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| Democratic Socialists of America Stand with Oklahoma |
How has the Teacher Union Lobby Gained
a 16% Pay Increase in One Year?
With Lies and Damned Lies
What Was Accomplished and What did it Cost Taxpayers?
One of the frustrations of attempting to discuss or debate teacher pay and benefits online whether you be a normal citizen or a legislator defending your vote is the sheer number of lies told by the teacher unions and their minions. This link is one of the "education" websites put up by the unions and what they really are are propaganda sites for those wanting to virtue signal online and of course to spread propaganda to the media and voters. Let's dissect their points one by one:
- #1, Education is the key to prosperity. They show a graph with median hourly wage on one side and the number of college degrees on the other side. One thing that ought to be obvious is that the median pay is under $20.00 per hour in the states with the highest number of degrees. Only about a $6.00 spread. The other thing you will notice is that the highest paid states are also on both the East or West coasts, high cost of living states where that $19.50 per hour won't allow you to rent a house. And they reason that Oklahoma is so low wage is that it has 6% fewer degree holders... or so they say. The real reason is the low cost of living in Oklahoma, one of the lowest in the 50 states. And they are even lying about the salary spread, in 2016 the average Oklahoman made $21.77 compared to the national average of $23.86.
- Oklahoma education receives nearly half of the state appropriated budget. Well, that is a lie as well, it receives 53% of the appropriated money but once you factor in state, local, and federal money spent on education the amount spent on education is 79% of appropriated funds. Oklahoma which had a total state budget of 6.8 billion in 2017 and Oklahoma education spent 5.4 billion dollars! Now that amount that they admit to, 48%, is split between medicaid, roads and bridges, welfare, elderly, military, prisons, mental health, public safety, juvenile affairs, vo tech, arts, dept of labor, libraries, forestry, agriculture, wild life, public television, the tax commission, the legislature itself, election board, and hundreds of other government functions.
- most of the funding goes directly to local K*12 schools. Well, if you consider 77% to be most, I would consider 23% being sucked out by state education administration a pretty hefty loss. That ought to be less than 6%.
- local schools are highly dependent on state funding. Not always, 35 districts do not get a cent from the state because they raise so much money from local property taxes and bond issues. The article claims that stat support has fallen from 59% to 51% without saying the state laws that were supposed to limit property tax growth to 3% were used to justify an automatic 3% raise in property taxes each year and thus drove the local property taxes higher and higher each year. Around one third of education dollars now comes from the state, one third from local, and one third from other sources like federal and bond issues.
- is where the lying gets bad, we are told that Oklahoma has had made the deepest cuts to education funding in the nation. They have a graph that mixes cuts in education with cuts in the income tax rates. There was NO cuts to education from state or local sources. Yes Oklahoma cut the income tax rates but NOT school funding.
- says the regional average pay is $48K, well Oklahoma teachers wage average is $45K PLUS $10,000 in flex benefits that Arkansas and Texas teachers do not get! Plus Oklahoma has a cost of living that is $4000 per year below Texas, mostly in property taxes and housing costs. And minimum salaries haven't increased since 2008? That is a lie! Each year each teacher gets a raise from the minium salary schedule, every single year. And all school boards negotiate with their teachers and pay them what they think they are worth and if the teacher agrees they sign the contract. Having a state minimum is there to protect the teachers, not as a minimum pay rate.
- the claim is that Oklahoma lost twice as much education funding as the lottery and Indian gaming brought in. Another lie. They list income tax cuts as proof that education funding was cut, assuming that every penny in income tax cut came from education funding, that money stayed in the pockets of the people that earned it. Again, state and local education funding has not been cut, it has gradually increased. Federal money did decrease as the federal stimulus funding wound down. That was a bonus, not regular income for education.
- brags about money going to the classroom but doesn't say that Oklahoma classroom spending is about 10% below the national average classroom spending percentage. What is 10% of seven billion dollars which is the state education budget? $700,000,000 siphoned off by administration and wasted on other things beside classroom education.
An educated person could easily trash the rest of that website with ease. Perhaps people have been lied to and maybe they are spreading the lies knowing they are lies.
And BEFORE the strike the legislature had passed a pay hike that made Oklahoma teachers #12 in the nation and #2 in the region for teacher pay. The House and Senate did pull a fast one though, the pay raises is funded for one or two years, then the money is siphoned off into Soonercare and Medicaid. This of course gives them another shot at raising another half billion dollars in new taxes.
That of course wasn't enough so the teachers went on strike, egged on by their superintendents and school districts who provided legal cover by closing the schools. After two weeks of strike nothing was gained but it didn't stop them from asking for more. They are still asking for an additional 1.5 cents on top of the new 3 cents on gas and 6 cents on diesel, and another 25 cents on top of the new $1.00 cigarette tax. They also demanded an additional .125 income tax on all Oklahomans to be earmarked for education.
