Perspective - May 2007

May 2007 • Volume 14 Number 5

It’s time to shut down the OU Women’s Studies program

The surprising truth about teacher pay

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Perspective May 2007

Vol. 14, No. 5

Brandon Dutcher .................................. Editor Perspective is published monthly by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Inc., an independent public policy organization. OCPA formulates and promotes public policy research and analysis consistent with the principles of free enterprise and limited government. The views expressed in Perspective do not necessarily reflect the views of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Inc.

OCPA Board of Trustees Blake Arnold

Henry F. Kane

Mary Lou Avery

Robert Kane

Lee J. Baxter

Tom H. McCasland, III

Oklahoma City

Bartlesville

Oklahoma City

Tulsa

Lawton

Duncan

Steve W. Beebe

David McLaughlin

G.T. Blankenship

Lew Meibergen

John A. Brock

Ronald L. Mercer

Duncan

Enid

Oklahoma City

Enid

Tulsa

Bethany

David R. Brown, M.D.

Lloyd Noble, II

Aaron Burleson

Robert E. Patterson

Paul A. Cox

Russell M. Perry

Oklahoma City

Tulsa

Altus

Tulsa

Oklahoma City

Edmond

William Flanagan

Patrick Rooney

Josephine Freede

Melissa Sandefer

Kent Frizzell

Richard Sias

John T. Hanes

John Snodgrass

Ralph Harvey

Lew Ward

John A. Henry, III

Gary W. Wilson, M.D.

Paul H. Hitch

Daryl Woodard

Claremore

Oklahoma City

Oklahoma City

Norman

Claremore

Oklahoma City

Oklahoma City

Ardmore

Oklahoma City

Enid

Oklahoma City

Edmond

Guymon

Tulsa

Daniel J. Zaloudek Tulsa

OCPA Adjunct Scholars Will Clark, Ph.D.

Ronald L. Moomaw, Ph.D.

University of Oklahoma

Oklahoma State University

David Deming, Ph.D.

Ann Nalley, Ph.D.

University of Oklahoma

Cameron University

Bobbie L. Foote, Ph.D.

Bruce Newman, Ph.D.

University of Oklahoma (Ret.)

Western Oklahoma State College

E. Scott Henley, Ph.D., J.D.

Stafford North, Ph.D.

Oklahoma City University

Oklahoma Christian University

James E. Hibdon, Ph.D.

Rex J. Pjesky, Ph.D.

University of Oklahoma (Ret.)

Northeastern State University

Russell W. Jones, Ph.D.

Paul A. Rahe, Ph.D.

University of Central Oklahoma

University of Tulsa

Andrew W. Lester, J.D.

Michael Scaperlanda, J.D.

Oklahoma City University (Adjunct)

University of Oklahoma

David L. May, Ph.D.

Andrew C. Spiropoulos, J.D.

Oklahoma City University

Oklahoma City University

OCPA Fellows Steven J. Anderson, CPA Research Fellow

J. Rufus Fears, Ph.D. Dr. David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow for Freedom Enhancement

OCPA Legal Counsel DeBee Gilchrist Oklahoma City

OCPA Staff Brett A. Magbee / VP for Operations Brandon Dutcher / VP for Policy Margaret Ann Hoenig / Director of Development Brian Hobbs / Director of Marketing and Public Affairs Mary Ferguson / Executive Assistant and Event Coordinator 1401 N. Lincoln Boulevard Oklahoma City, OK 73104 (405) 602-1667 FAX: (405) 602-1238 www.ocpathink.org ocpa@ocpathink.org

Oil Fuels Human Progress

By David Deming

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n ancient times, the rate of human progress was so slow as to be indiscernible. People lived and died as their ancestors had done.

Their outlook was pessimistic. In the second century AD, Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote that anyone who had lived for 40 years had seen “all that is past and future.”

Human beings did not begin to develop a more optimistic outlook until the principle of progress was developed and embraced by eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers. In 1768, the chemist Joseph Priestly predicted “whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal.”

Priestly’s prediction was fully realized in the Industrial Revolution, a transformation that continues to sweep through the world today. In the last 200 years, the productive capacity of the American worker has increased by a factor of 36 and his life expectancy has doubled. Since 1850, the length of the average work week in America has decreased from 66 to 35 hours. In 1997, the United Nations noted that world poverty had fallen more in the last 50 years than in the previous 500. As our prosperity is increasing, the quality of our environment is improving.

Since 1970, air pollution in the U.S. has declined by 53 percent, even while our energy use increased by 48 percent.

Human progress depends on abundant and inexpensive energy from fossil fuels, including petroleum. Fossil fuels provide 85 percent of the world’s energy, and oil is the largest single source. Since the largescale exploitation of petroleum resources began in the nineteenth century, the world has consumed a trillion barrels of oil. But the resource is far from exhausted. In the last 10 years, geological estimates of the size of the ultimate petroleum resource have grown from about 2.5 trillion barrels to 5.5 trillion barrels. Human beings are discovering new oil resources at a rate 10 times faster than we are consuming the resource.

There is at least enough oil to provide for the world’s energy needs to the end of this century. Ultimately, however, petroleum is a finite resource that will be unable to power human civilization indefinitely. No technology is sustainable; all are bridges to greater human achievement. But at the present time all alternatives to fossil fuels have severe deficiencies.

Finding new energy sources will require decades of research and development. The technologies of the future are being developed today at the University of Oklahoma, where visionary president David Boren has fostered an intellectual renaissance. But impoverished societies cannot fund scientific research or afford clean environments. To create the future, we need to continue the development and utilization of fossil fuels.

