Oklahoma Teacher Shortage

[Zuplar]

Well, when countries like Cuba have higher literacy rates than the U.S. and are lauded for their educational system, while ours is a maze of "throw it against the wall and hopefully some of it will stick," something is, in fact, broken. I think it's a very appropriate word.

Speaking of Cuba, a neighbor of mine once had a four year old with a serious and rare heart defect. He went to Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, and got the same answer: a certain surgeon at a Havana hospital is the best of the best. He contacted the State Department, who allowed a waiver, and they took this four year old to Cuba. He is now 19 years old and healthy as can be. The bill was ZERO dollars even though they were Americans. They were simply amazed at the island nation and its educational system and healthcare system. NO WAY should they be better - in anything - than this huge, wealthy country to the north.

Funny you mention Cuba, as I was talking about some of these very same things to someone they other day. They didn't even believe me till they looked up the stats themselves.

[dankrutka]

The United States has a 99% literacy rate. Yeah, that's terrible. Have you studied how literacy rates are calculated and what accounts for differences? How confident are you in the accuracy of Cuba's numbers anyway? North Korea has 100% literacy - first in the world. Would you also like our schools to be like theirs?

This is another problem we have, people throw out statistics and studies without context or methodologies. The international tests that are frequently referenced have serious methodological flaws, but they're cited in public dialogue like they're scientific laws.

[zookeeper]

The United States has a 99% literacy rate. Yeah, that's terrible. Have you studied how literacy rates are calculated and what accounts for differences? How confident are you in the accuracy of Cuba's numbers anyway? North Korea has 100% literacy - first in the world. Would you also like our schools to be like theirs?

This is another problem we have, people throw out statistics and studies without context or methodologies. The international tests that are frequently referenced have serious methodological flaws, but they're cited in public dialogue like they're scientific laws.

Too much anger. Dan, you are better than this. You also know there are different figures depending on sources. I appreciate your viewpoint from academia, but it can sometimes border on pedantic. I was making a larger point about our ability to be better.

[dankrutka]

Too much anger. Dan, you are better than this. You also know there are different figures depending on sources. I appreciate your viewpoint from academia, but it can sometimes border on pedantic. I was making a larger point about our ability to be better.

I know tone doesn't read well online, but I certainly wasn't angry. More frustrated. Anyway, I apologize if it came across poorly.

Give Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars (2014) - also available on audiobook - a read and it might help explain why teaching is a frustrating profession. It's constantly labelled as failing or broken (again, there's been no time in American history schools haven't been viewed as "broken") by legislators and the public who do little to support it compared to other countries. Oh well...

[tfvc.org]

I thought that the lottery was supposed to pay for the education system? Or at least that was their excuse for making it legal here. Where is that money going? Maybe Oklahoma could make a certain drug legal and use the taxes from that to pay for the educational system. Teachers would be making 4 times the national average if that was the case.

[ou48A]

It’s a poorly managed system where many in management have virtually zero since of efficiency and feel no responsibility other than increasing the size of their own turf. There is a huge amount of wasted resources in our educational system…

There are many cases where big money is spent nearly every year on a new educational program and materials that somebody says is the next best mouse trap when there wasn’t a lot wrong with the old program… Techers grow demoralized by being forced to retrain for a new program nearly every year….. Just when teachers grow proficient the administrators often switch to a new teaching method.

There are many examples in the OKCPS where an employee is run raged with their work load and others in the same building do almost nothing…
It’s a poorly managed system.

[ou48A]

It is a difficult discussion, but it needs to happen. My wife is a teacher, and we have talked about the union a lot. There are some things I like about it, but I absolutely HATE that they make it almost impossible to fire teachers with tenure. I've seen too many irritable 60 year old teachers that have no business in a class room but the district cannot do anything with them.

Teachers do get fired in OKCPS……..It’s not often enough but if an principle is willing to put in the long hard work that is required, a teacher can be fired…. The problem is that very few principles are willing to do this work that is necessary to get rid of bad teachers because the system that was agreed to in negotiations is flawed.

