John Thompson is an education writer currently working on a book about his experience teaching for 18 years in the inner city of OKC. He has a doctorate from Rutgers University and is the author of  Closing the Frontier:  Radical Responses in Oklahoma Politics.

The last generation has seen the rise of education reform. This movement brought a profound sense of urgency to improving our schools, arguing that it is essential for the United States’ survival in the global marketplace. Consequently, reformers argue that data-driven accountablity, as well as an unflinching focus on classroom instruction, are more than a tough-love program for schools. They are the key to prosperity in the 21st century. Read the rest of this entry »

It is widely accepted that ownership of assets – a home, savings accounts, stocks and investments, a business – is a cornerstone of family financial security. Assets provide a cushion against temporary setbacks and allow for an investment in greater opportunities and economic success in the future. Government policies have long promoted asset building through a combination of direct expenditure programs and, especially, through preferential tax treatment in the federal tax code of home mortgages, savings account contributions, capital gains income, and other items.  States, too, promote asset building, in large part by “piggybacking” on federal itemized deductions for such items as the home mortgage deduction and property taxes on state income taxes.

A new report from CFED and the Annie E. Cassey Foundation (AECF) calculates annual federal expenditures on asset-building policies to be $384 billion. Of this total budget, ninety per cent of benefits, or $348 billion, is delivered through the tax code, while just 10 percent, or $37 billion, takes the form of direct government expenditures. Most of the latter is in the area of scholarships and grants for post-secondary education. Conversely, the vast majority of the total federal budget in the areas of homeownership, savings and investment, retirement accounts and business developments takes the form of tax credits, deductions, and lower tax rates.

Here’s the thing. These policies to promote savings, investment and ownership primarily subsidize the wealthy, and offer few, if any benefits to low- and moderate-income households. Take, for example, homeownership. According to the report: Read the rest of this entry »

For advocates, policymakers, and the general public, having access to reliable data is among the essential building blocks of informed discussion and debate. Last week at the Fall Forum event of the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy (OICA), participants were introduced to the new KIDS COUNT data center, a great online resource that should help guide policy discussions and decisions in Oklahoma on a whole range of issues over the coming years. Read the rest of this entry »

Note – Occasionally we plan to re-run blog posts on topical subjects that you may have missed the first time around. Recently, the Annie E. Casey released its annual Kids Count report measuring how states are faring on a range of indicators of child well-being . As the Tulsa World reported, Oklahoma’s overall ranking dropped to 44th  and we fared worse on 6 of 9 indicators than we did in 2000.  In this June blog post, we examined the disparity between our state’s growing wealth and persistently poor performance on measures of personal and social well-being.

Back in March, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released 2008 data on state personal income, which is the most widely used measure of a state’s relative prosperity. We took note of it at the time in our April Numbers You Need bulletin, focusing on Oklahoma’s rank as the state with the fourth strongest rate of growth in  personal income (5.4 percent) for the year.

Perhaps the bigger story, which hasn’t received much attention,  is that the state’s strong economic growth over the course of this decade has propelled Oklahoma from near the bottom to the middle rungs of states in per capita personal income. As recently as 2000, Oklahoma ranked 42nd in state per capita personal income at $23,582. Between 2000 and 2008, Oklahoma’s per capita personal income jumped 51.2 percent, fourth among the states behind only Wyoming, Louisiana,  and North Dakota (all, not coincidentally, states that have shared in the boom in mineral prices of recent years). As of 2008, Oklahoma ranks 28th with per capita personal income of $36,899, which is less than $3,000 below the national average of  $39,751. Oklahoma ranks above every southern state except Florida and Texas, and has surged past not only declining Rust Belt states like Ohio (32nd), Michigan (34th)and Indiana (39th), but also such seemingly dynamic southern and western states as Oregon (31st), North Carolina (36th), Georgia (40th) and Arizona (42nd). Read the rest of this entry »