Perspective - December 2016

DECEMBER 2016

OKLAHOMA COUNCIL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Oklahoma Budget Cuts Don’t Explain Tuition Increases

In Case You Missed It Rather than surrendering power to D.C. bureaucrats, says OCPA’s Trent England, landowners, local industries, and state and local governments should work together to protect the environment.

When it comes to early childhood education, says OCPA president Jonathan Small, policymakers shouldn’t put their finger on the scale by favoring government options over nongovernment options.

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OCPA trustee Tom Coburn, who has long been a leader in the push for transparency at the federal and state level, says online accountability for government spending is more important than ever.

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OCPA’s economists say that Oklahoma’s higher education system would have to shed more than 12,000 non-instructional workers just to get down to the national average. bit.ly/2eN8Hgd

Citing OCPA research on Oklahoma’s higher education spending increases, The Oklahoman takes note of a former governor (now a university president) who is cutting costs and freezing tuition. bit.ly/2daEFjT

After spending time at private schools in Oklahoma which cater to homeless children and specialneeds children, OCPA’s Trent England says it’s time to dispense with the stereotypes about private schools. bit.ly/2f1KByM

Thanks to the efforts of OCPA and some very capable lawmakers, many Oklahoma teachers and state employees are now seeing significant savings in out-of-pocket medical charges—while also saving money for taxpayers.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court seems to have forgotten the history lesson that a court’s credibility as a legitimate legal tribunal is shattered when judges simply make policy.

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PERSPECTIVE

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Oklahoma’s poorly designed state constitution and governing structure inevitably lead to poor governance.

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Brandon Dutcher, Editor Alex Jones , Art Director

OCPA Trustees

OCPA Researchers

Blake Arnold • Oklahoma City

David McLaughlin • Enid

Perspective is published monthly by the

Glenn Ashmore • Oklahoma City

Lew Meibergen • Enid

Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs,

Robert D. Avery • Pawhuska

Ronald L. Mercer • Bethany

Lee J. Baxter • Lawton

J. Larry Nichols • Oklahoma City

Douglas Beall, M.D. • Oklahoma City

Lloyd Noble II • Tulsa

Inc., an independent public policy organization. OCPA formulates and

Steve W. Beebe • Duncan

Mike O’Neal • Edmond

promotes public policy research and

John A. Brock • Tulsa

Larry Parman • Oklahoma City

analysis consistent with the principles

David Burrage • Atoka

Bill Price • Oklahoma City

Michael Carnuccio • Yukon

Patrick T. Rooney • Oklahoma City

Tom Coburn, M.D. • Tulsa

Melissa Sandefer • Norman

of free enterprise and limited government. The views expressed

Paul A. Cox • Oklahoma City

Thomas Schroedter • Tulsa

in Perspective are those of the author,

William Flanagan • Claremore

Greg Slavonic • Oklahoma City

and should not be construed as

Josephine Freede • Oklahoma City

Charles M. Sublett • Tulsa

Ann Felton Gilliland • Oklahoma City

Robert Sullivan • Tulsa

John T. Hanes • Oklahoma City

William E. Warnock, Jr. • Tulsa

John A. Henry III • Oklahoma City

Dana Weber • Tulsa

Henry F. Kane • Bartlesville

Daryl Woodard • Tulsa

Robert Kane • Tulsa

Daniel J. Zaloudek • Tulsa

Gene Love • Lawton

CHAIRMAN EMERITUS

David Madigan • Lawton

David R. Brown, M.D. • Oklahoma City

representing any official position of OCPA or its trustees, researchers, or employees.

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Tom H. McCasland III • Duncan

Steven J. Anderson, MBA, CPA Research Fellow Tina Dzurisin Research Associate Trent England, J.D. Dr. David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow for the Advancement of Liberty Jayson Lusk, Ph.D. Samuel Roberts Noble Distinguished Fellow J. Scott Moody, M.A. Research Fellow Andrew C. Spiropoulos, J.D. Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow Wendy P. Warcholik, Ph.D. Research Fellow

Securing Liberty: Rebuilding American Education in an Era of Illiberal Learning Saturday, January 21, 2017 9:00 AM to 8:30 PM Advance Center for Free Enterprise (on the OCPA campus) For more information, visit bit.ly/NASconference.

