Screaming at the right building

The people have spoken—if only someone had been listening

On March 31, almost 25,000 Oklahoma teachers and others boarded buses and carpools and met at the state Capitol for a rally. They came to show solidarity with one another and to demand from legislators more money and support for public education. And considering how, since 2008, the state has now slipped to 49th in education funding, they should really come more often.

Fewer than 24 hours later, the Oklahoma Senate Finance Committee approved a tax cut, which would take another $147 million out of the state budget, meaning even less money for education. Then the full senate voted to repeal Common Core (a national education standard for math and language skills), which, while a time zone away from perfect curriculum reform, would have been a good first step for a state that needs one.

On April Fools’ Day, a day after so many gathered together to show their commitment to education, the Oklahoma Legislature flipped them off.
And the land we belong to is grand.

The weekend before, though, held so much promise. David Blatt, executive director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute (a non-partisan think tank which provides timely and credible information, analysis, and ideas), was at his 50th birthday party. The dining room was filled with a birthday cake, wine, chips and dip, hummus, fancy crackers, and liberals in khaki pants, talking about marathons, cycling, and the state’s education possibilities. And Blatt was working on jokes.

“What do you think of this one? An old man is trying to convince a woman to let him kiss her breasts. He offers fifty, one hundred dollars; she says, ‘No.’ Finally, he offers $500 per. She agrees. They go back to the hotel. He kisses one, says, ‘I don’t think I can;’ kisses the other, says, ‘I don’t think I can.’ Finally, she says, ‘What do you mean, “You don’t think you can”?’”

“’I mean,’ says the old man, ‘I don’t think I can find the money.’”

“Then, I’ll tell the crowd,” Blatt said, “don’t believe the legislature when it says it can’t find the money.”

Nobody laughed.

“I could tell the Emo Philips’ joke,” he said. “’So I went to the Wailing Wall with my harpoon and felt like an idiot.’”

That one people liked, as they did the story Blatt told of meeting the eighteen year-old who said he’d had a bad decade.

“‘YOU had a bad decade?’” Blatt told the kid. “‘Tell me about it. I’m a Democrat.’”

To be a Democrat in Oklahoma is to have had the worst of decades. Sisyphus had it easier, so Blatt knows that it will be a victory if things don’t get worse for education this legislative session. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, though, if history matters, that’s not going to happen. Oklahoma cut more money from education than any other state since 2008. It ranks last in public libraries, 37th in those with a high-school diploma, 44th in the nation in per-pupil funding, but, because a state has to have priorities, first in the lowest tax rates¹ for horizontal drillers, beating out those socialists in Wyoming, North Dakota, Texas, and Montana.

We’re No. 1! We’re No. 1!

“So what makes you think the rally,” I asked Blatt, “will go well?”

“Because,” he said, “we’ll be there in force and most in the legislature say they support
education.”

Pretty low bar, I thought.  Most think moms are great, too. And, yet, as Charles P. Pierce of Esquire once said of protests like the one for education in OKC, “Sometimes it’s enough to yell at the right building.”

Which brings me to State Representative Mike Turner (R-OKC), part of the new generation of GOP wingnuttia. It was Turner who last year authored a bill outlawing all marriage in the state, and he’s the one who said of the rally, “This sort of behavior should not be tolerated by our schools or any other state agency participating in this gross abuse of your hard-earned money.”

Gross abuse? You make $38,400 for three months of work, more than many of these teachers make on full-year contracts, but, please, continue.  

“They were supposed to teach children today. It’s a school day. They were not doing that,” he said.

Oh, knock it off. The kids’ll survive and, more important, this is how democracy gets done. Moreover, Turner, who’s 26, has some cajones complaining about the work ethic of teachers when he’s had, count ‘em, one job before his bang-up work as a legislator, and that was in high school. According to his own website, mikeforthehouse.com, the 26-year-old had one job where “ … he worked as an electrician’s apprentice, crawling through attics and underneath floors to run wires.”

A regular Horatio Alger. Of course he’s now running for Jim Langford’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, because Oklahoma needs more of this kind of thinking in Washington.

But it wasn’t just legislators who missed the point. The Superintendent of Schools, Janet Barresi, somehow managed to foul it back. (What’s new?) While saying the rally was “very impressive,” she added, “Like all the educators and parents who rallied at the Capitol, I believe Oklahoma’s public education system needs more money going to the classroom and not administration.”

Yeah, that’s what the rally was about. Top-heavy administration.

Even still, Blatt was upbeat and heartened by those who came to the rally, impressed by their very presence on a windy, chilly Monday. He heard from many who said they’d gladly give back the $29 they’d get from a proposed tax cut if it meant better schools.

“I opened the speech with a Will Rogers quote,” he told me the day after the rally.

“Why?”

“Because that’s what you do in Oklahoma.”

“When you’re in a hole,” he told the crowd, quoting Rogers, “stop digging.”

Problem is, not everyone sees the hole.

From his prepared remarks: “Some of the plans in the legislature would tie a tax cut to a trigger, so that whenever revenues grow, there will be automatic tax cuts. But that’s the wrong trigger. How about we decide that we won’t cut our income tax until per pupil funding climbs back to where it was in 2008? How about no tax cut until our teacher salaries are no longer among the lowest and teachers no longer have to dig into their own empty pockets to buy school supplies for their students? How about no tax cut until our college graduation rate reaches the national average?”

Yes, tax cuts. Always tax cuts. They are the salve legislators put on everything.

“So, the state has this roads fund and every year, come hell or high water,” he told me, “we increase the funding to roads—this year, something like $57 million—until the fund reaches something like 600-million. So, my thinking is doing the same thing for kids. But how do you actually get the legislature to fund kids as well as they fund roads? Well, maybe if you just paint a yellow stripe down the center of these kids.”

Considering the expediency with which the rally’s goals were dismissed by the legislature, who knows if even that would work? As it turned out, the teachers who came to OKC that last day in March might as well have come with harpoons and tilted them at the Capitol like 25,000 Don Quixotes for all the good it did. With the tax cut approved, teachers will, in fact, get that $29 (maybe they can use it to buy school supplies for their classrooms), the state legislature will keep making their job more difficult, and Mike Turner will continue talking about whatever it is Mike Turner is talking about. 

Still—still—March 31 was a good day, all things considered, for there were 25,000 who stood together in Oklahoma City, yelling, as one, about the future, about education, about children, and yelling at the right building.

¹Horizontal drilling tax breaks unnecessary, The Collegian at The University of Tulsa, Jan. 27, 2014