More importantly, the question is poorly worded. Whether that indicates bias or not is another question, but look at the two choices. Parents have the moral right to choose, and it drains money from public schools. Are those options mutually exclusive? Can’t a voucher be a moral right that also hurts the public schools?

It’s also incomplete information. I oppose vouchers for a number of reasons. As I said above, the number one reason is that the private school doesn’t have to accept any kid who shows up with a state aid check in hand. Yes, vouchers will deplete school funding. Yes, vouchers will go to schools that don’t face the same accountability measures as public schools. Yes…actually, if you want a great top ten list of reasons why vouchers are a bad idea, Steven Singer has a great one put together already.

I also question the phrase public or private school which best serves their needs. As Tyler Bridges stated in his response to Shapard this morning on Facebook:

Out of respect for many that I know at CBA I will not speak to their school, as they have great things going on and have great people out there. That being said, using their 1:7 ratio of staff to students, their very small student body, as well as their student makeup, is hardly a quality comparison Bill. My question would be this: if CBA took a representative sample of 100 students (which would more than double their enrollment) from Clinton PS (83% free/reduced, 15% poverty, 35% bilingual, 23% ELL) do you feel they are so much better at providing a quality education that they would continue to turn out the same product as they do now?

Private schools don’t face the number of variables that public schools do. Our students’ situations are often unpredictable. Shapard may be convinced that 12 schools like Corn Bible Academy in Clinton could do a better job than Clinton Public Schools do. According to CBA’s website, they serve about 80 students. Clinton has over 2,300 students. I’m not a statistician, like Bill Shapard, but I think it would take more than 12 CBAs to meet the need of Clinton’s students.

But I digress.

Shapard’s poll question puts the two options on unequal footing. He gives one moral standing. He gives the other a fiscal outcome. Wording matters, and he knows it. Just because a few hundred people who still answer their land lines pick (a) over (b) doesn’t mean it’s good public policy.

One positive thing about Loveless feeling he must constantly twist the fork in the back of public education is that we also see a clear illustration from those who hate public education about the toxic narrative they love to spew. Here are some examples of comments (with names removed) from Loveless’s post yesterday:

• if everyone gets there 7-9 grand per year, the market will fill the need. Catholic schools have been doing it for 70% less for decades in the inner cities. And outperforming public schools substantially.
• We’re not talking Heritage Hall and Casady. Go to any large city in the US and compare inner city Catholic schools with the public schools- they take anyone.
• Let’s just cowboy up and admit that it is about the folks who work in education not wanting to admit that the system is failing but nobody wants to lose their job. For once, let’s just stop saying it’s about the kids…heard that for decades- it ain’t.
• Believing that tax paying parents should have a choice in how their money is spent on their child’s education is not “hell-bent on destroying public education”. It’s actually the exact opposite.

I don’t know the cost of Oklahoma’s Catholic schools, but I do know the cost of attending any private school is two-fold: tuition and donations. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that tuition alone doesn’t fully fund private schools. They rely heavily on donations. If they start filling up with students attending on vouchers, their donations will decrease. The families using a voucher aren’t going to have the deep pockets their traditional students have.

And yes, I’m certain that we’re probably not talking about Casady and Heritage Hall. That helps prove my point though. No amount of politics and wordsmithing truly grants parents the choice of where to enroll their children.

I challenged the commenter who wants us to cowboy up to come into any of the Mid-Del Schools (after passing a mandatory background check) and tell all the staff that why they come to work is not about the kids. Crickets.

As for the last comment, we don’t all contribute the same amount. Whether it’s income tax, property tax, motor vehicle tax, or any other state revenue source, all of our contributions look different. Thus what we pay into the tax base that funds public education is different. We don’t get rebates for the services we don’t use. I haven’t needed the assistance of a highway patrolman for years (no matter what the one I met a couple of weeks ago thought). Still, I don’t get a rebate for not using their services. I also don’t get to re-allocate those funds elsewhere. That’s not how any state function works.

I’ve said for as long as I’ve thought about such things that I don’t care if you homeschool your kids or send them to private schools. That’s your choice. It may be the best thing for your kid. It’s not for me to decide. I just don’t think the money should follow the child. My business is managing the district’s resources for the kids we have now and the kids we’ll have in the future. Since about 90% of our budget goes to payroll, the vast majority of the investment is in the kids we have right now.

Loveless posted another article from Choice Remarks on his Facebook page last night. This one was titled “Nearly 4 in 10 Oklahoma teachers would choose private or home education for their own children.” One of my good friends, Pam Huston (a principal in Moore) posted the same article on Facebook, but with some major shade.

Above the article, she wrote:

This article could also be titled, ‘Over 65% of teachers surveyed agree that public charter schools are the least, or second to the least, favorable option for their own children.” It’s all in how the results are spun……results are posted in the comments below.

Below are the results:

These are teachers responding. Of the four choices, teachers have public schools ranked one or two nearly 80% of the time. I think these results are basically a Rorschach Test. You see what you want to see. Yes, some teachers would love to put their kids in another school setting. Some teachers wish they could be home educating their children. I see no problem with that.

