Chesapeake empire marches on

[dankrutka]

As someone who has spent their career in education, there’s so much hyperbole and silliness in this thread.

[Rover]

As someone who has spent their career in education, there’s so much hyperbole and silliness in this thread.

As someone who has spent their career in business nationally and internationally, there is so much minimization of the educational problem here in this state.

[BillBennett]

Wow! Did this thread ever go Debbie Downer! Last year everyone was counting the number of tall cranes in the city! I know there are some reality checks that need to be done, but it could have been done in November.

[Pete]

As someone who has spent their career in education, there’s so much hyperbole and silliness in this thread.

And in which state do you live and teach?

[Swake]

Anything that a DC think tank / higher education professor says isn't worth the toilet paper they wiped their @$$ with that morning. I couldn't think of a more-removed-from-society person than the one you described...

So you place no value on what a higher education professor teaches.

This is the problem.

The guy that told my daughter what they couldn't do from Oklahoma? He may have been an ass, but he wasn't wrong. Today my daughter actually DOES have one of "those" jobs in DC. She's a policy director for an NGO and she's not yet 30. But she didn't graduate from an Oklahoma school, she went to Swarthmore College outside Philly. She is part of our brain drain and actually proved him correct.

[PhiAlpha]

Saturday Morning: “Looks like a beautiful day outside! I’m going to check OKCTalk before I get ready and head out!”

-Skims though CHK thread-

Shuts garage door: “Man, I wonder if there’s enough gas in my tank to get the job done without having to suck on the tailpipe?”

[Pete]

Anyone just now realizing that Oklahoma has never had any sort of start-up culture, has almost zero tech, and has never been in the running for corporate relocations – yet hopes it will just magically happen despite very clear and obvious issues – is part of the problem and why there is no momentum towards progress despite a century of failure.

[Jake]

One of the funniest parts of the Canoo debacle was the fact that Oklahoma didn't even land the "headquarters" and lost out to Justin, Texas and Bentonville.

Oklahoma can't even land fake companies.

[Txag]

There’s going to be some opinion/bias in this wall of text, but when we look at our neighbors to the south, I don’t know that their politicians today value education any more than Oklahoma does, but they have individuals that do. Texas benefits today from education foundations that were created in the 1800’s, relatively moderate politicians in the 80’s and 90’s, and key benefactors for math and science. We can talk about the incremental improvements that our schools are making, but without substantial investment and an attitude change with a marked inflection point, we’ll never catch up. On a relative basis, here are a few areas that come to mind when thinking about comparative differences between the two:

• Funding: Texas has two sovereign wealth funds that were established in the mid to late 1800’s for the purpose of supporting education. The Permanent University Fund today funds the University of Texas and Texas A&M systems. It was created when the Texas and Pacific Railroad donated 1 million acres in the West Texas to the state because it was too worthless to survey. Well... that became the Permian Basin and the PUF now has assets of $36 billion and contributes over $1 billion a year to those university systems. The other is the Permanent School Fund which helps fun the state’s public schools. Its original endowment came from monies the federal government paid the Republic of Texas for now New Mexico, Colorado, and Oklahoma. Later the state transferred half of the state's lands to the fund. That fund now has assets over $57 billion and contributes ~$2.5 billion a year to schools. It also provides a financial backstop to nearly all bonds issued by public school districts, which lowers their borrowing costs.

• Individual benefactors in higher education: The closest thing Oklahoma has had here is T. Boone. This will probably be controversial in this forum, but most of his contributions didn’t really go towards helping the underlying competitiveness of the school in math and science. He made substantial contributions to the athletics department, and some other contributions which he ultimately required to be managed by his investment fund. I’d actually argue he made more meaningful contributions to Texas through his >$100 MM gifts to US Southwestern, MD Anderson, and Baylor Scott & White. In the MD Anderson example he game them $50 MM and required that they grow that into $500 MM within 20 years or it would revert to Oklahoma State. It took them 3 years to convert that to $500 MM and became the foundation of the Pickens Research Endowment, a missed opportunity for OSU. If you look at our billionaires around the state they aren’t really doing anything (outside of maybe the Kaiser family) to improve conditions for its residents. There’s a few that have signed the Giving Pledge, but we haven’t seen them make much progress (looking at you Harold Hamm, you aren’t getting any younger). These are the types of people that can make substantial progress for our schools and universities if they had passions they wanted to progress. I'll use George P Mitchell as an example. He had a fascination with physics and astronomy. While his contributions weren’t nearly as large monetarily as T. Boone, they were fundamental in even putting Texas physics on the map. He held retreats that brought in physicists from around the world to Texas, single-handedly bought Texas A&M and the University of Texas’ way into the Giant Magellan telescope project in Chile to work with Harvard and other prestigious international organizations, and donated ~$100MM for buildings and professorships for the physics department. Stephen Hawking has lectured at A&M because of Mitchell. I still remember having lunch on the rooftop of the physics building and Stephen Hawking came through with his caretakers as they sat outside for a minute. He was also fundamental is getting the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas which would have been 3x more powerful than the LHC at CERN – funding for that got pulled by the feds with the end of the Cold War. All of this to say, having these benefactors with passions and vision for math and science are incredible important – I don’t see David Green helping us out here.

