With state budget in crisis, many Oklahoma schools hold classes four days a week
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I don't think this is entirely a "red state" thing. It seems most of the non-elderly Republicans I know really do want to fund schools, at least more than they are now. Though, it does seems that a large number of politicians want to force private schooling, of which there are few in OKC and none that I know that are secular, or homeschooling amidst the budget crisis.
There's also the issue of brain drain, with many teachers opting to move to Texas or quit the field entirely. This year's Oklahoma Teacher of The Year is moving to Texas next year to teach, for example.
I can answer any questions about this situation to the best of my ability or ask my wife, who is more knowledgeable than me about it and I will try my best to keep my personal politics out of it.
Even if these schools could stay open for 5 days, I doubt any state willing to do something so reckless with education can provide an education worth getting.
A bunch of adults did this by treating politics like a game, but children will be the ones who suffer.
And there is enough money to send kids to school. Oklahoma's per student spending is at the OECD average. If it were a country, it'd be between Spain and Italy in education spending per student.
Oklahoma's median income is well above the OECD average. It's nearly 40% higher than Italy. Teacher salaries in Oklahoma are accordingly higher. They're going to have to spend quite a bit more than Italy and Spain.
Regarding missiles. If we spent... $200 billion less on defense, which we easily could afford to do, the Federal Government could kick that money down to the states for other purposes (infrastructure, education, healthcare). And or the Federal Govt could lower taxes and the states could raise their taxes.
Lastly, I don't think the Italy numbers take into account healt care costs of teachers. America's stupid health care system and its relegation to employers to include health care into salaries is going to really skew numbers.
There's the problem. Why would an Oklahoma teacher accept the same standard of living as an Italian teacher when there are plenty of other Oklahoma jobs available?
Adjusting for PPP parity the gross median household income in Italy is about 46% of US median income [1]. Oklahoma median household income is about 85% of US median income [2].
Even when you account for the cheaper cost of living in Italy, you need to pay people more money in Oklahoma. This is as true in education as in any other industry.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/06/02/the-...
> Although Oklahoma has no laws governing homeschooling, it is the only state that guarantees the right to home school as part of its constitution.
But still, I wonder if homeschooling is actually picking up the slack from underfunded public schools.
0) http://newsok.com/article/4568616
1) http://www.homeschoolfacts.com/state-laws/oklahoma-homeschoo...
For a small refresher:
The American dream phrase of American noun: American dream 1. the ideal by which equality of opportunity is available to any American, allowing the highest aspirations and goals to be achieved.
It was spent to make the share prices of private companies go up.
And yet to this day, with the school system falling to pieces, the state government is still debating [0] whether to re-impose this tax on oil and gas producers. Keep in mind that this tax cut directly benefits companies like Devon that have an $18B market cap, as well as other larger out-of-state producers. As a comparison, neighboring Texas seems to tax oil and gas production at 4.6% [1]. It's a very shameful situation.
In my opinion this is the crux of the problem. Law makers have messed up priorities. In an ironic twist some oil and gas producers are even asking for the tax to be raised [2]. Even they know it is too generous.
[0] http://newsok.com/article/5548887 [1] https://comptroller.texas.gov/taxes/crude-oil/ [2] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/oklahoma/articles/20...
> One should distinguish between the terms "freedom" and "liberty." Speaking generally, Freedom usually means to be free from something, whereas Liberty usually means to be free to do something, although both refer to the quality or state of being free. Jefferson's use of the terms almost always reflected those meanings.
One easy solution is to just have everyone swipe their school id card regardless of pay, but then we don't get to start shaming govt assistance early.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/images/databriefs/51-100/db51_fig4....
[the lower the PIR (poverty income ratio) the poorer]
These children are mostly not malnourished, and in most cases their obesity could be solved (in the direct sense, ignoring why they overeat) by eating the same things in lesser quantities, at no cost to their health.
But cooking food at home is cheap as hell compared to paying for prepared food if only looking at the cost of the food or ingredients.
There's much more to weight than calories.
"Vegetable oils" are extracted from seeds, usually with the assistance of the petroleum distillate hexane. The polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) portion of these oils is very unstable, so the producers use steam to remove the rancid odor from their "food-grade" product.
The PUFA's in vegetable oil are cluster bomblets that destroy people's health. IMHO, vegetable oil should only be used as biodiesel.
From the article, third paragraph: "But funding for classrooms has been shrinking for years in this deep-red state as lawmakers have cut taxes, slicing away hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue in what some Oklahomans consider a cautionary tale about the real-life consequences of the small-government approach favored by Republican majorities in Washington and statehouses nationwide."
