Eric Blanc wrote a comprehensive and excellent article in Jacobin about the dire condition of public schools in Oklahoma. Given the legislature’s indifference, even hostility, to public schools, he says it is Oklahoma’s turn to strike.
State legislators haven’t been able to find enough money to pay for public schools, but they have found it easy to divert money from their resource-starved public schools to pay for charter schools.
Blanc says that the purposeful gutting of public schools has been the project of free market fundamentalists. But it did not start with them.
I urge you to read the whole article. Here is an excerpt.
He writes:
Demanding major increases in pay and school funding, Oklahoman educators are set to strike on April 2. The similarities with West Virginia are obvious. In a Republican-dominated state with a decimated education system and a ban on public employee collective bargaining, an indignant workforce teetering on the edge of poverty has initiated a powerful rank-and-file upsurge. But history never repeats itself exactly. To strike and win, Oklahoma workers will have to overcome a range of distinct challenges and obstacles.
Years of austerity have devastated Oklahoma’s education system, as well as its public services and infrastructure. Since 2008, per-pupil instructional funding has been cut by 28 percent — by far the worst reduction in the whole country. As a result, a fifth of Oklahoma’s school districts have been forced to reduce the school week to four days.
Textbooks are scarce and scandalously out of date. Innumerable arts, languages, and sports courses or programs have been eliminated. Class sizes are enormous. A legislative deal to lower class sizes — won by a four-day strike in April 1990 — was subsequently ditched because of a funding shortage. Many of Oklahoma’s 695,000 students are obliged to sit on the floor in class.
The gutting of public education has been accompanied by a push for vouchers and, especially, the spread of charter schools. There are now twenty-eight charter school districts and fifty-eight charter schools across Oklahoma. “Is the government purposively neglecting our public schools to give an edge to private and charter schools?” asked Mickey Miller, a Tulsa teacher and rank-and-file leader. For Christy Cox — a middle-school teacher in Norman who has had to work the night shift at Chili’s to supplement her low wages — reversing these school cuts is her main motivation to strike: “The kids aren’t getting what they need. It’s really crazy. Though the media doesn’t talk about this as much as salaries, I feel that funding our schools is the primary issue.”
Pay, of course, is also a central grievance. Oklahoma’s public school teachers and staff haven’t gotten a raise in ten years – and state workers have waited nearly as long. Public school teacher pay is the forty-eighth worst in the nation. Like in West Virginia, many teachers are unwilling or unable to work in these conditions. Roughly two thousand teaching positions are currently filled by emergency-certified staff with no teaching degrees and little training. Alicia Priest, president of the Oklahoma Education Association (OEA), the state’s main teachers’ union, explains that “our teacher shortage has reached catastrophic levels because it’s so easy for teachers to move to Texas or Arkansas, or even to another profession, and make much more money.”
Those teachers and staff who stay in state are often forced to work multiple jobs. Micky Miller’s experience is not atypical. During the day, Miller teaches at Booker T. Washington high school in Tulsa. After the school day is over, he works until 7:30 PM at the airport, loading and unloading bags from Delta airplanes. From there, he goes on to his third job, coaching kids at the Tulsa Soccer Club. “I have a master’s degree, and I have to work three jobs just to make ends meet,” he noted. “It’s very difficult to live this way.”
The roots of this crisis are not hard to find. Taxes have not been raised by the Oklahoma legislature since 1990. Due to a right-wing 1992 anti-tax initiative, a supermajority of 75 percent of legislators is now needed to impose new taxes. Yet the need for a supermajority was not a major political issue until very recently, since there has been a strong bipartisan consensus in favor of cutting taxes. Some of the first major tax breaks for the rich and corporations began in 2004 under Democratic governor Brad Henry and a Democratic-led Senate. One recent study estimates that $1 billion in state revenue has been lost yearly due to the giveaways pushed through since the early 2000s.
Republicans swept into the state government in 2010 and promptly accelerated this one-sided class war. Governor Mary Fallin and the Republican legislature have slashed income taxes for the rich. They have also passed huge breaks for the oil and gas companies — not a minor issue in a state that is the third-largest producer of natural gas and fifth-largest producer of crude oil in the country. Even the fiscal fallout of the 2014 oil bust did not lead the administration to reverse course….