The two week strike cost taxpayers around $115,000 per day just at the Capitol, not counting the millions spent across the 200 school districts that were closed. Teachers were being paid, with the missed days made up by adding around 1.5 hours a day to the rest of the school days for the year. State troopers were spending around $100,000 per day by pulling in troopers from all around the state, worsening traffic safety and lowering traffic fine income. Around $15,000 a day was pent on clean up, trash service, portable toilets, and repairing damage to the Capitol by thousands of rowdy teachers trampling everything underfoot. The public safety offices paid for the costs by raiding their disaster assistance funds normally reserved for tornadoes or fires, depleting the funds and those funds will have to be refilled by the taxpayers.
School districts spent millions more on wear and tear on buses, even if a nominal $5.00 per head was charged to use the district buses. Meanwhile the teacher union was demanding that Fallin veto the $5.00 hotel tax repeal that was passed as part of the Senate deal to pass the other $600 million dollars in increased or new taxes to permanently fund the new average $6100 per year in pay raises for the first year. Next target was repealing the state exemption to the capital gains tax, saving 5% in taxes on Oklahoma income from Oklahoma sourced income like businesses and capitol gains off stock in Oklahoma companies.
Oklahoma State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister extended the strike by announcing a one week extension in testing date schedule, giving the teachers a second week with no fear of losing federal funds. This testing schedule was supposed to start on April 2nd. Under federal law the tests have to be offered to the students and if less than 96% of the students took the tests the feds would remove part of the funding. Third grade students had to take the federal tests or they wouldn't be allowed to progress to 4th grade the next year. At stake was $821 million in federal funds.
In the end it was this testing that stampeded the school administrations and school boards into calling off the strike. Moore had announced the testing on one day, the day we sent out last week's special edition newsletter asking parents to hold their kids back from the testing until the school teachers returned, then on the next day Moore ordered the teachers back to school after only 92% of the kids showed up to take the tests. Faced with losing federal money was what it took to break the strike, something that Hofmeister could have forced earlier instead of enabling another week of strike by allowing the testing period to extend.
Phone calls into the Capitol were generally in favor of the teachers the first week, some reported 5 to 1 in favor of the teachers, but the second week started off with phone calls 10 to 1 against the teachers! Parents and the average citizens were furious. Read this one post from an elderly lady over on the East side of the state:
This dramatic, orchestrated event has made me reconsider the terms "educator" and "teacher". I have felt like a big bully walked into the room, shoved us into the corner, handcuffed to the floor with a full bladder and then proceed to scream, cry, yell, throw broken chairs at us, slam our hands with every book that was archived in their buildings age 10 years or older, and meticulously chant story after story of every horrible event ever possibly remotely touching any school teacher's life. Then in public forums like this, groups of the mean boys and girls would chant how we the public stupid and entirely too uneducated to understand this situation when we dared to question the veracity of the claims from the far superiority educated teachers. It seemed as if we were transported back in time and forced to endure the ancient pecking of orders of the school yard with mean boys and mean, mean girls.
My husband and I have left this walkout making these promises:
1. We will pay our ad valorem taxes only as these are mandated and we too old to relocate.
2. We will not attend any public education event (other open school board meetings) such as programs, sports, ect. I will not pay for any type of entertainment provided by the school district.
3. Those thousands of box tops that I faithfully saved in the past, gone! I will burn them or send them to a friend in another state. These hateful ingrates can beg elsewhere.
4. The hundreds of dollars that I donate ever year to the stuff the bus or the backpack programs, I will simply send to another state. I will no longer donate a single piece of paper to any school district in Oklahoma.
5. I will not buy any more cookie dough, Oklahoma's beloved Blue & Gold, or any other trinket your child is selling for the public school. I live on private property and for my protection it is posted, keep out!
6. Do not ask for any donations of from my household, Oklahoma Public Schools and School Teachers. I am done!
The hatefulness, the ungratefulness, the demands, the meanness, the intolerance, and the threats that the public school teachers have demonstrated on public social media is nothing short of pure hatred, superiority, abuse of others, and harassment.
Now the teachers are turning on one another. We will see how long the ship continues to sail. I suspect Ms. Alicia Soros' has already sailed for a fairer state. I pray the Oklahoma Taxpayers will wake up and take back our schools from this arm of big government!
And the entire strike earned the teachers nothing at all. The raises had already been passed by the Republican led legislature. The strike's purpose wasn't for more raises or education budget increases, it was to lead a blue wave to take the state back in the November 2018 elections. Anytime you see Capitol Gain taxes being discussed or under attack you know it is a conservative/liberal boxing match. The union organizers were out to stir up trouble and dissent against the incumbent Republicans, to place the blame for non existent budget cuts on the Republican Party. The drove hundreds of liberals to run for office and caused millions to pour in from out of state to fund these new candidates.
How will these new candidates do in the elections? Probably not well and many would have to take a pay cut from around $66,000 including benefits to less than $40,000 including benefits after a 10% pay cut set to kick in next session. And the Democrats are delusional if they think this strike will cause voters to support liberal candidates or those posing as conservative Republicans.