Human progress is sustainable only if we maintain an optimistic attitude, continue to increase our prosperity and energy utilization, and invest in education and research. The greatest danger to human civilization today is not environmental degradation, but a return to the ancient plague of pessimism. % OCPA adjunct scholar David Deming (Ph.D., University of Utah) is a geophysicist and an associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma.

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OCPA is bringing Dinesh D’Souza back to Oklahoma to discuss his most important book ever!

Liberals are upset about what Dinesh says in this new book ... (some conservatives are, too!)

On Thursday, May 17th come have lunch with us and find out why.

LIMITED SEATING! RESERVATIONS ARE BEING TAKEN NOW!

This will be OCPA’s first luncheon event at the

Oklahoma History Center, 2401 N. Laird Avenue, Okla. City (northeast of the capitol building).

CALL US TODAY AT

405.602.1667 OKLAHOMA COUNCIL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, INC.

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Destructive Dogmas The Women’s Studies program at the University of Oklahoma – a harmful program devoted to the study of women and the promotion of a socially destructive ideology – is completely unnecessary. The taxpayers of Oklahoma should stop paying for it.

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here is no legitimate reason why the taxpayers of Oklahoma should support an academic program—the Women’s Studies program at the University of Oklahoma—devoted to women and the promotion of the feminist ideology.

As an academic matter, it is completely unnecessary. Serious scholars currently located in the OU Women’s Studies program could become parts of other departments such as English, psychology, anthropology, or sociology. In fact, many of them already have joint appointments in other departments. If the faculty members in the Women’s Studies program are doing good research, it should survive the scrutiny of other scholars in their primary discipline. If it cannot, there is certainly no reason to support it within a separate department.

Women students do not need special support in today’s academic world. The fields in which women continue to be under-represented are fields in which women are already being heavily recruited and courted. Many schools and companies have outreach programs specifically designed to attract more women into science and engineering. Yet despite these outreach efforts, the fields remain stubbornly male.

Besides, who among us is willing to sacrifice their own natural interests in order to “win one for the girls”? I spent my academic career in economics, a male-dominated field. I found myself attracted to the more humanistic parts of the discipline. I would have had to distort my own intellect and interests to force myself into the extreme male mold that would have been required to succeed in the more mathematical areas of economics. I was unwilling to do that for myself. I can not in good conscience encourage other people to cram themselves into academic slots that don’t really fit them.

By Jennifer Roback Morse

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Overall in the United States, women outnumber men among undergraduates. For undergraduates of the traditional college age—that is, under 25—a clear female majority emerged a decade ago. The male share of undergraduates dropped from 49 percent in 1995-96 to 46 percent in 2003-04. Among undergraduates who are aged 25 and older, women outnumber men almost two to one. The largest gender gap is among African-American undergraduates, where males make up a mere 40 percent of the under-25 aged students. This is hardly evidence of an oppressed minority who needs a continual hand-up from the establishment.

In fact, this gender imbalance in higher education is becoming a social problem for women themselves.

Educated women, particularly African-American women, are having a hard time finding suitable marriage partners. There are simply not enough educated men to go around. As a result, some educated women are giving up on marriage completely and choosing single motherhood, with all its accompanying problems and risks, simply by default.

How About a Men’s Studies Department?

Therefore, we do not need Women’s Studies departments to give women students additional encouragement and support. If anything, we need a Men’s Studies department that would ask why men are retreating from higher education. We should have a Men’s Center on campus to encourage them to invest in themselves, for their own benefit and the benefit of the wider society.

There are other very interesting topics for the Men’s Studies department to study. For instance, why do men commit suicide so much more often than women? Men in general commit suicide at four times the rate that women do. Married men are only half as likely as bachelors and about one-third as likely as divorced men to take their own lives. In other words, getting married cuts a man’s suicide risk in half.

Getting divorced triples his probability of suicide. And a man whose wife dies is about ten times more likely to commit suicide than a wife whose husband dies.

Furthermore, a Men’s Studies department might ask why children do better with single fathers than with single mothers. Even when income is held constant, children who live with their fathers full-time had higher self-esteem and less anxiety, less depression, and fewer problem behaviors than children who were with their mothers full-time. Children in father custody have the advantage of maintaining a more positive relationship with the mother than do children in mother custody. The greater income of the father is not the source of the benefit to the children, but an additional benefit.

And while we’re on the subject of divorce, scholars

of Men’s Studies might ask whether it is really true that divorced men have “abandoned” their families, when two-thirds to three-quarters of divorces are initiated by women. The vast majority of these divorces do not involve anything remotely like domestic violence.

One survey of 256 people who had been divorced at one time or another asked “what was the principal reason you got a divorce?” Sixteen percent reported drug or alcohol problems as the principal reason, while only five percent reported abuse as the principal reason. Fully 47 percent listed “basic personality

Your Tax Dollars at Work Here are some of the courses offered in the OU Women’s Studies program.