[Jersey Boss]

I thought that the lottery was supposed to pay for the education system? Or at least that was their excuse for making it legal here. Where is that money going? Maybe Oklahoma could make a certain drug legal and use the taxes from that to pay for the educational system. Teachers would be making 4 times the national average if that was the case.

The funds from the lottery allowed the legislators to slash state funding to pay for tax credits and such.

[ou48A]

Our limited resources require that Oklahoma move further down the road of forced consolidation and a reduction of administrators.
When other states can do this and operate with far more efficiency we can too!

[Jersey Boss]

Our resources would not be so limited if the legislators were not shoveling them out with no oversight to favorite industries and interests. I will agree that district consolidation is urgently needed, but the outsized influence of rural legislators is a major impediment to getting this done. While I support the position that funding does not always translate to better results, lack of funding insures poor results.

[Just the facts]

Simple solution, eliminate public schools after 6th grade and make secondary education mandatory. If parents don't pay then garnish tax refunds, paychecks, and social benefits.

Or, stop building so many new schools and abandoning old ones. If people want to move to the open prairie fine, but schools shouldn't follow them out there.

[Jersey Boss]

Simple solution, eliminate public schools after 6th grade and make secondary education mandatory. If parents don't pay then garnish tax refunds, paychecks, and social benefits.

Or, stop building so many new schools and abandoning old ones. If people want to move to the open prairie fine, but schools shouldn't follow them out there.

Do you know of any first world county where this is the practice?

[Laramie]

I thought that the lottery was supposed to pay for the education system? Or at least that was their excuse for making it legal here. Where is that money going? Maybe Oklahoma could make a certain drug legal and use the taxes from that to pay for the educational system. Teachers would be making 4 times the national average if that was the case.

Sadly, Oklahoma used to lottery to supplant the funding. It didn't increase the funds; those incremental increases where shifted from Education to pad some of the other state budgets.

[Laramie]

Teachers do get fired in OKCPS……..It’s not often enough but if an principle is willing to put in the long hard work that is required, a teacher can be fired…. The problem is that very few principles are willing to do this work that is necessary to get rid of bad teachers because the system that was agreed to in negotiations is flawed.

A principal has to put a non tenured/tenured teacher on a plan of improvement. The maximum teacher load any principal can monitor effectively is 2 to 3 (tenured and non tenured) teachers. There are loads of paper work (documentation) needed to support bringing a teacher before the board for termination with strict timelines & benchmarks.

Unions don't always take the teacher's side; they often work with the administration. Sometimes it's better to counsel the ineffective teacher into resignation.

Simple solution, eliminate public schools after 6th grade and make secondary education mandatory. If parents don't pay then garnish tax refunds, paychecks, and social benefits.

Or, stop building so many new schools and abandoning old ones. If people want to move to the open prairie fine, but schools shouldn't follow them out there.

Schools follow the people who reside in the communities that support the tax structure to fund those expanding & new districts.

The older areas have a populous that have long graduated their children; they have no interest in increased property taxes or millage to fund those structures.

[Just the facts]

Do you know of any first world county where this is the practice?

Japan follows a similar program. Not sure about other countries.

[zookeeper]

Our limited resources require that Oklahoma move further down the road of forced consolidation and a reduction of administrators.
When other states can do this and operate with far more efficiency we can too!

I agree with this. The local school superintendents are often the most highly paid, and most powerful people, in many rural areas. Some for districts with only a tiny number of students. But Jersey Boss nailed the problem, when rural legislators run the legislature, nothing will happen.

[Dubya61]

Simple solution, eliminate public schools after 6th grade and make secondary education mandatory. If parents don't pay then garnish tax refunds, paychecks, and social benefits.

Or, stop building so many new schools and abandoning old ones. If people want to move to the open prairie fine, but schools shouldn't follow them out there.

Go home, JTF. You're drunk.
Yes, this would solve the problem. In that same vein, we could additional attempt to solve sprawl by making it mandatory to have a certain person-per-square-feet law on your property. Any homeowners who don't comply would pay a low-density-luxury-tax. If they don't pay, then garnish tax refunds, paychecks, and social benefits.