Choice Remarks is one of the many offshoots of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA). On a post-election blog, school choice kingpin Brandon Dutcher further discusses the argument for vouchers.

As we approach 2017, the taxpaying parents of 100,000 Oklahoma students, despite being compelled to pay for public education, have in effect said to public school officials: “Your product is sufficiently unattractive to us that you can’t even give it away.” Moreover, Oklahoma has enacted a private-school voucher program and a tax-credit scholarship program. And as we move ever closer to Rod Paige’s vision of universal school choice—by expanding our current programs, enacting ESAs, providing for individual tax credits, and more—I suspect the vindictive resentment will grow.

Dutcher fails to note, then, that 700,000 students remain in public schools. If the 100,000 are dissatisfied, then the 700,000 must be content, right? Of course not. Neither of those assumptions are necessarily valid.

As for the vindictive resentment, yeah, it’ll grow. Keep characterizing public schools as failures, and we’ll resent you. Keep scheming ways to further deplete school funding, and we’ll resent you. Keep using poor measures of school effectiveness and ignoring the effects of poverty on learning, and we’ll resent you. This is no surprise. I won’t shy away from it. I doubt my blogging peers will either. I’ll keep saying, I’m sorry you’re upset, and you’ll probably keep saying the same thing. Neither of us will mean it.

The charge of the choice brigade approaches. Soon, it will have a new standard bearer: future Secretary of Education Betsy Devos. I haven’t spent a lot of time looking her up, but Rob Miller has:

For the past 15 years, DeVo$ has used her family money and influence to push an agenda to transfer public tax dollars over to unaccountable for-profit corporations. We know she will promote education savings accounts (ESAs) and other vouchers schemes and that she will work to funnel public money to church-sponsored schools.

To steal from the latest Geico commercials, “it’s what she does.”

If you recall, Bet$y DeVo$ has spent the past few years serving as the Chairman of the American Federation for Children (AFC), an organization which has as its vision “the transformation of public education by breaking down barriers to educational choice.”

Among other political activities, AFC has worked in the shadows to fund the legislative campaigns of hundreds of school-choice proponents across the nation. In recent years, they were the ones who contributed to the successful Oklahoma mudslinging campaigns against Melissa Abdo in 2014 and Lisa Kramer this year, just to name a few.

With the head of the Amway empire running education, we won’t just be getting school choice; we’ll be getting a voucher pyramid scheme extraordinaire!

People like Loveless will sidle up to everything ALEC, OCPA, Choice Remarks, Sooner Poll, and the like throw out there. Because he won re-election in June and didn’t have to run a general election race, he has had a five month head start on trolling public education.

Meanwhile, others in the Legislature are busy trying to craft a budget to help all state agencies. Some even want to fund public schools, rather than finding ways to fund private ones.

November 8^th was a disappointment for many of us in the #oklaed community. I get that. Nonetheless, we must keep fighting. If we don’t, the future is easy to predict.

One

Mid-Del Family and Friends:

Over the last 24 hours, I have heard a wide range of people discuss what Tuesday night’s results mean to them. Specifically, I’ve heard several theories of how to interpret the overwhelming vote of Oklahomans against State Question 779 – the penny sales tax initiative.

It reminds me of the novelty paintings you used to see everywhere – the ones where you’re supposed to blur your eyes until an image comes into focus. Usually it’s a unicorn or a waterfall or a ninja or something. Well, that’s what people tell me. I never can see it.

Almost every theory I’ve heard includes some version of the idea that the people of this state and that our Legislature want to help us. They want to give teachers raises. They want to more fully fund public schools, but not this way. In some versions, the portion of the tax that would fund higher education gets people riled up. Sometimes, the criticism centers on school districts themselves. More often, I hear people frustrated that we’re letting our elected officials off the hook.

I did have a vision before the election results started coming in. It included using whatever proceeds we received from the penny sales tax to fund teacher raises beyond the minimum of $5,000, adding back positions that we’ve cut, and increasing support salaries. Now that’s all gone blurry, and when I try to focus on what to think of Tuesday night, I see nothing with clarity.

I started writing this as a pep talk. I really meant to send you an encouraging message. I hoped to tell you with clarity what this all means. Right now, I just don’t see it. Before the election, I guess I was seeing what I wanted to see in the blur of our political landscape. I was hopeful.

No, I never thought hard-coding a tax increase into the state constitution was the best solution. It’s just the only one that had come to the table. It was all we had. Now I hear renewed support for teacher raises from policy makers across the state. I can’t tell you to look at the picture, though, and see something that I don’t see myself. Maybe it’s there. I just don’t know. If it is, we’ll know within the next six months. If it’s not, well, we’ll know that too.

What I do know is that the day after the election, we had school. We picked up students at the bus stops and got them home. We taught them. We fed them. We cared for their social and emotional needs. Maybe that’s not the image our Legislature and voters see when they look at us. It’s what I see, though.

The same state that voted against the penny sales tax wants to remind us that they appreciate teachers. On some level, I believe them. Maybe that just means I’m looking at the picture, trying to see the unicorn, and listening to the voice over my shoulder insisting that it’s there.