• Contemporary Feminist Thought • Feminist Anthropology • Women Creating Social Change • Early Modern Witch-hunt • Lesbian Literature • Sociology of Family • Human Sexuality • Human Sexuality II • Women’s Health • Varieties of Radical Dissent • Food and Power • You’ve Come a Long Way Baby: How Female Athletes Arrived • Women and Religion • Sociology of Gender • Health and Gender • Women and Gender Relations • Race, Gender and the Media • Music and Gender • Gender in East Asia • European Women and Gender Relations • Gender and Cross-Cultural Issues in Eastern European Women’s Writing • Women, Minorities, Mathematics and Achievement • Southern African Women Writers • Women and World Politics • African Women and Religion • Women and Development in Latin America Source: http://www.ou.edu/womstudy/

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©Cartoonbank.com

differences or incompatibility” as the principal reason likely to die at work than are men. For instance, of the for their divorce, while 17 percent listed marital deaths in Iraq, less than 2.6 percent have been infidelity and 10 percent reported disputes about female, at a time when women comprised 10 percent money or children. of the forces deployed in Iraq. In other words, women Students more interested in activism than in scholwho serve in Iraq will get equal pay with men, with arship might want to fight the injustice so frequently only about one-fourth the chance of being killed perpetrated by divorce courts, which enforce noncompared with men. custodial fathers’ obligations to pay financial support In addition to a Men’s Studies department to much more strenuously than their rights to visit their balance the Women’s Studies department, we should children. Governmental agencies take a dim view of also have a Life Studies department to balance the fathers who fail to pay. But these same agencies pro-abortion ideology of Women’s Studies departappear to be much more tolerant of women who ments. The interdisciplinary Life Studies department actively interfere with their children’s rights to have would prepare young women and men for careers of relationships with their father. activism and service within the pro-life movement.

Men’s Studies scholars could also investigate why Women could receive the professional training they little boys are so much need to run a crisis more emotionally pregnancy center, vulnerable than little or to do girls. For instance, a fundraising for study examining the pro-life foundaimpact of maternal tions, or to be depression on the office managers cognitive development for medical clinics of children found no that deliver babies affect on girls. But the free of charge, or boys of depressed to be hospice mothers scored a full workers. standard deviation The Life Studies lower on standardized program might intelligence tests than also have classes boys whose mothers crossed-listed in were not depressed. embryology, to Developmental differexplain what the ences between girls “blob of tissue” and boys are so really is. These commonly found that courses could child development explain that the “Mrs. Gilray says women aren’t going to take it anymore. Pass it on.” experts more or less “product of contake them for granted. In this particular study of ception” is a human life, not from the time of “quickmaternal depression, the researchers suggest that ening” as medieval thinkers believed, not from the “because infant boys as a group are already developtime of implantation in the womb, but from the momentally delayed compared with girls, their abilities ment of conception. to regulate their attention and emotions and find The Life Studies program could also offer courses order in the world are particularly in need of help that explain what pro-life leaders actually believe, as from a sensitive healthy caregiver.” opposed to the caricatures of their views so often Here’s another question: Why are men over-reprepresented in other classes. Students might learn sented in the “death professions”? Of the deaths that about Norma McCorvey, who was the original Jane occur in the workplace, 92 percent occur to men. Jobs Roe of Roe v. Wade, how she felt exploited by her prolike timber cutters and fishers, pilots and navigators, abortion attorneys, and why she eventually had a roofers, cab drivers, truck drivers, and construction change of heart and converted to Catholicism. One laborers have among the highest risks of death. has to admit in all candor that students are not likely These have traditionally been male-dominated to hear this kind of information in any other classes occupations. on campus.

We might also ask ourselves why those women who Has Feminism Made People Happy? do work in dangerous occupations are so much less But enough about other academic departments.

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What about feminism itself? Has feminism made people happy? I fully recognize that feminists disagree amongst themselves on many crucial issues.

Instead of trying to unravel those Byzantine threads, I will analyze the form of feminism that has filtered down in the mainstream culture. Feminism means roughly this: women and men are the same, except that women are better. So my question is this: has the systematic denial of genuine gender differences made people happy?

I would argue that, on the contrary, this has been a disaster for men and women alike. Differences between the sexes appear at birth. As we mature, everything that has to do with sex or reproduction affects men and women differently. Men and women react to the sex act itself differently. Women frequently are more eager to get married and to start families earlier than men are. If they have trouble conceiving, they each experience infertility very differently. If they do have a child, they will react to the woman’s pregnancy differently, they will treat the baby differently, and the baby will treat them differently. As their child grows up, mothers and fathers have different approaches to parenting.

If a couple cannot admit these most basic differences, they are headed for conflict and grief. They will expect the other person to feel what they feel, see things as they do, and then feel cheated when they don’t. The demand for equal sharing of household chores runs into this same problem: men and women are sensitive to different needs within the household.

This is why sociologists have so often found that gender equality ideology is correlated with marital dissatisfaction among wives. Women who cling to the feminist ideology continually feel cheated. By contrast, wives who feel appreciated by their husbands for her contributions report higher levels of marital satisfaction. This is even true among wives who do the lion’s share of the housework. Even more interesting is the finding that women are happiest when they feel their husbands are emotionally engaged with them, regardless of the division of household chores.

The feminist attempt to overlook or explain away systematic differences between men and women has made people miserable.

Feminism has taken the personal relationship that is the most important to most people, namely marriage, and injected poison into it. As the relationship between mothers and fathers, marriage is also the most basic unit of social cooperation. When marriage breaks down, the substitutes for it are crude and ineffective and intrusive.

No university needs a department devoted solely to the study of women and the promotion of this socially destructive ideology. The intellectual life of the Univer-

There Is Simply No Way I Could Make This Stuff Up In the April-June 2006 edition of the journal Food and Foodways, OU women’s studies professor Julia C. Ehrhardt published an article entitled – stay with me here, folks – “Towards Queering Food Studies: Foodways, Heteronormativity, and Hungry Women in Chicana Lesbian Writing.” Dr. Ehrhardt, a Reach for Excellence Assistant Professor of Honors and Women’s Studies at OU, wrote: As the nascent field of food studies takes shape, insights from queer studies have the potential to enrich our understandings of the interrelationships among food, gender, and sexuality. The project of queering food studies invites us to consider how food practices and beliefs reinforce and resist heterosexual gender ideologies. In this article, I analyze foodways in recent Chicana lesbian literature, examining writings that illustrate the cultural endurance of heteronormative constructions of gender even as they demonstrate how these beliefs are disrupted, destabilized, and transformed in queer literary kitchens. Poetry and essays by Chicana lesbians challenge dominant models of Chicana culinary roles by emphasizing women’s efforts to satisfy their physical and sexual appetites.