Their top tax rate on income is 5.25%. And given their energy boom, there are only two possibilities: they're not taxing enough (they could clearly boost the top income tax brackets slightly), or they're badly mismanaging the spending. Their sales tax is 4.5%, while I regard that as regressive, they could probably afford 6% without any problems given their state income level.
The people in the middle in Oklahoma, have high incomes compared to other developed nations.
But they get mulcted out of it because of their godawful public services. From a colleague who works in that state I hear that everyone who can half afford it sends their children to private school because public schools are simply too bad. Then they vote to fund schools even less. Small-government in action.
It's mind-boggling to me how much of modern republican politics is "I've got mine. Fuck if I'll pay for yours." Directly paired with "No-one cares about us we been forgotten about and left behind. Someone look out for us."
There is an entire American party based on looking out for the overlooked. Maybe vote for them??
It's really sad. My uncle was a big republican in a more moderate state, county committee chairman, etc. He switched because the party degraded into something that doesn't stand for something that a civlized society should stand for.
Ultimately, the fundamentalists and lunatics will implode the GOP. Demographics always win, and these flyover places are going to be ground into the dirt when the people they are hurting rise up.
I used to believe this until I found people who actively vote against their own interests. For example, they know their rep will lie and try to pass a bill that will harm their access to healthcare. But they still vote for them because of party loyalty.
Again... they know exactly what will happen when they vote for them and still choose to do because of loyalty. They know they need their affordable health insurance because of something they are going through yet they'd rather lose it and have their side win. There's no reasoning with some people. You can provide stats, facts, reasons, and yet they'll still do exactly the opposite of what would bring them long term benefit.
> O’Brien said the schedule change helped Newcastle shave about $110,000 out of its $12 million annual budget
That's literally less than one percent. Teachers make the same amount, so by cutting 20% of the school days they save <1% of the budget? That's insanity.
Are budgets so tight that this is the best way to squeeze it? It seems like part of the story is not being told.
Would printing out a CC licensed textbook help at all?
"And the number of positions filled by emergency-certified teachers — who have no education training (or, in O’Brien’s words, “are upright and breathing”) — is now 35 times as high as it was in 2011."
What is the actual percentage of qualified to non-qualified in most affected schools? Is anyone monitoring that? You can absorb some non-qualified teachers in most teams but there is a point at which the team support gets thinned out.
UK: Free school dinner percentage is a standard metric of local poverty in UK. 88% is very high, 60% is remarkable.
That said, I do think there is an important concern about the increased burden on low income families -- both in terms of child-care costs and food. The article mentions the one district that arranged "low-cost" child care on fridays for $30/child/week, but for a two-child household that corresponds to an extra $240-$300 per month. For low income families that may be 10% or more of household income.
Indeed the cost of their "low-cost" childcare is a bit fishy. The article mentions that the Newcastle school district has an enrollment of about 2300 students, and save $110,000 per year by switching to four-day weeks -- Around $48 per student per year. Yet they charge $30 per student per week for childcare on Fridays. How is that cost being justified?
[1] http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ987605.pdf
[2] http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/EDFP_a_0016...
[3] http://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/10780/ -- Worth noting perhaps that this is a dissertation, and the corresponding research has never been published in a peer-reviewed venue. Not to say its flawed, but it hasn't necessarily undergone a close methodological review
(Disclaimer: Not an education expert. I just went hunting for articles discussing academic effects out of curiosity. Would love to hear from those that know more about the subject.)
I read comments like this all the time, and while I don't disagree, I'm not sure anyone realizes just how many jobs will be cut if "we spend xxxbn less on defense." All of that money goes somewhere, the vast majority of it goes into either parts (created by labor) or labor itself. I realize on HN "defense spending" is the prime evil, but that money also supports (if I had to swag it) hundreds of thousands of US jobs.
One could even argue that money spent on DOD budgets trickles down less to the inhabitants of the state that raised the money in taxes in the first place compared to money spent on education.
If we spent that same money in a different industry it would support hundreds of thousands of jobs there too.
At the extreme we could also spend this money paying people to dig holes and full them and still support just as many jobs.
As a country we have to stop thinking of govt spending as a flat cost and instead get back to thinking of it as an investment.
What does this money gain the country and when? Are we efficiently allocating our capital to maximise our return. When consider at the margin, will additional investment/production in area X get us better return than an additional dollar in Y?
In my opinion education has one of the highest returns available to a govt. And a pittance of the cost compared to other high return options.
