Editor’s note: This is in response to Tucker Cross’s Sept. 1 column “Increased education spending won’t solve problems.”

Last Wednesday, an article by Tucker Cross arguing against increased education spending ran in The Daily.

Expecting to be enlightened with an alternate viewpoint on the issue of our education system, I instead got the regurgitation of bits gleaned from the literature of one man — Andrew Coulson.

The basic gist of the article is that we in America need not increase spending on public schools, because they are inefficient and filled with far more school employees than are necessary.

Cross claims that charter schools do more for students with less money, and infers that by “letting this whole issue be handled on a local, free market level,” virtually all of our problems will be solved.

What Cross doesn’t tell you is that Coulson asserts not that there are too many teachers, but that there are too many school employees. If one reads further into Coulson’s work, you will find that he means school bureaucracy more than any other sector of public school employment.

As it turns out, approximately one-third of the jobs added since 1970 have been in this sector; yet Cross writes as if it is exclusively a surplus of teachers that is the problem.

He also points out that approximately $7,420 per student is spent each year. This number is given with absolutely no context, leaving the average reader in a state of shock. Furthermore, the National Center for Education Statistics reports the average expenditure per student is actually $8,586. Assuming a student attends every one of the 180 days in a school year, this amounts to $47.70 per day, which is just about minimum wage if he or she were working the seven hours spent in the classroom.

Cross also doesn’t even bother to mention this includes not simply average students, but special education students as well, who cost around twice as much to educate.

The fact that students with learning disabilities even exist is completely ignored by both Cross and Coulson, for if that were factored into the difference between general public schools and charter schools, the cost-effectiveness difference would shrink. Charter schools are filled with students both capable and willing to succeed in school, so of course they do more with less.

In fact, as a general rule the better a student does in school, the less he or she costs to educate. I’d like to address the meat of the problem here: more or less money?

I question whether Cross has ever attended a rural school in Oklahoma. I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but in my hometown of Ada, state school districts are literally dying. In the Vanoss, Stonewall and Konawa school districts, administrators have cut sports, trips and custodial staff down to the bone, and they’re not alone.

One school district in the area, Stratford Public Schools, was in such bad shape financially that they closed doors for the summer early because they simply ran out of funds.

My own mother is a teacher, and I can promise you there is no such thing as an overpaid public school teacher. Only an idiot would go into teaching for the money here in Oklahoma. Yes, we need reform, but not when times are already tough. This issue needs to be addressed with a chisel, not a sledgehammer.

Our schools are desperate for money, and to cut funding any more simply because there are a few inefficient ones is flirting with disaster.

— Buck Roberson, University College freshman