Past OCPA speakers are pictured below.

Larry Arnn

Mitch Daniels

Arthur Brooks William F. Buckley George W. Bush

Artur Davis

Jim DeMint

Newt Gingrich David Horowitz Mike Huckabee

J. Rufus Fears

Jeb Bush

Steve Forbes

Dick Cheney Dinesh D’Souza

Tommy Franks

John Fund

Brit Hume

Laura Ingraham Frank Keating

Russell Moore Stephen Moore Peggy Noonan

Jeane Kirkpatrick

Charles Krauthammer

Art Laffer

Rich Lowry

Ed Meese

Marvin Olasky

Sarah Palin

Star Parker

Dana Perino Michael Reagan

Paul Ryan

John Stossel

John Walton

Allen West

Walter Williams

Cal Thomas

Clarence Thomas Scott Walker

J.C.Watts

State Budget Cuts Don’t Explain Tuition Increases

By Preston Cooper

History is replete with examples of obvious yet incorrect answers. The sun revolves around the earth. Labor inputs determine a good’s value. Now, another example has emerged.

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, an obvious—yet ultimately incorrect—explanation for the rise in college tuition has gained currency.

The blame is fixed on state legislators, who tightened state budgets for higher education in the face of falling tax revenues after the economic collapse. The result, in this telling, is that universities were forced to make up for the shortfall by increasing tuition charges. The story makes sense on its surface, but the data do not support it.

To understand why, it is important to consider that higher education is a unique sector of the economy which is not bound by the usual rule of minimizing costs. As colleges cannot easily measure unit costs—you cannot measure a “unit” of education the way you can measure a ton of steel or a bushel of wheat— they must instead benchmark their costs to available revenues.

Economist Howard Bowen proposed this idea in 1980 as the “revenue theory of costs.”

When revenue streams widen—say, through an expansion of the federal student loan program—colleges will find new ways to spend the money. Shiny new academic buildings, world-class athletic teams, or expanded university administrations are all channels for the newly available funds to be spent. As OCPA research fellows J. Scott Moody and Wendy Warcholik have pointed out, the administrative bloat problem is particularly acute in Oklahoma. Moody and Warcholik show that Oklahoma’s colleges employ 2.4 non-instructional workers for every 100 private-sector workers—a ratio 61 percent higher than the national average.

What does all this have to do with state budgets? Generally, universities attempt to maximize all available streams of revenue. It matters little whether state legislators are generous or tightfisted; colleges will increase tuition at similar rates in either scenario. Budget cuts represent reductions in available revenue streams, so institutions will find ways to cut expenses in order to adjust to the new normal.

This last point is key. While many people assume that colleges must match every dollar lost to budget cuts with another dollar in tuition increases, in reality there is no strong association.

Economic analyses generally find only a small effect of budget cuts on tuition increases, on the order of pennies on the dollar.

Others find an effect in the short term, but not in the long term.

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PERSPECTIVE // December 2016

Questions for Higher Ed Officials Glen Johnson, chancellor of the Oklahoma State System of Higher Education, has hit the road to lobby legislators for an increase in public funding for higher education.

Last session, the Legislature reduced public support for the institutions by 16 percent.

State colleges and universities have made up this reduction by increasing tuition, but, not surprisingly, they would like the Legislature to restore their previous subsidy. … Johnson deserves praise for starting a conversation with lawmakers about our state higher education system. But conversation goes both ways. There are questions lawmakers should pose to Chancellor Johnson. .…

Three years ago, the regents voted to give principal staff, none of whom directly serve students and several of whom make over six-figure salaries, a five-percent pay increase. Given that nearly all state employees, including public school teachers, haven’t received a raise in years, why don’t you cut the salaries of these highly paid bureaucrats and use the savings to serve students?

As for the truth about public support, isn’t it true that, on average, Oklahoma, as a percentage of its government spending, spends more than 10 percent more than other states on higher education? Don’t we, on average, also spend a higher percentage of our state’s gross state product on state higher education than do other states? Worst of all, isn’t it also true that the rate of non-instructional employees working for our state higher education system is 60 percent higher than the national average, ranking us the fourth highest in the country? Aren’t these figures strong evidence that our system is plagued by inefficiency and excessive overhead?

