The education lobby will soon ask Oklahoma voters to sign a petition requiring that our state per-pupil school spending must always equal the regional average. There are at least four reasons why this is a bad and dangerous idea.
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First, anyone who knows basic arithmetic understands why this won't work. Every time you raise Oklahoma's per-pupil spending you also raise the regional average, even if the other states in our region do nothing. That ever-escalating average then becomes the carrot at the end of a stick, forever just out of reach. You can never equal a moving average when what you do drives that average forward.
Second, the petition would require the immediate allocation of at least 850 million new dollars to the schools. Since the Oklahoma Constitution insists that we balance our budget, those dollars could come from only two places — other state programs or tax increases.
That would mean shutting down most highway repairs, releasing prisoners as we lay off guards, trimming social services to the bone — all in the name of a per-pupil spending average that may not even improve learning. If we opted for tax increases to pay the bill, the forced extraction of almost a billion dollars from Oklahoma household budgets would work an enormous hardship on everyone.
Third, our schools simply don't deserve more dollars until they spend the ones they have more sensibly.
As Americans for Prosperity recently reported, Oklahoma schools spend three times the regional average on school administrative costs that never even reach the classroom — $753 per pupil versus $242. Every time school enrollment goes up, so does administrative overhead.
If the question is what will bring more learning, the answer isn't simply "spend more per student.” It's "spend more in the classroom.” At our current per-pupil spending of about $6,900 per child, we're pumping about $138,000 into a typical elementary classroom with 20 students.
Average teacher pay is about $42,000. That means more than two-thirds of school spending goes for something else — often administrative fat.
Keystone Schools in Tulsa County is a small district, with about 450 students. Yet its superintendent earns $117,000 a year, more than most statewide officials other than the governor. The Millwood district in Oklahoma County has just over 1,000 students and pays its superintendent $137,000.
When two-thirds of current per-pupil spending is going to something other than teaching, we have a right to ask why we need more per-pupil spending.
Finally, there is no clear correlation between average per-pupil spending and learning, which is the central mission of our schools. Some of our top-performing school districts, as measured by test scores and college attendance, actually have per-pupil spending averages well below the state average of $6,900.
Some of the worst schools have very high per-pupil averages, often because a large share of those dollars is being spent to underwrite bloated administrative costs.
This petition is bad math, bad policy and a bad idea.
If the question is what will bring more learning, the answer isn't simply "spend more per student.”
It's "spend more in the classroom.”
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