In particular, Carla Trujillo’s 2003 novel, What Night Brings, highlights the figure of the hungry lesbian as a provocative counterpoint to the literary image of the Chicana as cook. Literature by Chicana lesbians not only invites scholars to question heteronormative assumptions about food, gender, and identity, but also demonstrates the potential of queer studies to enrich a variety of topics in food scholarship.

– Brandon Dutcher

sity of Oklahoma will go along just fine without a Women’s Studies program. Oklahoma taxpayers should stop paying for the promotion of feminism. % Jennifer Roback Morse (Ph.D., University of Rochester) taught economics for 15 years at Yale University and George Mason University. In a recent debate at the University of Virginia, sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Dr. Morse argued against the necessity of women’s studies departments. Dr. Morse has served as a research fellow for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and as a John M. Olin visiting scholar at the Cornell Law School. She is now a research fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. Her public-policy articles have appeared in Forbes, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, Policy Review, The American Enterprise, Reason, and Vital Speeches. Her scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of Political Economy, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Her latest book is Smart Sex: Finding Lifelong Love in a Hook-up World (Spence, 2005).

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By Lawrence W. Reed

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here should be a ready-made market for a great new book just out this spring: Charles G. Koch’s The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World’s Largest Private Company.

Academia, government, nonprofit organizations and even much of the business world could use a management primer that integrates economic and management principles against the backdrop of indisputable achievement.

Koch doesn’t just read books or give lectures about building and running a successful enterprise; he actually built one, and he runs it. Koch is CEO of Koch Industries Inc., a star performer of a company that boasts $90 billion in annual sales and 80,000 employees. Since the late 1960s, Charles, his brother David, and their business associates have taken the oil firm that Koch’s father started more than half a century ago and fashioned it into a privately held global conglomerate. It produces more “stuff” than I could describe if I had your attention for an afternoon, including things you eat, walk on, drink from, or put in your car—oil, beef, carpet, asphalt, disposable cups, and paper towels, to name a few.

Koch’s core premise is universal and elemental, one that should prompt any reader to have a “V-8 moment,” like the characters in the old television commercials. That premise is this: We know what makes an economy successful—private property; the rule of law; individualism; risk and incentive; innovation; entrepreneurship; profit and loss; competition; and Schumpeter’s “creative destruction.” In other

words, a market economy. Why shouldn’t those very principles be the foundation of an organization’s success? The challenge, as Koch puts it, is to “develop the mechanisms” that allow a firm (or any organization) “to harness the power of the market economy within the company.”

Koch’s book is more than a management guide. It’s a refresher on the critical pillars of market economics.

The reader is reminded of concepts he might have either forgotten or never learned—opportunity costs, sunk costs, marginal utility, subjective value, comparative advantage, imperfect knowledge, and numerous others. The author admits to being greatly influenced by some of the giants of economic scholarship, from F. A. Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter to Milton Friedman. He attributes the success of Koch Industries to the leadership’s concerted effort to meld management principles with the principles of the market economy, and much of the book explains how that translated into real-world decisions, strategies, and directions that built the company over the years.

Koch calls his resulting methodology “MarketBased Management,” or MBM. At first blush, some readers might wonder how much of MBM is really new, but in fact, Koch has a key insight here. Economic thinking can add significant value even in situations that don’t involve analyzing markets.

One economist who appreciated this point was the late Paul Heyne, who authored a college text I used to require of my freshmen students when I was a college instructor. In The Economic Way of Thinking, Heyne

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showed how, when you really understand economics and how economies work, it can change the way you think about much of life.

For example, I would ask my students what it “cost” them to attend college. Invariably, they would give me a dollar figure that represented tuition plus room and board. But then I would ask them, “What would you be doing if you weren’t here for four years?” (A few were there for a lot longer). It made them realize that the cost of a college education isn’t just the checks that Mom and Dad wrote, but also all the income and experiences they themselves were not earning precisely because they were in college. Bingo. They had discovered “opportunity cost.” I’d like to think that for most of my students thereafter, nothing ever “cost” so little again.

As another example, I explained to the students how the concept of “sunk cost” affected my behavior. I once bought what I thought was a “bargain” halfgallon of pecan ice cream for 99 cents and then quickly discovered the pecans were as scarce as kangaroo wings. After consuming a single disappointing scoop, I put the ice cream back in the freezer. Time and again, I’d see it in there, but couldn’t bring myself to pitch it. After all, I paid a buck for it! I wasn’t thinking like an economist. Then one day it hit me: That 99 cents was sunk. History. Nothing I could do about it.

The only thing that mattered now was the future. Since I was probably never going to eat the rest of the ice cream, the economic thing to do was to get rid of it and make room for something better. I never flushed anything down the garbage disposal with more intellectual satisfaction than that ice cream.

Koch drives home that even in the for-profit business world, where markets exert a great deal of discipline, plenty of firms really still don’t understand the power that market principles can have in their own operations. For instance, in looking at a private business, how many times have you noticed excessive bureaucracy, short-term thinking, ossified decision-making, and reward structures that pay for tenure rather than entrepreneurship? How many times have you witnessed supervisors afraid to bestow real authority on those they supervise? And how many times have you observed a corporate culture beset from the top down with corner-cutting on both quality and integrity?