— OCPA distinguished fellow Andrew Spiropoulos, writing September 8 in The Journal Record

Real Change in State and Local Appropriations vs. Real Change in Tuition Revenue per FTE Student Four-Year Public Universities in Oklahoma, 2006-2013

Real Change in Tuition Revenues per FTE

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Real Change in State and Local Appropriations per FTE Source: Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System

This explains why private universities in the United States have also seen substantial tuition inflation since the Great Recession, even though they do not bear the brunt of state budget cuts. Both public and private universities are bound by the revenue-maximization principle.

In Oklahoma, state and local appropriations per full-time equivalent (FTE) student at the average four-year public college fell by $1,290 in real terms from 2006 to 2013. Contrary to stereotypes about the Sooner State’s ruby-red politics, these cuts were much less dramatic than the $1,979 average cut the rest of the nation faced. But these reductions in appropriations do not neatly match up with increases in tuition—some colleges with large appropriations cuts had small tuition increases, and some schools with appropriations increases still saw tuition grow at a fast pace.

Among four-year public colleges nationally, changes in state and local appropriations from 2006 to 2013 explain just 0.5 percent of the variation in changes in tuition revenues over the same period. Among the 14 four-year public colleges for which data are available in Oklahoma, changes in appropriations explain around 0.9 percent of changes in tuition revenues.

Some caveats. Eliminating the obvious outlier on the graph (the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center) raises explanatory power to 18 percent—somewhat larger, but still well short of being the dominant factor. Eliminating outliers among the set of all public schools nationwide yields explanatory power of just 5.5 percent.

This analysis is also just a correlation, and so does not

definitively rule out that state budget cuts have an effect on tuition charges. Like all economic theories, the revenue theory of costs is imperfect, and thus cannot explain 100 percent of variation in tuition. In reality, changes in state appropriations likely do have some effect on tuition charges.

But what this analysis can tell us is that budget cuts are not the primary cause of tuition increases. Not even close. They are probably a factor, but far less important than others—among which the most important is doubtlessly the availability of taxpayer subsidies through the federal student loan and Pell Grant programs.

What are the implications for policymakers? Increasing state appropriations to Oklahoma’s colleges on the expectation that tuition will fall concomitantly is a very dubious bet. It may take a five- or 10-dollar increase in appropriations to generate a one-dollar reduction in tuition, if that. Certainly there are better uses for the money in an era of tight budgets.

Tuition inflation is a serious problem, which saddles younger generations with unnecessary debt and scares many prospective students away from even applying. Policymakers should engage with inflation’s causes, but also recognize that cuts in appropriations are pretty far down on the list.

Preston Cooper is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where he focuses on the economics of higher education. He writes a regular column for Forbes.com, and his work has also appeared in U.S. News & World Report, the Washington Examiner, Fortune, and other publications.

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WHY SCHOOLS DON’T DELIVER

By Greg Forster

I don’t often get great new insights when I read the work of Oklahoma edu-blogger Rob Miller. But I did have an epiphany of sorts when I recently read an article of his arguing that public schools underperform for the same reason the post office does— because meddling politicians are in charge.

To my mind, this argument reveals the real cause of America’s long-term inability to set any kind of serious education policy: half the people who shape that policy are living on a different continent.

In the article, which appeared last year, Miller points out that the real problem with the post office is not the post office. It’s the politicians who own the place and constantly meddle with it, preventing it from fixing old problems and imposing new ones. For example:

One part of Miller’s comparison between public schools and the post office goes badly wrong. He erroneously claims that public schools, like the post office, deliver for all people.

Just as the post office has to get mail to and from every distant rural address, public schools have to educate all the “difficult” students that Miller imagines the private schools don’t want to serve.

In fact, more than 100,000 students a year are kicked out of public schools. Almost 100,000 more have disabilities public schools can’t accommodate. Admittedly that’s a small percentage of the total student population—but then, rural postal addresses are a small percentage of all postal addresses. The small size of the population is part of the point here. Miller is just wrong that public schools serve the hardest students.

Who educates these students after they’re turned away from public schools? Private schools.