Please click on the link link and keep reading.
The bipartisan defunding of education in favor of tax breaks is noteworthy. Oklahoma politicians and voters seem to think of teachers as babysitters with college degrees, also mostly women who really need to work gratis or at low pay. I see no evidence of strong support for teachers in any state. If you know of at least one, please post the why and how here.
“..also mostly women who really NEED to work gratis or at low pay…” The 10,000 lb elephant in the room seldom if ever recognized or dissected: “NEED.”
Quote: “As a result, a fifth of Oklahoma’s school districts have been forced to reduce the school week to four days.” This is hideous, jaw dropping and tragic for the people of Oklahoma, whether they support the public schools or not. The rich will do just fine while everyone else will suffer. Oklahoma makes Kansas look like a progressive Nirvana (not really). This is what happens when this knuckle headed right wing libertarian/Randian philosophy of greed takes hold in a state or a country. The common good is trampled into the dust.
Think about this – if you are in 8th grade you have seen your funding cut every year since kindergarten. It get real tragic when OK compares itself to Kansas.
https://www.ossba.org/2018/01/09/new-national-data-show-oklahoma-falling-further-behind-in-education-investment/
The real irony of comparing yourself to Kansas is the Kansas Supreme Court has repeatedly told the legislation they are unconstitutuionally underfunding education and have given them one last chance to come up with a fix.
http://kcur.org/post/kansas-supreme-court-says-school-funding-still-unconstitutionally-low#stream/0
So OK is trying to catch up to unconstitutuionally underfunded education.
Just wrap your head around that.
Here’s my favorite sentence in the article: “This weakness is the result not only of Oklahoma’s reactionary anti-union laws, but also the manifest ineffectiveness of the OEA’s decades-long focus on lobbying the legislature and electing Democratic Party politicians.” This is not just an Oklahoma problem, or a teachers in red states problem, but a problem with how teachers unions have been operating for decades. Instead of focusing on grassroots issues, they’ve focused on lobbying and trying to get Democrats elected, and Democrats have not been friends to public schools. The teachers are leading, from the bottom up.
Completely agree! Without complicity on the part of the Democratic party, the terrible situation in public-education would not have ever gotten to this state of crisis. Yet, here in California the NEA immediately endorsed Democrat Gavin Newsom who was pro-choice the last time he ran for Governor against pro-choice Jerry Brown.
Yes, yes, and yes!
They neglected public schools because they’ve been chasing charters and vouchers for 20 years.
All those experts, all those think tanks and editorials, and it took the teachers walking off the job in these states to get their attention.
It’s neglect. The people in power simply weren’t doing their jobs. Their ideological preferences didn’t align with the schools these children actually attend.
It was inevitable too- you can’t ignore 90% of schools and students and “improve education”- that’s ludicrous. They can rejigger and rebrand and do better marketing all they want- if you’re harming 90% of schools the system as a whole won’t improve. They’re bailing out one end of the boat while punching holes in the other end.
It’s a SYSTEM. Systems are interconnected. And they will ALWAYS be interconnected. If they privatize the whole thing it will STILL be a system because it has to be universal.
They’re just wrong about the nature of the thing they’re redesigning and all the tweaking in the world won’t change that.
from an OK citizen (Duncan/Moore/OK City)…. “it was bipartisan. I have not heard of any individuals against the tax increase; just the lobbyists. $1 per pack for cigarettes; 3 cents per gallon for gas ; an increase on the tax for oil that comes out of the ground; $5 / night hotel tax. My wife’s monthly royalty check from oil drops from $105 to $100. Hah! I will gladly pay $5 dollars / month; I buy about 60 gallons of gas a mint so that is $1.80. ”
have some empathy for people who are ruled by these “oil” oligarchs.
