Articles

Overwhelming majorities of public school websites reviewed by OCPA’s Center for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) during a recent analysis were out of compliance with the state’s School District Transparency Act.

Most Oklahoma school districts are not in compliance with the statutory requirement to publish credit-card statements on the school district’s website—including some districts with recent high-profile instances of financial misconduct.

It’s back-to-school time, which means that budget-conscious parents – spending money on school clothes, backpacks, and more – are setting priorities. Education officials should do the same.

One portion of an Oklahoma law dealing with financial disclosure requires Oklahoma school districts to publish district credit card statements for public review on the district’s website. Though some schools are in full compliance, a sampling of 10 percent of the school district websites suggests that the overwhelming majority are not.

An honest reading of the public-opinion survey data over the past couple of years shows that Oklahomans favor educational choice. But what if a pollster explored the question again now, in this climate dominated by daily news stories in which the public education community (despite $8.7 billion in annual revenue) tells us the sky is falling?

Oklahomans who have been told repeatedly that Oklahoma’s schools are underfunded may be very surprised to learn that the schools in fact have “savings accounts” that are full of cash sitting idle.

The condition of take-home pay for teachers in Oklahoma is dire. If one doesn’t believe so, all a person has to do is look at recent polling that shows 97 percent of Oklahomans believe teachers deserve a raise.

“Oklahoma is 49th [or somewhere near there] in education spending.” You could substitute any number of state names into the sentence above, because the identical statement, I guarantee, has been made, likely within the last year, in probably 10 states. I’ve lived in three states—Texas, Arizona, and Oklahoma—and I’ve heard that very statement in all three. And if the statement is not made specifically about education, it is made about spending in general, by education-establishment types, in an effort to imply that state spending is low on everything, including education.

The Obama administration is bullying the nation’s public schools into allowing students who claim they are transgender to use the bathroom and locker room facilities of the opposite sex. This should be an object lesson to naive education reformers who want greater federal power over schools in order to push higher standards. But it is also something much bigger—it is helping people see that a government school monopoly is unsustainable in a pluralistic society.

For the parents of thousands of Oklahoma high school seniors, graduation 2016 was a time for pride and satisfaction. But for the six graduates of a special private school in Oklahoma City, that ceremony was literally a symbol of life triumphing over death from drug or alcohol addiction.