Public Education

Public Education, Oklahoma's biggest challenge:

Oklahoma's public education can be greatly improved with just three changes:

1. Weed out the "bad" teachers.
2. Hold teachers accountable, and pay bonuses based on
student performance.
3. Consolidate school districts.

Pull the weeds!
Every adult can remember a teacher they had in school that should have been fired. A teacher that was so bad, that even as a kid, you knew that he was not doing a good job teaching. But that teacher never got the boot.

Between 1995 and 2005, only 112 Los Angeles tenured teachers faced termination -- eleven per year -- out of 43,000. And that’s in a school district whose 2003 graduation rate was just 51 percent.

In ten years, only about 47 out of 100,000 teachers were actually terminated from New Jersey’s schools. Original research conducted by the Center for Union Facts (CUF) confirms that almost no one ever gets fired from New Jersey’s largest school district, no matter how bad.

Reporter Scott Reeder of the Small Newspaper Group discovered in 2005 that “out of 95,500 tenured teachers in Illinois [outside of Chicago] an average of only two are fired each year for poor performance.” In Chicago itself, hundreds of principals surveyed by The New Teacher Project in 2007 said that 83 percent of poor-performing tenured teachers are “rarely or never” terminated.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma there are approximately 2,136 tenured teachers. Original research by the Center for Union Facts into school district records indicates that, between 2003 and 2006, only two tenured teachers were fired. Put another way, Tulsa Public Schools fires about 0.02 percent of its tenured teachers annually.

Pay for performance!
Most people who work in the private sector are familiar with performance bonuses. These can come in the form of tips, commissions, completion bonuses, profit sharing, spiffs, etc. But not teachers! Instead their pay is based primarily on the number of years they have been teaching. The more years, the more pay. Good years, bad years, successful years or failure years, it makes no difference.

The time has come that we keep, promote and pay teachers based on the product they produce: educated children. There is little argument that this type of system will work and can be easily implemented and administrated. The only roadblock, is the headlock that America's teachers' unions have on our "career politicians". It is time we stand up!

There are about 601 school districts in Oklahoma. In comparison, California with ten times the population of Oklahoma and twice the geographic area has just over 1000 school districts. The smallest school district in Oklahoma, the Boley School District, has only 51 students. Although some school personnel wear several hats, each school district has a board, superintendent and administrative staff.

In many cases small school districts are prevented from enjoying team sports, top notch infrastructure, along with a list of amenities that larger districts take for granted, yet these small districts still require considerable funding. Proper funding for schools has been an ongoing debate across the state. Reducing the duplication and waste caused by too many school districts would free up badly needed funds for Oklahoma’s education system’s improvement.

A recent report revealed that all Oklahoma schools are not all alike*. High school graduations rates differ as well as the percent of students that do graduate, that are prepared for college. It seems that some Oklahoma high schools do a better job teaching than others and little is being done to discover the differences and make positive changes. In the private sector, bank branches, store branch locations and many office branches of the same company openly share “best practices”. Not true with Oklahoma schools; each school is allowed the latitude to teach with variation as long as core courses and minimum standards are met.

The report sights the need for college remedial courses to prepare Oklahoma high school graduates for real college level classes. About 9 percent of the graduates from Garfield County’s Garber High School need remedial classes their first year in college while on the other end of the scale, 100 percent of the graduates from Blair High School in Jackson County need remediation. So why the difference, what makes one high school perform better than another? Certainly parents, location and socioeconomic plays a part in the differences, but we must assume, that so do the teachers and the teaching techniques.

It is time for consolidation of Oklahoma’s school districts and some hard-nosed investigations into the vast differences between these schools' student performance.

Teacher’s Pay:
What we pay our Teachers in Oklahoma is another hot topic. Here is a revealing fact: In Tulsa, the median pay for public high school teachers is between $39K and $57K. Head coaches in Tulsa earn a median income of $49K to $80K with some surpassing $100K annually. (The head football coach in Jenks, Oklahoma, Allan Trimble earns in excess of $100,000 per year.) What does this say about our education priorities?

*The Oklahoman October 11, 2009: http://www.newsok.com/oklahoma-high-school-students-not-quite-prepared-for-college/article/3405729

Teachers pay: http://sde.state.ok.us/Teacher/Salary/default.html

Sources and quotes from: www.teachersunionexposed.com