Free Market Friday: Roadblock to Progress

The Journal Record ^ | 04/03/14 | Michael C. Carnuccio

[Pining_4_TX]

Unless Oklahoma continues efforts to grow the size of our state’s economic pie, tax-consuming interests will become more aggressive in their efforts to seize what they believe to be their piece of the pie in its current size. In this struggle, some will win and some will lose. On Monday, we began to see a little more clearly how this could play out, as thousands of public school employees from across the state took off work, some with pay, to go to the Capitol and pressure state lawmakers to direct more taxpayer dollars to public education. Their school administrators encouraged them to do so. However, administrators didn’t tell those teachers, or the students and parents who also attended, that from 1998 to 2011, administrative bloat in Oklahoma public education increased by 49 percent, while student enrollment rose just 6 percent. Also, when you add up all the funding from state government, local ad valorem taxes and federal grants, total taxpayer dollars for Oklahoma public schools were at an all-time high in the most recent fiscal year. Yet student test scores have remained flat.

Read more: http://journalrecord.com/2014/04/03/free-market-friday-roadblock-to-progress-opinion/#ixzz2y2CDVEQi

[Pining_4_TX]

Oklahoma teachers constantly whine and complain about their salaries, conveniently omitting the facts that their salaries are for 9 months of work (with generous amounts of time off during the school year) and that OK has a lower cost of living than just about all the other states.

You certainly don't hear teachers and administrators mention the possibility of differentiating between good teachers and poor ones. Government schools continue to decline in quality and increase in cost and are a prime example of why government programs fail. Yet the sheeple continue to throw more and more money at them.