I'm not surprised. OK ranks 45th in education, and has led the nation in "per pupil" education cuts for the last 5 years in a row. This despite the fact that teachers had to strike in order to get a raise.
Investing in education pays for itself. I will never understand this.
Thank you for being a teacher and a veteran.
"45th in education"--does that mean per-pupil expenditure?
If so, there's obviously a bias in favor of high-cost-of-living states, because they have to spend more to get the same result. Oklahoma is not a high-cost-of-living state. I suspect that we would rank in the middle 1/3 if expenditures were adjusted for cost of living.
We've got something like the 5th-lowest average score on the ACT (2019 scores). Which seems very bad. However, we test 100% of our students (paid by the state), one of only 15 states to do so. I did not know this until I just checked. Unless my memory is faulty (a distinct possibility), we didn't do that in 2018. Last time I checked our scores against the national average, we were testing about 87%, and our average score was 0.1 below the national average. Getting that last 13% tested has caused our average score to go down 2 points.
Teachers got a big pay raise a year ago.
For 2019, we ranked 43rd in "adjusted average salary," at $48,295. By comparison, California ranks 36th at $50,787. I imagine that $48k-plus goes further in Oklahoma than $51k-minus does in California. BTW, Vermont and Maine rank 45th and 46th, respectively.
CD has made the point, but investing in education doesn't pay for itself if the product is not good. All things being equal, more money invested is better, but all things are not equal. I've seen two different school systems respond to increased funding by scheduling more boondoggle trips for administrators.
Before my current job, I taught in a middle school that was aspiring to be certified in the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program (IB-MYP). I was with a group of teachers who went to Houston for the workshops and seminars we needed to make sure we were teaching in the right way and aiming at the right target. Two years later, because more money was available, other teachers and our principal went to Montreal for the training. The principal took a private room instead of doubling up, and she attended no workshops, because it was Montreal and she wanted to go shopping.
In my current job, our school joined the Confucius Institute 7 or 8 years ago, and the Superintendent, the principal, the athletics director, and the activities director went to China. It was a junket. There wasn't one thing about Chinese culture that we incorporated into our curriculum beyond having a Chinese language class for a couple of years. We're no longer a member of the Confucius Institute, for which I am thankful, because I think its primary purpose is propaganda.
Thanks for your final comments. Despite the bungling and incompetence I have seen, I've enjoyed both of those careers.