aMaZiNg!
One criticism elected officials routinely get is that they lie to the people. That’s because they often oversell little things as aMaZiNg, cOlOsSAL, gInOrMoUs changes.
For example, does anyone remember Governor Stitt's "Most Transformative Education Reform in State History!" That was last year's tweak to public school open district transfer. In reality, roughly 25,000 kids switched districts each year before the change. With his "Most Transformative Education Reform," another 282 kids transferred. <eye roll>
Now the Governor and his hand-picked Secretary of Education, Ryan Walters, are crowing about their aMaZiNg plan to pay teachers $100,000. Wow!!!
Well… you know where this is going. The reality is the #StittSham plan is a nothing burger.
First, the Governor’s plan doesn’t include any new money for education. The funding comes from existing lottery funds that are already being spent on education…
Yes. You got it. His plan funds these salaries by moving money from one pocket to another.
Second, the plan provides this money to school districts in the form of grants. The districts must compete with each other to get their grant requests filed first because the money is allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. If your district is too late, it doesn’t get any money. But it still has to pay any salaries they bumped up in previous years. That’s the law.
Third, the plan requires already cash-strapped school districts to match this money dollar-for-dollar. If they had the money they would already pay teacher more.
Another significant problem is the plan only has enough money to cover 1.2 teachers per district.
How’s that? Let’s look at the funding…
HB 4388 places a cap on educational lottery dollars. The cap is $65M. Anything over that is available for matching funds to pay teachers $100K. Last year the lottery brought in $80M for education, so that leaves us with $15M for grants.
Now let’s do the math…
For districts that have the money to do matching, that $15M gets matched dollar-for-dollar. That gives us $30M total.
The current teacher salary schedule says a teacher with a master’s degree and 25 years of teaching experience is paid $51,971. For argument’s sake, let’s assume these are our best teachers. They need another $48,029 to get them to $100,000.
$30M divided by $48,029 is a whopping 625 teachers. (We can fund even fewer teachers if it turns out our best teachers have less experience and lower credentials.)
According to the Oklahoma State Department of Education, we have 509 traditional school districts. We also have 37 brick-and-mortar charter school districts and 7 virtual charter school districts. That gives us 553 school districts.
625 teachers… across 553 districts, or slightly more than 1 teacher per district.
So, which teacher in your district will win the Kevin Stitt / Ryan Walters Education Hunger Games?
