| According to our most reliable available statistics, there are nearly 100,000 students in Oklahoma who are opting out of the typical public school system. Nearly 33,000 are enrolled in private schools which their families pay tuition for. Homeschooled students account for about 40,000. That number matched the research that the Tulsa World published nearly 10 years ago, when they concluded that homeschooling exceeds private school enrollment by about 20%. An even faster growing segment of child education is the charter school system. About 25,000 oklahoma students are lucky enough to get accepted into the limited number of charter schools. The largest charter school is Epic One On One. They have over 10,000 enrolled in their online system with tutors who come to the home of the student, as needed. This means that one out of every seven kids is no longer attending the local public school campus. Sadly, there are also thousands who drop out altogether. They find the typical public school to be intolerable for them (mostly for social reasons). So why aren't the students who aren't in public schools getting equal education support from our state legislature? Some of them are expressing a desire to go on strike with their tax support. It is time to bust up every school district of over 10,000 enrollment. They are the big urban failures which are no longer the pride of their communities. |  Many lawmakers will lose the support of voting parents if they throw more wasteful spending into the failed big school districts, without the essential reforms to restore a healthy environment for kids' academic success. |
| This week there's talk of teachers going on strike. I don't blame them. Their workplace sucks. A combination of;
| There are systemic problems which money won't ever fix. In fact more money will just further put off the fundamental restructuring which is essential. More money will only serve to bribe the teachers we currently have, because quality educators are largely already gone. Not all of them, but enough that we no longer have the masters of academia who could navigate a class of 30 kids to where they needed to be by the end of the semester. We now have an average of 16.3 kids for every teacher. We pay more per student in teacher pay($2700) than does San Diego ($2500), yet their teachers get $55,000 per year because they have 5 more students per class, on average. |