• Early settlers: The Texas Triangle was heavily settled by Germans and had outsized influence in Texas politics in the mid to late 1800’s and were heavily involved in pushing for higher education.

• Land Ownership: Fast growing areas often have better schools and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. People like Edmond and Deer Creek schools (they’re both ok) and so they try and move there. Oklahoma’s fragmented land ownership (at least close to cities) limits the scale necessary for planned communities. Many places in other states have tons of huge 2,000+ home communities that have integrated neighborhood schools. Now you can argue all day against this type of urban sprawl, but these types of development can have more place making and sense of community where people support these embedded neighborhood schools – but all of that is driven by ownership of the families that live there. It's easier to pass bonds for these schools because they're "your" schools and people have more of a vested interest in them. Investment in the schools is an investment in your own neighborhood and property value. When you've got all these random assortment of 100-200 home neighborhoods where people are "different" than you, its harder to foster that sense of community. If all of our decision makers live off on their 1-5+ acre properties and don’t want to see their neighbors and send their kids to private school because they want them to be surrounded by like minded people and because the public schools are indoctrinating kids, then we will never get good public schools.
  

Ok, I’m done ranting and I’m sure there’s lots that people disagree with, so light it up.

[Mott]

That wasn't the reason.

Just finished Gate's new book "Source Code". It is a great read. Micro-Soft located in ABQ because their first customer (MITS) was located there. MITS was acquired by a larger company who tried to violate the MITS exclusive license agreement with Micro-Soft. Micro-Soft won in arbitration and was free to do business with anyone. Micro-Soft then left ABQ because Gates and Allen were homesick, not because NM was an uneducated state.

Paul liked NM enough to purchase a $12 million estate outside of Santa Fe
https://virtualglobetrotting.com/map...4/view/google/

[Mott]

Txag, Very good post, thanks for the history behind Texas education funding.

[Pete]

There are many states -- like 48 -- that have better education than Oklahoma, and most way, way better.

It's not just Texas.

[dankrutka]

And in which state do you live and teach?

And how is that relevant? I work in a specialized area with very few positions nationally. I didn’t flew to Texas or a anything. But I should have clarified what I meant… Oklahoma education needs investment more than anything. Plain and simple. Education is dramatically underfunded in Oklahoma. I actually think the people support education, but the legislature is out of line with the people. A lot if the other analysis is just speculation and projection.

[Pete]

^

Everybody agrees funding is the issue.

[bison34]

^

Everybody agrees funding is the issue.

Agree with you on that! But it isn't a solely funding issue. Other states spend less per student and are ranked significantly higher. It's a leadership issue, as well. It's a "how is the money being spent" issue.

This is a topic we need to discuss. This may not be the thread for it, but I appreciate you allowing some discussion, Pete!

[Plutonic Panda]

^

Everybody agrees funding is the issue.

Then why is nothing done about it? Oklahoma always seems to be moving backwards here as of late. Why do people vote for the political leaders they vote for if they know nothing is being done to increase funding? Does anyone think Oklahomans would vote for a sizeable tax increase to improve higher education?

[bison34]

Then why is nothing done about it? Oklahoma always seems to be moving backwards here as of late. Why do people vote for the political leaders they vote for if they know nothing is being done to increase funding? Does anyone think Oklahomans would vote for a sizeable tax increase to improve higher education?

They have increased their per student spending a lot the last 5 years, but the leadership has been horrible. So what the spending is on is dumb, and not helpful.

[Pete]

They have increased their per student spending a lot the last 5 years, but the leadership has been horrible. So what the spending is on is dumb, and not helpful.

That's absolutely not true.

We are still a very long way from catching up to just average, so increases still leave us far behind.

Most of the increases have been spent on increased pay for teachers, and absolutely no one thinks that is 'dumb'.