Stan Geiger

School Super Ads

I've seen ads from a couple of candidates for state school superintendent. They are NBP ads. NBP stands for nuttin' but platitudes.

Both of them speak of routing more education money directly into classrooms. I don't really know what that means.

Excluding the students, there are two components to a classroom: a teacher and the various tools.

Are the candidates for school super calling for more teacher pay without actually saying it? If so, I'm in complete disagreement with them.

A punk that just graduated from a university with a teaching degree can take a job as a classroom teacher and be paid more than the state average wage from the get. That new teacher will also get free health insurance, courtesy of the state. And that teacher will become a part of the Oklahoma Teachers' Retirement System, which offers a very generous defined-benefit pension plan. Meanwhile, that teacher will have a 6-hour workday and be required to show up for work only half the days in a calendar year.

Teachers are more than amply compensated for what they do.

Are the candidates claiming a need for more educational tools in the classroom? Every time I see a news story on education, complete with video of kidlets playing with Crayons, I see a classroom so full of stuff you couldn't get anything else in it without the aid of a shoehorn. The only thing in the classrooms that seems to be in short supply is students.

If the candidates are saying too much money is being spent outside the classroom, I'm in complete agreement. But that money should be pruned from the system and given back to taxpayers. There is no need for it anywhere else.

I saw a report just the other day that mentioned the results from a recent study of 30 industrialized nations. U.S. students ranked 21st in science and 25th in math. We spend more money on education than any nation on the planet, yet we rank in the bottom third in science and math.

Statistics say anywhere from a fourth to a third of students entering a public high school won't be around come graduation day.

For three decades, we have given educators everything they said they needed. We have hired more teachers to reduce class sizes, we have hired more non-teachers, we have increased pay for everybody in education, we have built fancier facilities with fancier equipment. What we have to show for that massive public investment is something just short of spit.

Still, the educators sing the same tired song. They just don't have enough money.

There is a thing in economics known as the law of diminishing returns. Basically, that law says you can gain by throwing money at a problem up to a point. After that, you're just wasting money. I think we hit the point of diminishing returns a long time ago when it comes to funding education.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was Einstein that defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Have we, as a nation, gone insane?

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