If you’ve driven on Route 66 between Tulsa and Oklahoma City in the past few days, you may have noticed dozens of people walking along the old Mother Road.
Many are schoolteachers who vowed to walk 110 miles on Route 66 in a week’s time to demand better pay and better funding of the state’s public schools. Teachers — with the blessings of superintendents and school boards — across the state have organized walkouts and protests at the Capitol building to press the Oklahoma Legislature.
The Tulsa World was there for the march’s start Thursday:
Hundreds of cars and trucks honked and waved their approval. Some drivers weren’t so supportive, extending their middle fingers or pointing their thumbs down. One truck driver seemed to go out of the way to belch diesel smoke on marchers. […]
“We are willing to walk 100 miles for our students,” said Patti Ferguson-Palmer, one of the march’s principal planners and president of the Tulsa Classroom Teachers Association. “What is the Oklahoma Legislature willing to do? We are not all young and fit.”
One of the local TV stations was there when the march began at Webster High School in Tulsa, which is right off Route 66:
CNN reported Friday the march will continue through much of this week, despite storms and even snow buffeting participants:
Teachers in Oklahoma say more spending on education is needed, asserting that school facilities, equipment and textbooks are rundown, outdated or in short supply.
The educators and state government are at odds over salaries and funding. Gov. Mary Fallin recently signed a bill that raises the average teacher salary by $6,100, but the teachers’ union wanted that figure to be $10,000.
The state ranks 49th in the nation in teacher salaries, according to the National Education Association, in a list that includes Washington, D.C. Only Mississippi and South Dakota rank lower than Oklahoma.
The Legislature in late March passed a $6,000-a-year raise for teachers, but educators said the bill lacked vital funding for other aspects of the state’s educational system, including for support staff.
The Economist a few weeks before the walkout assembled a good report on the long-percolating issues that have affected Oklahoma’s education system.
As in Oklahoma’s northern neighbour, Kansas, deep tax cuts have wrecked the state’s finances. During the shale boom, lawmakers gave a sweetheart deal to its oilmen, costing $470m in a single year, by slashing the gross production tax on horizontal drilling from 7% to 1%. North Dakota, by contrast, taxes production at 11.5%. The crash in global oil prices in 2014 did not help state coffers either. Oklahoma has also cut income taxes, first under Democrats desperate to maintain control over a state that was trending Republican, and then under Republicans, who swept to power anyway. Mary Fallin, the Republican governor, came to office pledging to eliminate the income tax altogether. Since 2008 general state funds for K-12 education in Oklahoma have been slashed by 28.2% — the biggest cut in the country. Property taxes, which might have made up the difference, are constitutionally limited.
The fiscal problems in Oklahoma have been long in coming. Even a successful teacher walkout there won’t solve its problems overnight.
They’ll supposedly walk a hundred miles for their students, but won’t do the one thing that is most important: stay in the classroom during the school year and teach them! What exactly do you need that is so expensive in a classroom anyway? Abraham Lincoln didn’t have some fancy school campus with well paid teachers, and I think he turned out fine. Throwing money at problems never solves anything – classrooms and roads included. Pay “other staff” more, i.e. administrators, janitors, etc. Is all well and good, but it doesn’t do anything for the kids. What they need is something more intangible, something money can’t purchase and a building can’t produce. And if these teachers don’t know what that is, well, it may be time to move on to more selfish, materialistic endeavours…
I bet you’re fun at parties.