Posty, trouble in OK

[jb]

See on the news your educators are expressing their frustration over low pay and classroom budgets.
Being #47 in low pay should be a disgrace, and using text books that are 20 years old even worse.
What's the problem ?

[BarryBobPosthole]

The problem is we elected a Tea Party legislature who took on the same path as Kansas and many others. They cut state taxes big time (we were already one of the lowest taxed states in the US), reduced the gross production tax for oil and gas from 7% to 1% (as a comparison, North Dakota is or was at 11%). Then they wondered why state revenues tanked. The the bottom dropped out of oil prices and we’ve never recovered. the current republican leadership hasn’t passed a raise for teachers in eleven years and have cut spending overall more than 30%. And then of course, they say charter schools are what we need for education.
Its all ideology until you see it where the rubber meets the road. And our legislature are cowRds and our governor is a stupid bitch.

Anything else you want to know?

BKb

[Thumper]

Well, there are 50 States ... SOMEBODY has to be #47. ;)

[BarryBobPosthole]

JB was generous. We’re actually 49th.

BKB

[Penguin]

Thank god for West Virginia huh?

Wait a minute...... :p

Will

[BarryBobPosthole]

Aren’t they the tricksters who gave the teachers a raise to get them off the street and then cut their pension benefits to pay for it?

BKB

[Penguin]

The main reason they walked out was the cost of insurance has skyrocketed and they were having trouble affording decent care. Although my heart was with them I know this is a national problem. Much bigger than the teachers of one state. Bigger than all the teachers in all the states put together.

They ended up taking the promise of a raise to get them to go back to work but I doubt anything will come of the insurance problem. Honestly at this point I am convinced that nothing short of a completely nationalized health care system will fix it. We just have too much graft and corruption and kickbacks and shady business dealings masquerading as "the free market". And far too many politicians getting rich off of campaign contributions who are willing to defend such a rotten to the core system.

But I wish the teachers all the luck in the world. They are on the right side of this issue I just don't know that they can do anything about it.

Will

PS: Please don't call me a commie for the opinions stated above. We have the most inefficient and costly system in the first world. I am not a commie I am a pragmatist... I want something that works and this shit ain't working.

[BarryBobPosthole]

I don’t know the situation in WVA but here the teacher pay is only part of the issue they have walked out over. Overall education funding in the state has been cut by 30% on a per student basis. And teachers are where a lot of that slack is taken up. My sister was an English teacher for 25 years (she’s a school counsellor in Arkansas now because of pay) and Imy familyand I have personally bought hundreds of copies of literature books that she needed for her classroom over the years.
That ain’t right.
The mantra here is that it is administrator pay that is one of the big overhead issues that needs to be cut and that no more money should be ‘thrown away’ until inefficiencies are dealt with in education. Administrative overhead is 7.4% here. If we fired all of the superintendents and principles and administrators that’s what we’d save.
Like you said, education is not an efficient model in any setting, at least IMO. We’re not cranking out widgets. And one size definitely doesn’t fit all. Rural schools will always be very inefficient for example.
Maybe we just need to get rid of all of the mba’s.
BKB

[Penguin]

"...... Maybe we just need to get rid of all of the mba’s."

Hey, that's a thought. :)

Public education is an easy target to pick on and an easy one to defend I think. Be honest, can any of us honestly even claim to imagine what it must be like to walk into some of the classrooms in some parts of this country? I cannot so I tend to listen more and speak less when the subject comes up. I do think secondary school education is vital, and I've no problem with investing more in the system. But I think the discipline problems need to be addressed as well.

I could make changes in one day that would lead to all of these problems disappearing in short order though. It just isn't constitutional. My solution? Outlaw private schools. Make rich and powerful people put their kids in the scrap heap that they helped to create with their disinterest and benign neglect. You'd better believe that most of these problems we see would disappear pronto.

That's one of the biggest problems with having an elite that is so rich that it can isolate itself from the rest of society. They truly can wall themselves off and let the world go to hell. And unfortunately they are the ones with the power to fix a lot of this stuff.

Will

[LJ3]

Can't disagree with that unconstitutional approach or that it would be successful in very short order. It would also be eye opening to see the dark forces that rise up to shut it down in even shorter order.

I was telling some other dufes yesterday about my neck of the woods. Many many Loudoun County teachers have to live in WVA over an hour away because they can't afford to live in NOVA. Avg NOVA salaries are ridiculously low. I'd like to see every state start to raise hell about the state of our schools, nationally. I don't think it would change anything quickly but at least keep it in a sphere of awareness to some degree.

[BarryBobPosthole]

The most often quoted panacea I’ve heard lately is ‘school choice’. As if fixing the problems in common public education is too difficult so let’s offer a better alternative. In my state, they have tried several different legislative vehicles to fund them with common education revenues. Let the tax dollars follow the student into whatever school the parents choose. That’s the idea, and it sounds good until you think about a nanosecond about it. When you realize that charter schools are most often ran by out of state (in Oklahoma the majority of charters are ran administratively by private companies) entities and that they are in no way beholden to the local school boards you start to get nervous. Then when you realize that the curriculum is also decided by those same people and you start to get the idea.
As an example, we have a big duck in a little pond situation in Seminole, Oklahoma. There is a business there, Enviro Systems, who is the biggest employer there. The owner said he couldn’t find qualified job candidates there and decided it was because of the poor product (yes, product) that the local public school was producing. Instead of trying to fix the problem, he promoted building a charter school there using tax dollars for a part of its funding. The local school board voted it down. He took it to Mary Fallon and the state board and they approved it. So now, Seminole has a charter school that is ran by acompany out of Texas, paid for by Oklahoma taxes, and doesn’t answer to anyone in Seminole Oklahoma. It turns out as well the company in Texas that the owner selected teaches creationism prominently in their curriculum. It remains to be seen how many Enviro Systems employees they can crank out.
This is happening everywhere, not just Oklahoma. Home schooling is the other alternative.

