Tulsa providing 'inclusive and stigma-free' sex education

"In sharp contrast with the sketchy Reagan-era Falwellian Scare Tactics brand sex-ed curriculum," one writer notes, rest assured that Tulsa Public Schools is providing "inclusive" and "stigma-free" sex education to 7th graders.

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Biden no excuse for inaction in Oklahoma

Joe Biden and OEA president Alicia Priest

[Guest post by Jonathan Small]

Joe Biden’s inauguration means Democrats now hold narrow control of Congress and the presidency. But it does not mean advocates for freedom have no way to impact policy.

Even when the far-left holds power in Washington, the states remain the place where innovative policy advances are most likely to occur. That should prompt advocates for freedom to redouble their efforts here in Oklahoma.

This would be true at the start of any presidential term, but it’s especially important this year as the disruption created by COVID-19 and the gaping flaws it exposed in our state systems have created public demand for change.

For example, the lack of consistent, quality, in-person instruction in public schools has fueled strong demand for parent choice in education. That will bolster Oklahomans’ influence in urging lawmakers to offer all parents a “ticket out.” Whether a parent wants a new option because their child’s geographically assigned school is little more than a supplier of ultra-“woke” indoctrination, isn’t sufficiently academically preparing kids, or because it will not reopen due to teacher union opposition, all parents deserve options.

The path to reclaiming power at the federal government lies in proving the superiority of your ideas at the levels of government you do control. That means advocates for freedom who are worried about what happens in Washington, D.C., need to be just as concerned about what’s happening “under the dome” in Oklahoma City.

7-year-old special-needs student left on bus alone

 FOX 23 has the story.

Oklahoma school district says diploma is no indicator of learning

"In a court filing, an Oklahoma school district has declared the issuance of either a passing grade or a high school diploma is not—'and never has been'—an indicator that a student mastered state-mandated core courses," Ray Carter reports.

Child allegedly punished with 'restraints' in Choctaw-Nicoma Park district

 KFOR has the story.

Ghost-student farce now too big to ignore

[Guest post by Jonathan Small]

Status-quo defenders insist waste, fraud, and mismanagement in state government are overhyped. Then how do they explain Oklahoma schools being paid to educate more than 55,000 “ghost students”?

Ghost-student funding has been in place for years, but COVID-19 has put it on steroids.

Oklahoma law distributes state funding based on several factors, one of which is “the highest weighted average daily membership for the school district of the two (2) preceding school years.”

Put in plain English, that means a school can be paid for students who attended two years ago but are no longer there. Thus, even amidst a significant enrollment decline, districts receive huge sums for “teaching” nonexistent “ghost” students.

This funding farce is now too big to ignore. Due to COVID-19 and several districts’ refusal to provide full-time, in-person instruction, there has been a mass exodus to alternatives, including credible online providers such as Epic, other districts, private schools, and homeschooling.

Newly released enrollment figures show Oklahoma schools can now claim more than 55,000 ghost students this year via the use of old enrollment numbers. If ghost students were confined to a single school district, it would be larger than any brick-and-mortar district in Oklahoma—by far.

The financial consequences of ghost-student funding are not minor. The state-aid figure for 2021 is $3,533.17 per student, so those 55,000-plus ghost students translate into at least $195.1 million in misallocated funding.

Just 22 districts account for more than 55 percent of ghost students. Oklahoma City has nearly 6,800 ghost students while Tulsa has 3,291. Those ghost-student payments are on top of money both districts receive for other students who have not received full-time, in-person instruction this year. Because of that poor service, the share of high-school students flunking at least one class in Oklahoma City has surged to 59 percent, and the failure rate in other districts has doubled or tripled, according to KWTV.

Ghost-student funding particularly harms rural schools that have remained open. Those schools have been teaching children, and often steer clear of the political indoctrination seen elsewhere, yet they are being shorted financially for doing their job as other school officials play political games.

One reason school leaders in urban areas have been so indifferent to the needs of families is that ghost-student funding shields them from the full financial consequences of their shutdown decisions.