In most cases, what poor managers need is a reality check. If they don’t comprehend the miraculous workings of a market economy, don’t expect them to be diligently implementing its principles within their organization’s operation. If they’re managing as if they were Soviet central planners, they’re probably reaping Soviet results.

The Soviet system suffered big failures even in its core “expertise”: maintaining rigid internal security.

Remember when a young German named Mathias Rust flew his Cessna 172 in 1987 across hundreds of miles of Soviet terrain and then landed safely in Red Square? Bewildered onlookers, including police and security forces, watched as he enjoyed a nice little self-guided tour of the local sites. They didn’t act because they were instructed to do only what they were ordered to do, and reacting to a Cessna landing in Red Square wasn’t in the book. They were not allowed to be on-the-job entrepreneurs. Koch’s MBM leads to a very different environment indeed.

Nonprofits sometimes behave more like unresponsive, unaccountable, and nonentrepreneurial government outfits than they do for-profit firms. MBM can work well here, too, with the right leadership that knows how to implement the spirit (and not just the letter) of MBM principles. I’m proud to say that as I read Koch’s book, I realized that my nonprofit organization, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, has succeeded in great measure because of MBM-like ideas, though that wasn’t fully apparent to me until I read the book.

At the Mackinac Center, we embrace change. We seek continuous improvement. We don’t think anything is ever done so well that we can’t improve it the next time. We think long-term, which often means that we forgo some attractive but ephemeral ventures that would distract us from our course. We employ the concept of opportunity cost so we get an accurate perspective on what it really costs to undertake a project.

We encourage our staff to be entrepreneurial by aligning the success of the organization to their own personal income and advancement. Like Koch and classical economists, we believe comparative advantage really is a key to success for both an economy and an organization, so we never promote a highperforming colleague into an administrative dead end, as many government schools do with their best teachers. We may be a nonprofit, but we don’t act as if it’s a virtue to be unprofitable. If I had had Charles Koch’s book at my side 20 years ago, however, I think we’d have become successful even faster.

This review hardly covers all the bases of the Koch formula or the MBM success stories within the Koch firm—which is all the more reason to read the book.

For readers who have never made a connection between the market economy and the principles of organizational management, a revelation awaits on every page. For readers who think they already know these things, the book could well be a kick in the pants that makes them realize they have a ways to go to actually, consciously practice what they preach. % Lawrence W. Reed is president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and education institute headquartered in Midland, Mich.

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The Surprising Truth About Teacher Pay When adjusted for cost of living, pension contribution, and experience, teacher compensation in Oklahoma ranks 14th in the nation.

By Terry Stoops

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ducation researchers Jay Greene and Marcus Winters said it best: “Few clichés permeate our culture more thoroughly than that of the underpaid schoolteacher.” And nobody perpetuates that cliché better than the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers union.

In November 2006, the National Education Association released its annual estimates of teacher salaries for the 2005-06 school year. Over the past 10 years, the education establishment has been using teacher salary reports from the NEA and the American Federal of Teachers (AFT) to support a campaign that portrays teachers as victims of miserly, unappreciative, and ignorant taxpayers.

National polls conducted over the last 20 years indicate that the campaign is working. At the start of the 1980s, polls showed that a plurality of Americans agreed that teacher pay was appropriate for the profession. In 1981, 41 percent of respondents said that teacher pay was “about right” and 29 percent said that it was too low. By 1999, only 26 percent of respondents said that teacher pay was “about right” and 61 percent said that it was too low. Polls conducted since 2000 revealed nearly identical results.

Such rhetoric compelled elected officials in a handful of states, including Oklahoma, to promise teachers multi-year pay increases to reach the national or regional average. Alongside Governor Brad Henry’s effort to increase teacher pay to the regional average, governors Michael Easley of North Carolina, Timothy Kaine of Virginia, and Chet Culver of Iowa each promised to raise teacher pay to the national average in their respective states. While the teacher unions and their affiliates praise these efforts, raising salaries to an arbitrary goal like a regional or national average is conciliatory public relations, not sensible public policy. There is no evidence that reaching an “average” salary level will produce a significant increase in teacher recruitment and retention or student performance.

For example, based on state survey and turnover data, I estimated that 406 teachers who left teaching in North Carolina during the 2005-06 school year may have stayed in their position if offered higher pay and better benefits. If spread evenly across all 115 school

systems, each school system in North Carolina may have been able to retain between three and four potential leavers if it offered them higher pay and better benefits. Furthermore, the turnover rate may have been reduced from 12.3 percent to 11.9 percent.

In general, the mainstream media have been complicit in this effort by casting an uncritical eye on the labor union’s teacher salary studies. For example, one Associated Press report published in the Tulsa World pointed out that Oklahoma’s “average teacher salary ranked in the bottom four in the nation for teacher pay and last in the region” but failed to question the accuracy of comparing the NEA’s unadjusted salary figures from state to state. Indeed, taken at face value, the NEA’s teacher salary report showed that teacher’s salaries in Oklahoma’s were falling far behind the nation and the region. The NEA ranked Oklahoma 47th in the nation in average teacher pay.

They estimated that the state’s average teacher salary was $38,772 last year, nearly $8,000 less than the unadjusted U.S. average and almost $5,000 less than the unadjusted average for the region. These unadjusted salary figures, however, are misleading because they ignore important differences between states.