Because private schools are almost always more eager to serve difficult students than public schools are.

That aside, however, Miller is absolutely right about his main point. The post office stinks, not because its managers and employees are all stupid and evil, but because Congress runs it. The obvious and only possible solution is to take it away from Congress, i.e., privatize.

That’s what a lot of other countries have done. Financial columnist Rick Newman reported in 2013 that 25 of the 27 European Union countries had at least some private mail delivery. Because why on earth would you want government to monopolize mail service? It makes no kind of sense.

That’s not all. “No other country would tolerate a state-owned enterprise losing billions of dollars per year,” comments Richard

The post office stinks, not because

its managers and employees are all

When they try to shut down costly, inefficient little post offices in remote rural townships, some local congressperson will inevitably rise up in indignation and talk about saving jobs and their “community’s identity.”

stupid and evil, but because Congress

runs it. The obvious and only possible solution is to take it away from Congress, i.e., privatize.

If you want to know why the post office provides lousy service and still loses billions, that’s one of the main reasons.

Miller’s reverie on the travails of the post office is, of course, aimed at making a point about education. He argues that public schools are like the post office. They’re not to blame for their problems; they answer to the same reprobate politicians who torment their postal cousins. Their motto is “neither the bureaucrats nor the corporate cronies nor the oppressive regulations nor the constant disparagement will stay us from the effective completion of our appointed rounds.”

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PERSPECTIVE // December 2016

Geddes, a professor in the Cornell University Department of Policy Analysis and Management, in Newman’s column. “The postal service would have been reformed a decade ago if we were any other country.”

But we aren’t any other country. We’re the United States, where boondoggles—like all those post offices in tiny towns— live forever.

Our national political tradition is not as socialistic as that of most advanced economies. But our greater commitment to freedom and diversity causes us to have lower levels of social cohesion and homogeneity. This makes it much harder to hold the growing technocratic state accountable to a firm set of public moral principles. European and Asian technocracy tends to be more authoritarian than ours, but also (in free countries) more honest, transparent, and efficient.

The EU has imposed rules regulating the permissible curvature of bananas and forbidding product labels from informing consumers that drinking water prevents dehydration.

But they don’t let their state-owned enterprises just toss billions a year into the furnace, year after year for decades. If you want that kind of waste, you have to buy American. (At least we get curvy bananas to make up for it.)

And that’s the problem with our education policymaking.

Half our policy class wants the kind of clean, transparent, and minutely regulated public ownership that prevails, more or less, in Europe. If our government doesn’t in fact operate that way, this is surprising, abnormal, something we have a right to expect will not happen.

But we are not in Europe. This free, boisterous, and diverse nation simply cannot get away with the levels of central ownership and control that the more homogeneous and culturally traditionalist European nations have managed to sustain. Our politics was designed from the beginning to accommodate a clamorous cacophony of interest groups, forming coalitions and jostling for position. It doesn’t run on consensus, and a clean social-democratic state doesn’t run any other way.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Europe would be better off with less central ownership and hyper-minute regulation. In my book, giving people stewardship over their own lives and allowing them the freedom to serve each other through their daily work and exchange is worth risking the occasional improperly curved banana in the grocery store any day of the week.

My point isn’t to ask whether social-democratic government ownership of service providers like post offices and schools is wise. It isn’t, but let’s set that aside. The question is whether it’s possible to have it without an intolerable degree of waste and political meddling. The answer seems to be that it’s possible in Europe, but not here.

Or perhaps I should say, it has been possible in Europe up to now. For Europe itself is facing a crisis of social-democratic public services even more acute than our own. Declining native populations, and large flows of immigration with low-to-no cultural assimilation, are rapidly undermining the European model.

As globalism and pluralism create increasing pressures on older models of social order, I’m placing my bets on the American experiment in freedom and diversity—yes, even in 2016. But you can’t eat your cake and have it, too. If we want a free and diverse country, we need an education system suitable for that kind of country. School choice would move us in that direction.

