AG says OKC school district took the money but failed to serve mentally ill students

The fact that Oklahoma City school district officials "apparently turned a blind eye to children with severe mental illness and failed to provide those children an education is inexcusable," The Oklahoman editorializes today. "The requirement that public schools serve all local students is an obligation, not just a rhetorical crutch used to dismiss academic struggles."

Put parents first

AEI's Gerard Robinson is out with a new survey of parental rights and responsibilities in school choice laws.

How can parents know?

I've mentioned before that the Oklahoma League of Women Voters is a liberal organization with a bias toward the government school monopoly. It looks like the Florida chapter is no better. "Last week," Jason Bedrick writes, "the president and education chair of the Florida State League of Women Voters (LWV)—which is a party to the Florida teacher union’s lawsuit against the state’s tax-credit scholarship program—argued that some parents are just not well-informed enough to choose a school for their own kids."

Teacher certification guarantees nothing

"Traditionally certified teachers are no more or less effective, on average, than alternatively certified or even uncertified teachers," Jason Bedrick reminds us.

$9,724 per student

That's what Oklahoma taxpayers are spending, according to data from the Oklahoma Cost Accounting System. That's $243,100 for a classroom of 25 students. 

Clearly the money isn't going to the teacher.

Pauls Valley teacher arrested on abuse charges

KXII-TV has the story.

Police: Owasso teacher took 'upskirt' photos of 14-year-old girl

The News on 6 has the story.

Oologah-Talala teacher accused of sex with student

The Tulsa World has the story.

The bathroom battle is already lost

"President Barack Obama intends to force every public school to permit transgender students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that match their chosen gender identity even if this choice differs from their present physical gender," law professor Andrew Spiropoulos writes.

Many states, including Oklahoma, argue that the federal civil rights laws the president is purporting to enforce do not address the difficult issues concerning transgender individuals. 

The states, as usual, are right on the law. And the president, as usual, will get his way. Why? Because school districts know if they refuse to obey the mandates, the administration will cut off their federal education funding. Speeches about the rule of law may move emotion, but it is cash that moves action. 

This battle is already lost – the feds rule. But it is important to understand when it was lost. The states weren’t defeated when President Obama was elected. They lost their autonomy when they decided to take the federal money. Many people don’t know that the Constitution prohibits the federal government from forcing states to implement federal policy. But it does allow Washington to purchase state compliance. 

Therefore, the time to fight federal overreach is not when the federal Don Corleone comes to collect his debt. You can only protect your sovereignty, self-respect, and policy autonomy by spurning the seductive offer of federal cash. Once you’ve sold out, there’s no turning back.

Meanwhile, author and pastor Douglas Wilson asks: "If your kid is still in the government schools after this fiasco, my only question at this point is, what is it going to take? Are you going to hang on to the salt and light argument until mandatory sex reassignment surgeries are being performed by sophomores in high school biology classes, using plastic picnic ware? And their reason for the plastic surgical instruments was because you and your hateful kind voted against the last levy?"

More evidence: school choice works

"A vast body of research shows educational choice programs improve academic outcomes for students and schools, saves taxpayers money, reduces segregation in schools and improves students’ civic values," Greg Forster writes. "The fourth edition of A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on School Choice brings together 100 empirical studies on each of these essential questions in one comprehensive report."

The national teacher shortage claim ...

... is still short on data, writes former classroom teacher Larry Sand.

School choice boosts test scores

M. Danish Shakeel, Kaitlin Anderson, and Patrick J. Wolf have released "a meta-analysis of 19 'gold standard' experimental evaluations of the test-score effects of private school choice programs around the world," Wolf writes.

The sum of the reliable evidence indicates that, on average, private school choice increases the reading scores of choice users by about 0.27 standard deviations and their math scores by 0.15 standard deviations. These are highly statistically significant, educationally meaningful achievement gains of several months of additional learning from school choice. The achievement benefits of private school choice appear to be somewhat larger for programs in developing countries than for those in the U.S. Publicly-funded programs produce larger test-score gains than privately-funded ones.

The transgender straw that broke the camel’s back

It's time to "give every family the option to spend their share of tax dollars at the school of their choice," David French writes.