Adjusting for Cost of Living, Pension Contribution, and Experience The NEA admits that its rankings of nominal or unadjusted salaries will not produce apples-to-apples comparisons of teacher pay across states. The authors of the report caution, “any discussion of average salary figures in the absence of other data about the specific state or district provides limited insights into the actual ‘value’ of those salaries. For example, variations in the cost of living may go a long way toward explaining (and, in practice, offsetting) differences in salary levels from one area of the country to another.”

Without a doubt, cost of living is one of the most important differences between states. States such as Connecticut, New Jersey, and California have a high average salary and a high cost of living to match. The high cost of living in these and other states will weaken the value of a teacher’s compensation. On the other hand, states like Oklahoma have a low cost

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Table 1. Adjusted Teacher Compensation by State (Including D.C.) Orig.

Rank 18 13 5 4 11 15 36 16 43 35 45 34 17 47 26 33 44 3 27 37 25 32 42 29 19 — 21 38 12 23 — 9 10 28 2 49 39 30 7 22 31 46 40 51 6 50 14 20 41 48 1

State Georgia Alaska Illinois Michigan Delaware Ohio Texas Oregon Utah Kentucky Missouri Arkansas Minnesota Oklahoma Nevada Tennessee Louisiana California North Carolina New Mexico Arizona South Carolina Alabama Idaho Indiana U.S. Median Wisconsin Kansas Pennsylvania Colorado U.S. Average Rhode Island Maryland Virginia Connecticut Mississippi Nebraska Florida New York Washington Wyoming Montana Iowa South Dakota New Jersey North Dakota Hawaii Vermont Maine West Virginia D.C.

Average Salary (NEA) $48,300 $53,553 $57,819 $58,482 $54,264 $50,314 $41,744 $48,981 $40,316 $41,903 $39,922 $42,093 $48,489 $38,772 $44,426 $42,537 $40,253 $59,345 $43,922 $41,637 $44,672 $43,242 $40,347 $43,390 $47,255 $43,922 $46,390 $41,369 $54,027 $45,616 $46,417 $54,730 $54,486 $43,823 $59,499 $37,924 $41,026 $43,302 $57,354 $46,326 $43,255 $39,832 $40,877 $34,709 $57,707 $37,773 $51,599 $46,622 $40,737 $38,284 $61,195

Pension Match 9.24% 21.00% 7.64% 9.40% 6.10% 13.00% 5.91% 16.97% 13.38% 13.11% 11.50% 14.00% 8.46% 13.43% 10.31% 6.13% 15.50% 8.25% 2.34% 8.65% 7.40% 7.55% 6.56% 10.39% 13.22% 8.25% 8.10% 6.07% 4.69% 9.30% 9.32% 14.84% 11.17% 6.62% 9.20% 10.75% 8.02% 6.28% 7.97% 1.37% 5.68% 7.58% 5.75% 6.00% 0.00% 7.75% 13.75% 4.81% 17.23% 24.13% 0.00%

Years of Experience 13.5 12.4 15.7 15.5 14.2 15.3 13.3 14.5 12.9 13.7 13.6 14.9 15.1 13.9 12.8 14.0 13.9 13.5 13.6 12.5 13.1 14.2 13.5 14.6 16.7 14.7 15.5 14.3 16.6 14.7 14.8 15.4 14.6 14.3 16.2 15.1 15.8 14.5 15.6 15.0 15.9 15.4 17.0 14.8 16.2 16.2 13.7 15.3 16.9 19.4 17.6

COL Index 0.921 1.237 0.956 1.013 1.003 0.954 0.889 1.058 0.961 0.942 0.900 0.886 0.971 0.885 1.074 0.908 0.946 1.347 0.940 1.031 1.044 0.942 0.916 0.945 0.929 0.971 0.942 0.906 1.009 1.015 1.000 1.244 1.265 1.035 1.273 0.894 0.902 1.036 1.304 1.044 1.009 0.993 0.931 0.911 1.317 0.938 1.613 1.223 1.086 0.953 1.409

Final Adjusted Compensation $62,381 $62,101 $60,954 $59,898 $59,423 $57,259 $54,966 $54,899 $54,202 $53,985 $53,459 $53,433 $52,727 $52,554 $52,403 $52,205 $51,975 $51,931 $51,687 $51,601 $51,569 $51,109 $51,109 $51,033 $50,694 $50,694 $50,488 $49,788 $49,640 $49,121 $49,087 $48,228 $48,211 $46,407 $46,313 $45,736 $45,711 $45,035 $44,749 $44,082 $41,885 $41,192 $40,149 $40,113 $39,760 $39,373 $39,044 $38,388 $38,250 $37,785 $36,275

New Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 T-22 T-22 24 25 — 26 27 28 29 — 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Notes: New Hampshire and Massachusetts were not included because of insufficient data. Average salary data are from the National Education Association, “Rankings and Estimates,” http://www.nea.org/edstats/images/06rankings.pdf. Pension match data are from the National Association of State Retirement Administrators/National Council on Teacher Retirement, “Public Fund Survey, FY 2005,” http://www.publicfundsurvey.org. Contribution rate was not available for Massachusetts teachers, so Massachusetts was not included in the ranking. Data on years of experience are from the American Federation of Teachers, “Survey and Analysis of Teacher Salary Trends,” http://www.aft.org/salary/previous.htm, 2003, p. 15. AFT did not include state-by-state teacher experience figures in subsequent teacher salary studies. The 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, is still the standard source for information on teacher experience. The 2003 AFT teacher salary study supplemented SASS data using its annual survey of state departments of education. Cost-of-living data are from the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center, “Cost of Living: 2nd Quarter 2006,” http://www.ded.mo.gov/researchandplanning/indicators/cost_of_living/ index.stm. The composite index number is used here, which is a composite of grocery, health care, housing, transportation, utilities, and miscellaneous cost indexes by state. A composite index number was not available for New Hampshire, so New Hampshire was not included in the ranking.