[Dubya61]

I agree with this. The local school superintendents are often the most highly paid, and most powerful people, in many rural areas. Some for districts with only a tiny number of students. But Jersey Boss nailed the problem, when rural legislators run the legislature, nothing will happen.

I think you can hardly say that rural legislators run the legislature. We've got to get out of the two tribes mentality. There is no republican solution. There is no democrat solution. There is no rural solution. There is no urban solution. We need to come together and solve this problem.

[dankrutka]

Teachers do get fired in OKCPS……..It’s not often enough but if an principle is willing to put in the long hard work that is required, a teacher can be fired…. The problem is that very few principles are willing to do this work that is necessary to get rid of bad teachers because the system that was agreed to in negotiations is flawed.

Retaining, attracting, and nurturing good teachers is a far more important issue than firing bad ones. A lot of the bad teachers are still better than long term subs. What's the use in firing bad teachers if there's no one to replace them? Remember, there's a teacher shortage.

I recently listened to a story (I think it was Freakonomics, but I can't remember) that said that teachers are actually fired more than many other similar professions. However, firing bad teachers has become a talking point. Having said that, there need to be high expectations in the field. No student deserves a bad teacher. But you can't get that with low pay and demoralizing cultures/politics.

[Just the facts]

If people are moving to areas because of the quality schools, then stop building new schools and make the existing ones quality, We then save millions and millions and millions on construction and land acqusition.

[gopokes88]

I don't know how to fix it but I do think OKC should unify the entire metro into one system.

In Albuquerque the entire city (600,000) is under Albuquerque Public Schools it has 80,000+ students in it. Granted it has some bureaucratic nightmares (they once lost $16,000,000, they still have no idea where it is.) but the funding is great. Because it is under one system the million dollar homes feed into the same system as the ones in the ghetto. The worst APS high schools receive the same funding as the wealthy neighborhoods. Now they are still bad schools with bad kids in them. Nothing will ever change the fact that the worse your home life, the less likely you'll perform well in school, but does give troubled kids access to the top of the line facilities and teachers. It was an eye opener to see how bad the facilities are in OKC. It helps their odds, it doesn't fix it but it does help.

[jerrywall]

I thought that the lottery was supposed to pay for the education system? Or at least that was their excuse for making it legal here. Where is that money going?

The big truth is there's just not that much of it. In 10 years the lottery has provided about $600 million for education. So $60 million a year on average. Only 45% of that goes to primary and secondary education, so $25 million or so. Our education budget is about $2.5 billion (not counting the $1 billion that goes to higher ed). So you're talking about a pretty small contribution to the education budget which already is half of our total state annual budget (not counting local spending).

[jerrywall]

Maybe Oklahoma could make a certain drug legal and use the taxes from that to pay for the educational system. Teachers would be making 4 times the national average if that was the case.

Colorado is projecting $95 million in tax revenue in total from marijuana this year. Sure, it would help, but is would be a single digit percentile increase in education funding. And that's if you don't incur any additional costs (enforcement, etc). I also don't think we'd have the sales here that Colorado has.

[gopokes88]

Colorado is projecting $95 million in tax revenue in total from marijuana this year. Sure, it would help, but is would be a single digit percentile increase in education funding. And that's if you don't incur any additional costs (enforcement, etc). I also don't think we'd have the sales here that Colorado has.

People are really bad with numbers I've noticed. Sure $95 million is nice but it would be a 3% boost to our education budget. This thread wouldn't exist if all that was needed was a 3% boost in funding.

[gopokes88]

Colorado is projecting $95 million in tax revenue in total from marijuana this year. Sure, it would help, but is would be a single digit percentile increase in education funding. And that's if you don't incur any additional costs (enforcement, etc). I also don't think we'd have the sales here that Colorado has.

People are really bad with numbers I've noticed. Sure $95 million is nice but it would be a 3% boost to our education budget. This thread wouldn't exist if all that was needed was a 3% boost in funding.

And that's not a sustainable # for colorado. As more states legalize their pot tourism industry will drop and drop and drop. It's not going to fall off a cliff but this would be the high water mark.