Of course, we would also need to cull the large mass of education pseudo-specialists who would want to suck up those Federal dollars. But if we could somehow move spending from defense to education, we might also be able to remove the parasitic consultant-layer on top of this field.
Studies repeatedly show that spending is uncorrlated with student outcomes: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/04/25/468157856/can-more....
That may be true of education budget in general, but what about these Oklahoma schools that are only open 4 days a week? Would boosting these school budgets be worthwhile?
The way a rational private organization would respond to such decreased revenue would be to have layoffs and increase class sizes. (While there is some evidence that smaller classes are on the whole better, we're be talking about a pretty small difference here, in a range where the expected effects would be small.)
"While the money in Camden, N.J., has led to relatively little academic progress, our stories from North Carolina, Indiana and Massachusetts offer a compelling counterpoint to the idea that money doesn't really matter.
So, too, do a pair of recent studies that look not at one state but at many where parents, activists and school leaders from low-income districts sued and won increases in school funding."
Currently the US spends $598 billion per year on the military. To me, the US would be better off spending $548 billion on its military and and extra $50 billion on education. There would be fewer soldiers and more teachers, so in the short term it might not have an effect on total number of jobs. But the 'return on investment' of that extra education spending would be far more valuable than the loss of military power that the US would be giving up.
Cutting the defence budget to boost education might actually mean a stronger military in the longer term if it leads to higher GDP and more engineers to build military robots and drones.
We already spend over $600 billion per year on education. What concrete goal would reallocating $50 billion from the military to education achieve? It's also a false dichotomy. If the goal is to really help people, let's cut 10% from both and cut a check for $200/month to every school-aged child.
$x_jobs lost, $y_jobs gained, $z_jobs overlap. $z_jobs is much much smaller than you may think. What does the machinist at boeing do when their job is cut? Teach torch-welding at the local highschool?
Please don't make up generalizations about the community as a rhetorical device in arguments. HN is divided on most issues—people just tend to notice the comments they disagree with or dislike.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14434569 and marked it off-topic.
Isn't this a mythical outcome though?
> But funding for classrooms has been shrinking for years in this deep-red state as lawmakers have cut taxes, slicing away hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue in what some Oklahomans consider a cautionary tale about the real-life consequences of the small-government approach favored by Republican majorities in Washington and statehouses nationwide.
And yet they managed to keep the schools open on a budget a small fraction of the size in the past. Suddenly it has become so expensive to run the schools as they're currently structured that they can't even operate them. I don't think that reflects as poorly on the budget as it does on the school boards and administrators.
> The four-day week is a “contagion,” said Paul Hill, a research professor at the University of Washington Bothell who has studied the phenomenon in Idaho and who worries that the consequences of the shift — particularly for poor kids — are unknown.
Somebody who has studied the effects of moving to a four-day school week says that his worst worries are that the outcome is "unknown". If he had observed negative consequences elsewhere, you might expect him to say that the consequences could be negative.
> Democrats helped pass bipartisan income tax cuts from 2004 to 2008. Republicans — who have controlled the legislature since 2009 and governorship since 2011 — have cut income taxes further and also significantly lowered taxes on oil and gas production.
Wonderful, I wish somebody were doing that job where I live.
And for what it's worth, I don't see how a four-day school week would lead to cost savings. The biggest recurring expense, to my knowledge, would be teacher, administrative, and custodial salaries; none of which would be reduced by a four-day week. Utility costs would probably only decrease slightly, if at all. I don't see the budgets they pass around at these schools, but I can't see it generating a considerable cost savings.
Of course, they can't ever solve the problem because the only viable solution involves reducing their own salaries or admitting that they are redundant and only cause unnecessary overhead to an already-strained system.
Wouldn't it be great if, at the cost of children playing latchkey for a day during a school year or two (or however long it takes them to fix this), they finally get their act together again.
Well, I'd argue that reducing budget is the only way some of these programs can ever be taken out of existence. Then it's no surprise that republicans are trying to reduce budget. Small-government means that people pay for their own things if they're not absolutely essential. They've managed before, they can do it again.
Of course, this is the horrible adjustment period because people have gotten accustomed to certain things being given/paid for them. How about we slash some ridiculous foreign expenditures, and divert them instead to these poor folks who can't afford an interim solution to their education. That's what we should be talking about.
So Oklahoma isn't spending a lot less; they're just spending a lot less on education. And ridiculous foreign expenditures is federal not state. Education is primarily state funded.
A better idea is for Oklahoma to fully fund education.
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Total_state_government_expenditures