Greg Forster (Ph.D., Yale University) is a senior fellow with EdChoice. He is the author of six books, including John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and the co-editor of three books, including John Rawls and Christian Social Engagement: Justice as Unfairness. He has written numerous articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, as well as in popular publications such as The Washington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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Agricultural Regulation a Serious Concern for Producers

By Levi Russell

Agricultural regulation is an important issue for rural America. The Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are the primary regulators affecting the food supply chain from farm to fork.

For row crop and cattle producers that dominate the landscape of the Great Plains, the EPA’s rules have the biggest direct effects. While these regulations are designed to provide many benefits, they come at a cost. Individual regulations are evaluated on cost/benefit grounds prior to implementation, but the costs of the overall regulatory burden on agriculture are not well understood.

EPA regulation of agriculture has grown roughly four-fold since the mid-1970s (see graph, data from the Mercatus Center’s RegData). Key pieces of legislation on which EPA regulation of agriculture is based include the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act; the Clean Air Act; the Clean Water Act; the Endangered Species Act; and other transportation and occupational safety legislation. A recent example is a

proposed change to pesticide licensure rules that would double the number of continuing education hours required for the license and require the license to be renewed every three years rather than the current five-year interval. A recent study of the rule conducted at Texas A&M University indicated that the EPA’s estimate of the cost of the program to the state failed to account for more than $57 million in costs. Another example is the case of a California farmer who was fined under the authority of the Clean Water Act for plowing his field even though the EPA’s rule has an explicit exemption for normal agricultural practices.

The uncertainty and compliance costs associated with these regulations represent serious concerns for producers.

Recent surveys of row crop producers, cattle producers, and feedlot operators indicate that future environmental regulation is a top concern for their businesses over the long term. However, the costs of regulatory compliance are not borne solely by the farmers. Preliminary results of my own research indicate that the growth in environmental regulation

Mercatus Center RegData Index of EPA Regulation on Agriculture 5

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since 1975 has put upward pressure on food prices, suggesting that food prices would be lower overall if environmental regulation had not increased as much as it has.

This is not to say that regulators are ill-intentioned. They face a highly complex and difficult problem: implementing the will of Congress for the betterment of the American people. The knowledge and information required to regulate even one industry is immense.

Not only is it costly to obtain the information necessary to pass effective regulations, regulators can’t be sure that unforeseen unintended consequences won’t diminish the effectiveness of their rules or cause more harm than good. Proposed measures to ensure effective regulation that is not overly burdensome, such as sunset provisions that would require regulations to lapse on a periodic basis, have been put forth but have not been implemented widely.

Other propositions include less federal and more local and state control over environmental policy and greater use of common law courts to deal with environmental problems. Both of these proposals acknowledge the information problems inherent in the regulation of agriculture.

Environmental regulation is an important issue facing American agriculture. Farmers will likely have to deal with more policy uncertainty and increased regulatory oversight in coming years. How these policies will affect farmers, consumers, and the environment remains to be seen.

Levi Russell (Ph.D., Kansas State University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Georgia.

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He also blogs at Farmer Hayek (www.farmerhayek. com), a blog providing economic commentary

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related to agriculture and natural resources from a 1

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PERSPECTIVE // December 2016

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free-market perspective.

Oklahomans Want Educational Choices

By Brandon Dutcher

An honest reading of the public-opinion survey data over the past couple of years shows that Oklahomans favor educational choice.

In the last two years, six different public opinion surveys— from respected polling firms such as Tarrance, SoonerPoll, and Cole Hargrave Snodgrass—have shown strong support for various forms of private-school choice (e.g., vouchers, tax credits, and Education Savings Accounts). Meanwhile, one survey found that Oklahomans oppose vouchers (the survey didn’t ask about tax credits or ESAs).

But what if a pollster explored the question again now, in this climate dominated by daily news stories in which the adults involved in public education tell us that (despite $8.7 billion in total revenue, the most in state history) the sky is falling?

Well, SoonerPoll did just that. Oklahomans are indeed concerned about school finance—and they also want to give parents more educational choices. Here’s the question from

Nearly 4 in 10 Oklahoma Teachers Would Choose Private or Home Schooling for Their Own Children When asked what’s the best educational choice for their own children, one might expect near unanimity from teachers that a traditional public school is best.