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of living, strengthening the value of a teacher’s compensation. In fact, Oklahoma has the lowest cost of living of any state in the country.

In addition, the NEA’s 2005-06 teacher salary study does not take into account factors (such as pension contributions and teacher experience) that more accurately represent how much teachers make in Oklahoma and across the country. Pension contributions add, sometimes significantly, to the overall value of the teacher’s yearly compensation. Oklahoma’s impressive teacher pension contribution rate of 13.43 percent is more than four percent above the national average and ranks as the ninth-highest contribution rate in the United States.

Finally, teacher experience is a critical factor to include in any comparison of teacher salaries.

Teachers are paid on a scale that increases their salary for each additional year of employment.

States with a more experienced teacher workforce will post a higher average salary, which will skew the comparison with states that have less-experienced teachers. By adjusting for this factor, the experience or inexperience of the workforce will not distort comparisons of average teacher salaries for each state, leading to a much more accurate salary comparison at a given level of seniority. On average, Oklahoma’s teachers are less experienced than the national average, so the NEA’s salary figure artificially deflates Oklahoma’s average teacher compensation when compared to other states.

Oklahoma Is Above the National and Regional Average When adjusted for cost of living, pension contribution, and experience, teacher compensation in Oklahoma surpasses both the average and the median compensation for the nation (see Table 1).

Oklahoma’s adjusted teacher compensation is $1,860 higher than the U.S. adjusted median compensation and $3,467 higher than the U.S. adjusted average compensation. Oklahoma’s high pension contribution, low cost of living, and lower-than-average teacher experience raised the state’s ranking from 47th to 14th in the nation.

In addition, states in Oklahoma’s region rank significantly lower in adjusted average compensation. Only five Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) states rank higher than Oklahoma in adjusted compensation. Most of the non-SREB states that border Oklahoma, including New Mexico, Kansas,

and Colorado have much lower adjusted compensation than Oklahoma. The adjusted average compensation for Oklahoma is nearly $1,000 more than New Mexico, over $2,700 more than Kansas, and over $3,400 more than Colorado. Only Missouri has a higher figure, topping Oklahoma by $905. % Terry Stoops (M.Ed. in administrative and policy studies from the University of Pittsburgh School of Education) is an education policy analyst at the John Locke Foundation. A former public high school English teacher in Spotsylvania, Virginia, Stoops is completing a Ph.D. in Foundations of Education at the University of Virginia Curry School of Education.

Lawsuit Reform Won’t Come Easy

By Andrew Spiropoulos

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(though anyone with a rudimentary understanding of economics will recognize that they are). My point is that they are naked policy arguments and are in no sense legal. Clearly the majority of the Court so viscerally dislikes reform of the legal profession that they have trouble recognizing when they have abandoned their role as judges and become political partisans.

Those of us—including the significant majority of Oklahomans—who believe lawsuit reform is necessary for the good of the state must keep in mind that no lawsuit reform bill will guarantee the advance of reform. It is all too possible that the Court, as it did with the last bill (weak as it was), will use every opportunity at its disposal, encouraged by their trial lawyer friends and colleagues, to gut the reforms. We too often forget that Texas did not successfully reform its legal system by simply passing a comprehensive bill. The business and medical communities, supported by average citizens, also took on the Texas Supreme Court in an expensive and vicious battle, using the political process to elect a court committed to the rule of law, not the rule of lawyers.

I sincerely hope it will not come to that here—I for one maintain hope that the current Court will recognize that it cannot take sides in this political fight and will act as the impartial judges they genuinely aspire to be. But in case I am wrong, reformers need to think about, sooner rather than later, how they will respond. %

klahoma’s lawsuit reform enthusiasts may or may not be able to get all of their proposals enacted into law. In any case, passing a law is not the end of the story.

I would ask lawsuit reform enthusiasts to consider the following bit of political argument: Although statutory schemes similar to Oklahoma’s [previous—and modest—attempt at lawsuit reform] do help screen out meritless suits, the additional certification costs have produced a substantial and disproportionate reduction in the amount of claims filed by low-income plaintiffs ... Another unanticipated result of statutes similar to Oklahoma’s scheme has been the creation of a windfall for insurance companies who benefit from the decreased number of causes they must defend but which are not required to implement post-tort-reform rates decreasing the cost of medical malpractice insurance to physicians. These companies happily pay less out in tort-reform states while continuing to collect higher premiums from doctors and encouraging the public to blame the victim or attorney for bringing frivolous lawsuits.

So what is this, you ask? A quote from an article by a trial lawyer pontificating against lawsuit reform? An excerpt from a speech by one of the many politicians financed by trial lawyer money? No, believe it or not, this is actually an excerpt from the latest decision of the Oklahoma Supreme Court dealing with a lawsuit reform bill.

My point is not that these arguments are wrong

Politics masquerading as law

OCPA adjunct scholar Andrew Spiropoulos (M.A., J.D., University of Chicago) is a professor of law and director of the Center for the Study of State Constitutional Law at Oklahoma City University.

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OCPA Dinner Honors American Heroes

By Brett A. Magbee CPA hosted the eleventh annual Oklahoma Citizenship Award Dinner on Wednesday, March 21, with the evening’s theme revolving around “heroes.”