Or maybe I’m overthinking this. I do that sometimes. Maybe there is no state consensus. There’s you, and there’s me, and there’s the people around us. If you teach my child, and I believe you care about my child, then I value you. I appreciate you. If you teach in my building and you help carry me through tough times, then I value you. I appreciate you.

We have over 14,000 students in this district who need us. If you’re disappointed right now, please just remember that it’s not at them. And if you can’t grasp the 14,000, then look at the next student you see. That one student needs at least one of us to make a difference in his/her life. You may be what keeps one student coming back to us just one more day.

I’ll keep fighting for them. I’ll keep fighting for you. Maybe you can’t see the big picture any more clearly than I can, but I hope you can see that.

Those of you who frequently read my blogs know that I often add a song at the end to wrap up my thoughts. For tonight, I thought I’d combine two of my musical loves: U2 and Johnny Cash. We started the school year singing “Sweet Caroline,” and it was #sogood. Tonight, I’ll leave you with “One.”

 

Last Call

This election season started a long time ago. Can you believe the first Republican debate in the presidential race was August 6, 2015? The first debate for the Democrats was two months later. We’ve been listening to the vitriol and obscenity of these people for well over a year now.

You would think that having longer to vet our presidential candidates would be a good thing. Yet here we are. These two. I won’t say their names or add their pictures here, but they are the major source of our collective politics fatigue right now. I know a few people who enthusiastically support one or the other of them. Most, however, seem to be voting against one of them.

I hope that we feel better about our local and state races. In the last month, several have turned ugly – maybe not to the extent of the presidential election, but then again, the stakes aren’t as high.

Candidates like Paul Sullivan (HD 69) and Lloyd Snow (SD 37) deserve #oklaed support, not just because of what they’ve done and who they are, but because of what their opponents have done and who they are. The same can be said for so many others. Here are a few:

• Kimberly Fobbs (SD 33)
• Rhonda Harlow (SD 16)
• John Waldron (SD 39)
• Rhonda Cox (SD 3)
• Shawn Sheehan (SD 15)
• Tom Stites (HD 2)
• Collin Walke (HD 87)
• Forrest Bennett (HD 92)
• Mickey Dollens (HD 93)

There are even some incumbents I want to see keep their seats, even though they have opponents I also could support. Two that come to mind are Scott Martin and Katie Henke.

By the way, if any of these people feel any sense of accomplishment with me supporting them, they should know that candidates I’ve endorsed in the past have a pretty lousy winning percentage.

There are some races in which I don’t know enough to offer an opinion. And there are others I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole.

Then there are the state questions. I’m not a farmer, but 777 seems like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I have this strange feeling it would tie our Legislature’s hands unnecessarily, like SQ 640 did a generation ago. Lawmakers would have to have a “compelling state interest” to pass any regulations about farming/ranching. Shouldn’t “compelling state interest” be the threshold for passing all laws? Maybe if you can’t show that, you should just sit on your hands in general.

State question 790 feels the same way to me. It plays into the myth of the war on Christianity. Framers of the initiative want you to believe this is the vehicle for placing the Ten Commandments statute back on the lawn of the Capitol building. The Oklahoma Policy Institute sees 790 differently.

Even if voters approve SQ 790, there is some possibility that the United States Supreme Court will rule that the Ten Commandment monument’s display on public grounds violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Previous U.S. Supreme Court decisions have prohibited some Ten Commandment monument displays while allowing others. The Court’s reasoning has depended on the history and context of each monument.

That’s actually the best case scenario for the backers of 790. The longer they can keep alive the narrative that rogue courts hate our values, the longer they can keep their base inflamed. It’s all a distraction.

It’s a distraction. The real push is for a way to divert public school dollars to private religious schools (more than they are already doing). Truthfully, if our leaders want to abide by the Ten Commandments, they shouldn’t need a statue on the lawn to remind them.

Then there’s SQ 779 – the penny sales tax. I’ve seen some bizarre ads recently that include supposed teachers who don’t trust that the money will be used for raises. I’ve seen accusations that the revenue estimates are too high. Or they’re too low. Or that it will really just create an administrative slush fund.

I’m a superintendent, so you know why I want it to pass. I want it for the 14,500 students I serve and for the people who work daily with them. If the tax generates more than we need for $5,000 raises, we will be deliberate in showing where that money goes. I’d like to add back some of the positions we’ve cut. I’d like to increase support salaries. I’d like to get to some of that deferred maintenance our teachers keep showing me in their buildings. Wherever it goes, though, I’m going to show it to you as clearly as I can.

What I will also be able to show you is where our teachers will go if it fails. Some will leave on I-35. Some on I-40. Heck, some may even use I-44 or one of the many state and US highways that dot Oklahoma’s perimeter. SQ 779 is a referendum on the failure of our Legislature and governor to improve public school funding. One way or another, we’re turning a corner. We’re either starting to fix our problems, or we’re committing to deepening them. Just because it’s closing time, doesn’t mean we have to make bad decisions…

…which reminds me that I haven’t discussed SQ 792. Modernizing the state’s liquor laws is probably about 50 years past due. I know there will be an adjustment period for retailers, but I look at this as a potential win for teachers too. God knows they deserve it.