Not only for reasons of loyalty to one’s employer (Thunder employees don’t cheer for the Warriors), but because teachers are in the schools every day and have firsthand knowledge of school quality and safety. So it’s surprising—and perhaps somewhat telling—that a new SoonerPoll survey (http://bit. ly/2dDBhfK) finds that nearly 4 in 10 teachers would choose a private school or home schooling for their own children.

Oklahoma lawmakers should do what eight other states have done: enact an individual tax credit or deduction for approved educational expenses (including private school tuition and home schooling).

This would empower teachers—and indeed all Oklahoma parents—to make the best educational choice for their own children.

—Brandon Dutcher

SoonerPoll’s July survey of likely Oklahoma voters: Educational choice gives parents the right to use tax dollars associated with their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school which best serves their needs. Some people favor educational choice because they believe that parents, not government officials, have the moral right to determine a child’s path.

Other people oppose educational choice because they believe it drains money from public schools and allows only a select few students to choose a different school.

Which viewpoint comes closest to your own?

A majority of these Oklahomans, 52 percent of the respondents, favor educational choice, while 37 percent oppose (11 percent are undecided).

Unsurprisingly, support was strong in the two major urban centers. In the Oklahoma City metropolitan area, 59 percent favor educational choice while 31 percent oppose. In the Tulsa metropolitan area, 56 percent favor while 34 percent oppose.

But even in the rest of the state, 46 percent favor educational choice while 41 percent oppose.

Is school choice even feasible outside of the two metro areas? You may be surprised at just how widespread and affordable private education really is in this state. According to PrivateSchoolReview.com, “there are 226 private schools in Oklahoma, serving 36,272 students. The average private school tuition is $4,706 for elementary schools and $6,712 for high schools.”

That’s not a paltry sum, to be sure, but it’s worth noting that total per-student spending in Oklahoma’s public schools is $9,724, according to the Oklahoma State Department of Education. Total per-student revenue is even higher: it’s more than $12,000 per student.

Would you believe there’s a thriving Christian school in Corn, Oklahoma, a town of 500 people? The school participates in Oklahoma’s private-school voucher program and Oklahoma’s tax-credit scholarship program. If school choice is possible in Corn, Oklahoma, it’s safe to say it’s possible anywhere.

Today one in seven students in Oklahoma’s public school system is eligible for a private-school voucher. Four out of five Oklahoma families with children are eligible for a tax-credit scholarship, according to the organization EdChoice. And I expect school choice to continue to advance.

One reason is the Sexual Revolution’s continued assault on Oklahoma values. “The Obama administration is bullying the

Continued>> 9

Today one in seven students in Oklahoma’s public school system is eligible for a private-school voucher.

Four out of five Oklahoma families with children are eligible for a tax-credit scholarship. nation’s public schools into allowing students who claim they are transgender to use the bathroom and locker room facilities of the opposite sex,” Greg Forster pointed out in these pages in August (“Commode Core Shows Why We Need School Choice”).

And it’s not just the bogeyman feds. As my colleague Trent England has been discussing on The Trent England Show, the Oklahoma Library Association is pushing transgender propaganda at 10-year-old students in schools all across Oklahoma.

Tulsa Public Schools is so keen on the idea of calling a little boy a girl that teachers are being trained on “gender nonconformity” issues, including which bathrooms transgender children are allowed to use. No real surprise there; in June district officials in Tulsa flew a “Gay Pride” flag outside the TPS headquarters.

For its part, the Oklahoma PTA announced in July that the national PTA and its constituent associations will now be advocating for legislation creating a new protected class for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer/Questioning” persons.

Parents, not government officials, have the moral right and the responsibility to determine a child’s path. The government— especially a government hostile to their values—should not penalize parents financially for raising their children in accordance with their consciences.

Brandon Dutcher is OCPA’s senior vice president. He is editor of the book Oklahoma Policy Blueprint, which was praised by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman as “thorough, well-informed, and highly sophisticated.” His articles have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, WORLD magazine, Forbes. com, Mises.org, The Oklahoman, the Tulsa World, and 200 newspapers throughout Oklahoma and the U.S.

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PERSPECTIVE // December 2016

Four-day School Weeks and the $1.5 Million Press Box You wouldn’t know it from media reports, but Oklahoma’s education system had $8.7 billion in total revenue last year, the most in state history.