Schools need to be held accountable for performance. Tying funding to current-year enrollment can be part of that process, although the best reform would be to let tax funding follow the child and empower parents to independently pick any school, whether public or private.

Those of us in the private sector don’t get paid unless we provide promised goods or services to customers. There’s no reason schools should be any different.

Kamala-proofing Oklahoma’s children

[Guest post by Jonathan Small] 

If Oklahoma wants to stop the socialist and anti-American offensive being waged by politicians like Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi, Oklahomans must act to “Kamala-proof” what is being taught to Oklahoma kids.

Consider the dangerous rules adopted by the Democrat leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives. Under those rules, House legislation will no longer refer to a father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, nephew, niece, husband, wife, etc. Instead, legislation will use phrases such as parent, child, sibling, parent-in-law, and child-in-law.

The new House rules even ban the use of the words “himself or herself” and instead mandate that “themself” will be used instead.

Democrats don’t want to “risk” referring to someone as male who wants to be referred to as female, regardless of biological reality. In fact, U.S. House Democrats and some Oklahoma Democrats are trying to force boys and men in girls’ bathrooms and males in girls’ sports.

To her credit, Oklahoma Congressman Stephanie Bice, a mother of two girls who represents Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District, saw right through the scheme and voted against this insane rule.

But don’t think this danger is confined to D.C. Indeed, Democrats in the Oklahoma House of Representatives tried a similar scheme this week and tried to bring a version of Pelosi’s rules to Oklahoma.

Where does such dangerous, anti-science, and destructive thinking start? It starts in big unions like the Oklahoma Education Association, which opposed Congressman Bice, endorsed far-left Democrat Kendra Horn as well as team Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and is proliferated in urban K-12 public schools and “higher-education.”

The assault on uplifting American values and our kids must be stopped. The best way to stop it is to give parents and students a lifeline out of environments that are trying to force socialist, anti-American views overtly and subversively on our kids.

Oklahoma Republican lawmakers can and should address this threat in this year's legislative session. They can do this by giving parents control over where their kids are required to go to school. 

Lawmakers can give any parent who wants it the option to change their child’s school to the public or private school of their choice by letting their tax dollars assigned for their child’s education follow the child to the school of the parent’s choice. We allow this kind of choice and parental control in many other government programs. It’s time for that to apply in K-12.

If we want to stop the spread of anti-American and anti-Oklahoma values in Oklahoma by the socialists in D.C., if we want to prevent rural Oklahoma from having to subsidize and be negatively impacted by the indoctrinating insanity going on in public education in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, it’s time to give control to parents and to Kamala-proof Oklahoma.

Carnegie teacher charged with second-degree rape

Mike Seals has the story.

Moyers Public Schools coach accused of molesting child

 KFOR has the story.

Why American children stopped believing in God

"The data seem to show that the main driver of secularization has been the acceleration of government spending on education and government control over the curricular content taught in schools."

Washington smear tactics in Oklahoma

[Guest post by Jonathan Small]

Smear tactics are nothing new in Washington, D.C., but those tactics are now being used in Oklahoma.

During U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, critics portrayed him as a drunk and a rapist. Fortunately, lawmakers saw through those attacks and confirmed Kavanaugh.

Sadly, similar character assassination, recently carried out in Oklahoma, sidelined a qualified nominee for the State Board of Education.

This sad episode began when Gov. Kevin Stitt recently removed Kurt Bollenbach from the State Board of Education and named Melissa Crabtree of Enid as his replacement.

Bollenbach was clearly out of step with conservatives and the governor who appointed him. His removal was justified because Bollenbach vocally supported efforts to bar Christian schools from serving children who receive scholarships through a state program. The regulations cited to justify that action were illegally adopted, as an opinion by Attorney General Mike Hunter soon made clear. It was obvious new blood was needed on the board.

In response, school-choice opponents launched a smear campaign against Crabtree. Sadly, they succeeded, and she withdrew from consideration.