Our award recipient, Oklahoma astronaut Lieutenant General Thomas Stafford, received the organization’s highest honor at a special ceremony held in the Sam Noble Special Events Center of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

Sen. James Inhofe introduced General Stafford via videotape. OCPA chairman Dr. David R. Brown presented the award. General Stafford talked about his career and his experiences as one of the pioneers of the American space program and received a standing ovation. In attendance were 74 residents of the general’s hometown—Weatherford, Oklahoma— who came to honor their friend and a true American hero. Some of those in attendance had known Stafford since grade school.

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General Thomas Stafford makes a few comments after receiving the 2007 Oklahoma Citizenship Award.

Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, delivers an insightful speech entitled, “The Family of the Lion and the Tribe of the Eagle.”

Our special guest speaker for the evening was Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. “What we think of as a hero in America is affected by our Constitution,” Dr. Arnn said. “This term ‘Constitution’ … it’s a broad term. It actually comes from the Latin term for ‘to stand.’ The Constitution is what you stand for, which is another way of saying what you are.” Referring to General Stafford as “a constitutional officer of the United States of America,” Arnn noted that “he has discharged his responsibility well.”

The Citizenship Essay Contest winners were announced by the Mistress of Ceremonies, OCPA director of development Margaret Ann Hoenig. They included: first-place winner Eryn Brooks of Woodward High School; second-place winner Allison Raborn of Marlow High School; third-place winner Holly Hiebert of Fairview High School; fourth-place winner Katie Jackson of Dewey High School; and fifth-place winner Cody Ott of Fairview High School. The essay question this year was: “What American, past or present, best exemplifies the qualities of a hero and why?” Total scholarship money awarded was $12,000. Many of Oklahoma’s universities have committed to OCPA that they will offer matching scholarships for the winners of our essay contest upon enrollment.

The photos on the following pages provide just a few of the many images from that evening. %

Photos by Chris White, WhiteGraphics

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Photo by Chris White, WhiteGraphics

Steve Watson of Contran Corporation and wife Mary Henry greet General Stafford.

OCPA marketing director Brian Hobbs and the five winners of our Citizenship Essay Contest hold an oversized check representing the $12,000 awarded during the competition.

Mistress of Ceremonies Margaret Ann Hoenig opens the evening with a welcome and introduction of special guests.

Shirley and Al Snipes greet General Stafford.

Jim Wallis greets General Stafford.

Larry Arnn is greeted by many attendees after his well-received speech.

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Photos by Paul and Fran Grounds, Captured Moments Photography

Rae Brown and C. Hubert Gragg are shown here with General Stafford.

Photo by Chris White, WhiteGraphics

Photo by Chris White, WhiteGraphics

The Goldsby Kids of Goldsby Baptist Church sing the national anthem.

Tom and Kay Hill visit with General Stafford.

Sam Hammons greets General Stafford.

Photos by Paul and Fran Grounds, Captured Moments Photography

Rep. Randy McDaniel is shown here with General Stafford.

General Thomas Stafford and OCPA chairman Dr. David R. Brown are pictured here just moments before the program began.

Todd and Lynne Thurman visit with their good friend General Stafford. Lynne is the director of the Stafford Air and Space Museum in Weatherford.

OCPA trustee Ralph Harvey and wife Maxine are pictured here with friends prior to the dinner.

Centenarian (and OCPA member) Ervis Lester and General Stafford share a lighthearted moment.

Corporation Commissioner Denise Bode meets General Stafford.

Lou Phillips congratulates General Stafford after the event.

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Oklahoma County Assessor Leonard Sullivan and his wife Marilyn greet General Stafford.

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“It’s no accident that women’s studies is so different from other subjects. It has an explicit agenda, and the agenda is not simply to provide young women (and men) with knowledge and tools for future learning. Women’s studies is unabashedly political and intermingled with the feminist movement. The National Women’s Studies Association’s constitution, written in 1982, made this link clear: ‘Feminist education is a process deeply rooted in the women’s movement and remains accountable to that community.’

One textbook author writes: ‘Women’s studies is faced with a vast responsibility. … We must prepare the next generation for its participation in the women’s struggle …’”

Carrie Lukas, vice president for policy and economics at the Independent Women’s Forum

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“There must be a special place in hell for these Privatizers, Charterizers and Voucherizers.

They deserve it!”

Colorado state Rep. Michael Merrifield, a school-choice opponent, in a recent e-mail to a colleague in the state Senate

“I’m only a public school graduate so I’m not very literate.”

State Rep. Wallace Collins (D-Norman), speaking last month on the House floor

“Brad Henry is the single laziest governor we’ve ever had. He shows up late at the Capitol and keeps pretty much a social calendar.”

Left-wing journalist Frosty Troy, who has covered state politics for nearly half a century (and who endorsed Henry for re-election)

A “comedy of errors.”

Lee Coker, superintendent of the Tuttle Public Schools, describing the Oklahoma lottery

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E “Parental choice is a very important part of educational excellence.”

President George W. Bush, in a meeting last month with Catholic school leaders and parents in the Roosevelt Room of the White House

“If the public schools were doing their jobs, charter schools wouldn’t be needed. …

(Education is) the greatest civil right we could offer any child in this country.”

State Rep. Jabar Shumate (D-Tulsa)

“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, directed, indoctrinated, numbered, estimated, regulated, commanded, controlled, lawdriven, preached at, spied upon, censored, checked, valued, enrolled, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.”

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs

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Oklahoma City, OK 73104

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Perspective is published monthly by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, Inc. No substantial part of the activities of OCPA includes attempting to influence legislation, and OCPA does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.