In MA our republican governor will not support the Fair Share Act that would bring needed funds to the education budgets while Robert Kraft makes a PR move to fly kids in his airplane while he will not support the Fair Share amendment/act and raises money for trump (with Tom Brady and failed senator Scotty Brown when he was in the country.)… So if trump flies you on Air Force one you can tell me we should “normalize” his stance? We need to rein in these republican governors like Baker in MA. … Daily Kos has him listed as leading the 3 democratic gubernatorial candidates “who have no traction” (as quoted by the Daily Kos article)
cs… 60 gallons of gas a month (not mint)
This sounds like Utah. Our pay is not quite as low as Oklahoma’s, West Virginia’s, or Arizona’s, but our per pupil expenditure is far lower. Our class sizes are ludicrous. I frequently have classes (social studies) of 38 or 39 middle school students. I teach 8 class periods, and have a total student load of 280. That’s not a type-o. I wish teachers here would begin to start talking about a walk out here, too.
PS: GO OKLAHOMA, WEST VIRGINIA, KENTUCKY, and ARIZONA!!! I hope this spreads.
How can anyone assign essays and grade them with 280 students? If you devoted only 10 minutes per paper, that’s 2,800 Minutes, or nearly fifty hours of reading. Impossible.
Welcome to my life. I don’t have kids do huge essays or research papers–it’s too much. They write, but a lot of short stuff. I feel badly about it, but for my sanity, I have to assign more short writings.
Where is your union? Don’t you have a contract that sets a maximum student limit and number of classes taught per day? What school is this and where?
This is Utah. The state has NEVER had any kind of limitations on class sizes or the number of class periods taught. We have a 10 period block schedule–5 every day. But it’s a TON of work and I’m incredibly exhausted. Teachers in Utah are burning out faster than they can be hired, and Utah’s student population is growing faster than just about any other place in the country.
While our wages haven’t been as stagnant as Oklahoma’s, the state legislature has usually only given 1 or 2% increase in the Weighted Pupil Unit per year, which doesn’t even cover the enormous student growth in the state. This year, we got 5%, and the so-called “union” is celebrating. But most of us make less money than we did 2008, and that’s in real dollars, not inflation.
Our teacher salaries average $50,000, and our class sizes run neck and neck with California as the largest. Almost all of our special education students are mainstreamed much of the time, in our huge classes. I once had 14 students on IEPs in the same class of 36. Our pension has been gutted for all teachers who started after 2009–only a 401K now.
When Utah went to a flat tax in 2005, and started funding colleges with the Uniform School Fund instead of separate funding, it is estimated that Utah schools lose $1 billion a year. That was under Governor Jon Huntsman, who everyone thinks is SO moderate (he’s not).
Same state, 27 to 30 kindergarteners and first graders per teacher and then the legislature wonders why so many children do not meet the over inflated third grade reading and writing standards.
Posted at Oped News https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Jacobin-The-Reasons-for-a-in-General_News-Legislators_Money_Oil_Oklahoma-Schools-180401-503.html#comment695444
with comments taken from this blog: “As a result, a fifth of Oklahoma’s school districts have been forced to reduce the school week to four days.” This is hideous, jaw dropping and tragic for the people of Oklahoma, whether they support the public schools or not. The rich will do just fine while everyone else will suffer. Oklahoma makes Kansas look like a progressive Nirvana (not really). This is what happens when this knuckle headed right wing libertarian/Randian philosophy of greed takes hold in a state or a country. The common good is trampled into the dust. ” See more at the link above.
The timing is perfect: MLK was killed 50 years ago on April 4. He came down here to Memphis to help out the sanitation workers’s “illegal” strike. Teachers walk out for the same reason these sanitation workers went on strike and MLK got killed (which he anticipated in his last speech): Civil Rights. What hasn’t changed since then is the fact that politicians want to stay in the background and they cannot deal with popular movements. They try to outlaw strikes, they make their states right-to-work, but they can still be easily overruled. People just have to understand, they have the power.
There was a movie screening yesterday in Downtown Memphis. They played a documentary about the sanitation workers’ strike. The movie was made 25 years ago by two Uof Memphis profs (still on the faculty) and were in the audience, and the screening was followed by a panel. It was very interesting because both on the panel and in the audience there were quite a few people who participated in the events of 1958, and they gave both their perspective and advice for the future about what and how to do it. They were all very sympathetic to the Parkland students’ movements; they compared it to the events 50 years ago.
It seems to me that teachers, similarly to the sanitation workers 50 years ago, have no other choice but walk out.
Correction: 1968
Yes indeed. 1958 is the year I was born in.