But oftentimes the schools’ spending priorities are real head-scratchers.

Consider, for example, Catoosa Public Schools.

Oklahoma Watch reported last week that while Catoosa is switching to a four-day school week and reducing staff, it also (thanks to bond proceeds) bought MacBook computers for all middle- and high-school students and is building a $1.5 million press box at the high school football field.

Staff reductions are understandable. After all, Catoosa’s growth in non-teaching staff has far outpaced student growth over the last two decades, according to data that the Oklahoma State Department of Education reports to the U.S. Department of Education. While Catoosa’s enrollment increased by 6 percent and the number of teachers increased by 10 percent, non-teaching staff increased by 27 percent. That’s money that could have gone to teacher pay raises. It’s all about setting priorities.

Catoosa spent $8,526 per student in 2006. It spent $11,799 per student in 2015. And yet the district’s priorities are such that they’re now going to a four-day school week while using $1.5 million (some of it unrestricted surplus funds) to build a press box?

Have you ever wondered why school officials, instead of always asking the Legislature for more money, don’t lobby for flexibility to better spend the money they have now?

It’s because they must maintain their sky-is-falling narrative. President Barack Obama, during a government shutdown, infuriated veterans by closing the World War II memorial. Likewise, things like four-day weeks and stories of teachers having to buy supplies ensure that citizens feel the pain.

Meanwhile, school districts carried forward $1.9 billion into the new fiscal year. Dedicated local funds exist for building, maintenance, and activities.

Yet it appears no specific local funds exist solely for teacher pay or salary increases. Teacher pay is not a priority.

Our education system has more money than ever.

But in a system with skewed priorities—a system that employs more non-teachers than teachers— that money’s simply not going to the right place: take-home pay for teachers.

I wish the folks in the press box would cover that.

—OCPA president Jonathan Small, writing August 26 in The Journal Record

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@OCPAthink 1. OCPA development director Rachel Hays is pictured here on a panel at the annual meeting of the State Policy Network (SPN). This year’s meeting, held in Nashville in early October, brought together more than 1,300 think tank leaders, scholars, activists, and philanthropists to network, learn, and strategize.

2. OCPA president Jonathan Small (left) talks about the importance of stopping the Obamacare Medicaid expansion with Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, at an October 13 meeting at OCPA. 3. New OCPA chairman Larry Parman speaks at the OCPA Liberty Gala on October 20 in Tulsa.

4. OCPA’s Brandon Dutcher (right) chats with National Review staff writer David French at the SPN annual meeting in Nashville.

5. OCPA chairman emeritus David Brown, FOX News host Brian Kilmeade, and OCPA trustee Ron Mercer are pictured at the OCPA Liberty Gala on October 20 in Tulsa.

6. OCPA president Jonathan Small is pictured here on a panel at the SPN annual meeting in Nashville.

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QUOTE UNQUOTE “$150,000”

“Liberals have ominously relabeled themselves

“The lower pay of fire fighters and school teachers

The amount the University of Oklahoma paid to bring hip-hop artists to campus for homecoming in October

‘progressives,’ forsaking a noun that had its roots

simply reflects the happy reality that we’re blessed

in ‘liber,’ meaning free. To progress is merely to go

with a much larger supply of superb first-responders

forward, and you can go forward into a pit.”

and educators than we are of superb jocks and

Author Lionel Shriver, writing September 23 in The New York Times

“When any man or woman goes on a dole something happens to them mentally, and the quicker they are taken off the dole the better it is for them the rest of their lives.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt

“From 2008-09 through 2015-16, [Oklahoma] state funding dropped 17 percent, but tuition and fees jumped 38 percent, according to the regents’ own data.”

Vicki Alger, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, writing on August 18 in The Oklahoman (“Don’t blame ‘underfunding’ for soaring college prices”)

thespians. Were it the other way around, then while we’d be better entertained with more top-flight sporting events and movies, all but the richest amongst us would suffer significantly greater risks of being unable to educate our children and of dying in house fires and from other mishaps.”

George Mason University economics professor Donald J. Boudreaux, explaining why it’s a good thing for society that fire fighters and school teachers are paid less than NFL players and movie stars