As with Kavanaugh, this debate was not over qualifications, but over whether conservatives in leadership would advance the conservative policies endorsed by voters.

Crabtree’s qualifications cannot be denied. She taught special education in public schools for four years, meaning she may have more classroom experience than the current state superintendent. Crabtree also taught the parents of children with disabilities and served at-risk families of children with special needs for more than a decade through her church.

What part of “longtime educator with expertise in special education” sounds like a bad fit for the State Board of Education?

Crabtree’s critics objected that she homeschooled her own children. Many other Oklahomans have done the same. (I’m proud to say I was homeschooled as a child, yet here I am today, a licensed CPA.) Polling shows thousands more would homeschool if it were financially feasible. And last spring’s COVID-19 shutdown left many Oklahomans with a new appreciation for those who successfully homeschool.

Crabtree’s critics objected that she opposed mask mandates. That’s not out of line with many Oklahomans, and the science behind mask mandates is not scientifically rigorous.

Critics said Crabtree touted zinc and Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19. A lot of Oklahoma doctors and pharmacists quietly do the same.

Taken as a whole, the attacks on Crabtree—like those lobbed against Kavanaugh—were clearly intended only to prevent conservatives from serving in state government.

Many citizens complain Oklahoma has remained mired in the bottom of education rankings for decades. But we can’t expect results to change if the only government-education officials deemed “acceptable” to serve are those unwilling or unable to think outside the box and do things differently.

Inaction on parental choice is impossible

An overwhelming 74% of GOP primary voters believe the money should follow the child.

[Guest post by Jonathan Small]

Oklahoma parents are demanding parental school choice and lawmakers are paying attention.

A new poll by Cole Hargrave Snodgrass & Associates (CHS) found 61% of Oklahoma voters support school choice, which was defined as “the right to use tax dollars raised for their child’s education to send their child to the school of their choice whether it is public, private, online, or charter.”

Among Republicans primary voters, support reached 74%. Support was consistent in both urban and rural areas.

That strong support is no surprise, especially considering ongoing public-school closures. Those closures are wreaking havoc and destroying opportunity. This is evident in increased failure rates in academic courses and significant learning loss.

In August, an official from Tulsa Public Schools even told the State Board of Education that district officials expected “that our least-reached students will have lost approximately a year more learning than would have otherwise been the case because of the COVID-related interruptions. So if I’m a student who might otherwise have been predicted to be two years below grade level, we’re anticipating that that student will now be approximately three years below grade level.”

Some school officials now want to end state testing, ensuring parents will not be notified of a child’s learning loss.

Oklahomans’ support for school choice is not tied solely to COVID-19. Polls have found strong support for parental school choice repeatedly since 2014. And Oklahoma’s political leaders have embraced it.

In January 2019, House Speaker Charles McCall said lawmakers “must put parents back in charge of their children’s education and give underprivileged families more options and more opportunity to thrive.”

This year Senate President Pro Tempore Greg Treat endorsed raising the cap on Oklahoma’s tax-credit scholarship program, saying, “Where there are kids that lack opportunity, my heart pains for them. We need to make sure they are not forgotten.”

Gov. Kevin Stitt endorsed school choice in his 2020 State of the State speech, saying, “Let’s work together to make sure all students at all schools have access to an innovative, enriching curriculum, regardless of ZIP code.”

Yet, despite public support and the backing of legislative leaders, the bidding was done of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, socialist Bernie Sanders, and the OEA/NEA union, which heavily opposed both school choice and President Trump and instead backed Biden and Kendra Horn.

Thankfully for the most vulnerable, there is now no reason for delay. In addition to public support, GOP lawmakers also have the numbers on their side. Republicans now hold 82 of the 101 seats in the Oklahoma House of Representatives, and 39 of the 48 seats in the Oklahoma Senate. It takes only 51 and 25 votes, respectively, to pass a bill in each chamber.

With this favorable environment for saving the lives and livelihoods of the most vulnerable through significant expansions of parental school choice, inaction will be impossible.