As someone who has been connected to the cattle industry most of my life, I am reminded of an old cattleman saying: "You can't starve a dollar out of a cow." Cattle are sold by weight and the more pounds they gain the more you increase potential profit. Some people, seeing the high price of cattle feed, try to cut costs by refusing to feed their cattle properly. The result is usually disastrous. Cows do not breed to have more calves; calves do not gain weight properly, and you lose money instead of having a chance to profit.

Likewise, you can't starve education to achieve positive and effective change.

If our state leaders and state school superintendent were in the cattle business, they would not only go broke but probably would be arrested for animal abuse. Starving education through lack of funding to force change in hopes of better performance will not work and is not working. It doesn't work with cattle and won't work with people.

I've never looked at a poor-producing cow and said, "If you don't start doing better then I will have to teach you a lesson. No hay for you." The idiocy of withholding a basic essential to make it more successful is obvious. (Almost as silly as speaking to a cow.)

If educators are not effective, they ought to be replaced either in the classroom or at the administrative levels. If the type of education we are providing is not successful for youth in today's society, it should be changed. But refusing to fund education across the state will not result in a positive change of expectations or student performance.

Education funding is not the sole answer to our ills as a state but it is the single biggest indicator of positive results being achieved in other states, so certainly we have to admit we are not doing our best in this arena. Significant per-student expenditures in other states produce lower rates of poverty, higher employment levels, less incarceration and a better quality of life. As we are at the bottom of the nation for funding education on a per-pupil rate, our results are just the opposite: overcrowded prisons, high incarceration rates particularly for female prisoners (We're No.1!), continued effects of generational poverty, lack of quality employment opportunities, lack of business investment, and high violence incidents in urban areas.

Education professionals are as frustrated as anyone when kids struggle to achieve their potential. Different ideas and new approaches take money. New programs specific to urban schools don't come cheap or easy. Tough decisions have been made in other states across our nation that achieved commitments at all levels to improve funding for education. We haven't been willing to do that here because we spend our time finger-pointing and being punitive. Our state leaders continue to starve education, bully educators and then express disappointment when the results are not what they could be.

I'm about to go full time into the cattle business. I will be feeding my cattle with the confidence that supporting the cow will produce a profit.

I hope Oklahomans recognize it's feeding time. Starving education to try to make it successful only produces generations who themselves will be starved. And they will be starving for the basic rights to opportunities of success, quality of life and happiness that every person is entitled to and that a quality education provides.

Gary Rudick is the retiring chief of the Tulsa Public Schools campus police department.