Tulsa Beacon
by Frank Keating
Thursday, October 28th, 2010
Included on the November 2 ballot will be State Question 744, which is a reckless tax-and-spend proposal designed to feather the nests of the education establishment without doing anything to bring much-needed reforms to our schools. This proposal focuses exclusively on money and not on student achievement.
And it’s not just conservatives who realize we have to quit putting money into our education system. Late last month while appearing on NBC, President Barrack Obama said, “We can’t spend our way out of it. I think that when you look at the statistics, the fact is that our per-pupil spending has gone up during the last couple of decades even as results have gone down.”
By its own terms this is exactly what SQ 744 aims to accomplish – massive multi-billion dollar spending based on per-pupil expenditures with no reforms, no accountability and no funding mechanism.
SQ 744 would provide billions of dollars in new spending with no requirements or direction on how these funds should be spent. In fact, every penny of SQ 744 could be spent on superintendent salaries and still meet the requirements of the measure. Just read the ballot – it expressly states this money can be spent on “non-instruction services.” That’s code for items that don’t help our children learn.
Since 1998, inflation-adjusted per-pupil funding in Oklahoma has increased by 43 percent, yet education outcomes have remained relatively stagnant. Fourth-grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Education Performance have actually decreased, and our average ACT scores have increased only marginally... FULL ARTICLE
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Thu, October 28, 2010
by Crystal Drwenski