Geee but this is a frustrating issue.

BKB

[Penguin]

hmmmm.

That sounds about par for the course Posty. There are some major drawbacks to these systems they implement. And you are right, the use of the word PRODUCT is a red flag. And although I freely admit that I do not have the answer for these types of questions anymore than anyone else, I do think you have put your finger on one of our biggest problems. We have shucked our duties as citizens and placed our faith in the market. For things that have no business being treated as a... well, a business.

Will

[LJ3]

Shame has been a cultural motivator since the beginning of time. It could prove a useful tool with the state of our education system if it became a national topic.

I also heard someone suggest making a starting teacher salary in the 100K range with a minimum of masters or phd to qualify. Seemed silly and sensible at the same time.

Kinda like my good friend, Posthole!

[Penguin]

100k? Interesting. You would definitely have some motivation to go into it at that salary! I'm not sure of what the specs are to be a teacher honestly.

It is a very difficult situation. There are so many difficult choices that I think would need to be made in order to make our secondary schools great. Elite. And it would take a complete change in attitude as well. I think the atmosphere, the "feel" of schools, would need to drastic makeover. I also think, although I may be completely loco in doing so, that there can be many different systems that could work.

As a complete aside they had Gary Player on the Golic and Wingo show this morning as I was driving in. They were talking about his lifelong commitment to lifting weights and staying in shape. When they asked his secret to looking so great and being so active after 80 years he said that people don't eat the right things, they don't exercise enough (if at all), they don't sleep enough, they don't laugh enough. Then he said this (paraphrasing) "Schools don't educate kids how to live. These are things that they should be doing and they are not. And when you don't learn them you pay the price."

Player is an amazing guy from all I have heard throughout the years. It was an interesting observation.

Will

[BarryBobPosthole]

There is a lot of shit that is upside down in our modern world in the US. I guess I should speak only for what I see in Oklahoma.
Education is the largest chunk of where our state and local taxes go. Indeed, there appears to be a lot of things that could be done to improve how much we get for that investment and the quality of it. Rarely have I seen more government involvement in running education result in any improvement. The opposite is true in most cases. And yet.....we try.
We also give/spend tremendous resources to develop things that will provide us with jobs and downstream revenues. Oil and gas companies get tremendous tax breaks here. Wind energy companies are given huge tax breaks in Oklahoma to encourage development. As if neither would be developed without those breaks. And every time a company looks to relocate somewhere, the race is on to lure them to our cities with humongous tax incentives. And yet, we cheer when that happens. We don’t complain one whot about the billions spent in tax breaks to attract businesses.
We have to have more faith in developing our human resources and know that the more educated and the more prepared our people are, the more jobs our state will attract. There just isn’t any fast or political way around that simple fact. We can’t cut our way to anything but brokedness. How we do that development is to ensure that we do the basics the right way without cutting corners. That means we hire and pay professionals to do it. And then we have to listen to them. And if the only way we let them speak and be heard is through their unions, then the problem is ours not theirs.



BkB

[Thumper]

I wrote a "Thump Post" for this thread yesterday ... but had trouble hitting the send button. I finally deleted the whole mess and decided I should step back and try to be less negative.

Ya' know what? I just ended up doing the same exact thing this morning. I spent a ton of time expressing my thoughts on this subject ... re-read it multiple times ... then sent it all to the round-file. I guess this is one of those things I just shouldn't comment on.

I WILL say, I have all the respect in the world for ANYONE who would even consider entering the teaching profession these days. The ONLY incentive I can see for them to do so, is that they must be totally dedicated to trying to do some good in this messed up world. To make matters worse, a good portion of the students are more screwed up than the system! Discipline is one MAJOR thing that's lacking. Not only at home, but the schools themselves have their hands tied. Discipline a kid these days and you'll likely end up in jail.

I have a LOT more to say, but that's one of my major gripes. I will say I have one question that bugs me. All I ever hear about is how broke (as in short of funds) the educational system always is. I don't have a clue, but it seems most every state these days has some sort of lottery. Don't most (if not all) of them dump millions of $$$ from the profits, into the school system? (or am I a dinosaur?) WTF is being done with all that cash?

[jb]

Our state uses lottery funds for education, but if it adds 1 billion to the education budget, then 1 billion is taken from the budget that came from other sources. Then they say 100% of lottery goes to education.

[BarryBobPosthole]

We have had the same thing happen here, JB. One of the latest revenue raising tactics here is to allow dice games in the casinos and taxing that. Sin taxes are always popular here on the buckle of the Bible belt.

BKB

[quercus alba]

Sin tax? Is that like buying indulgences?

[LJ3]

Sin tax? Is that like buying indulgences?

I thought that was tied to sentence structure and punctuation. Apparently I needed a better education.

[BarryBobPosthole]

Clever.

BKb

[LJ3]

I'll see myself out.

[quercus alba]

I actually thought that myself but I didn't want to be a hog about things