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As policymakers prepare for the 2017 legislative session, it is likely that they will be looking for areas where cost savings can be found. I would suggest starting with the two largest items in the state budget.

“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.

The tragic deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, and then the horrific ambush murders of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, drew the usual statements from President Barack Obama. Yes, it was awful, he allowed, but then he engaged in divisive rhetoric about gun control and race.

OKLAHOMA CITY – Proponents of school choice earned a qualified victory on July 18 when a compromise plan offered by newly-hired superintendent Aurora Lora was accepted to expand the KIPP Reach College Preparatory School in Oklahoma City.

Every budget crunch brings another call for consolidation of Oklahoma school districts and the pushback from rural residents and their legislators. We can expect more of the same in next year’s legislative session. It is difficult for those in urban areas, especially when they look at the high per-pupil expenditures necessary to keep some rural schools open, to understand the ire that is raised in rural communities by the “consolidation” movement.

I’m old enough to remember when the “watchdog press” prided itself on keeping an eye on government. So where are the watchdogs when it comes to reporting on the government’s education systems?

OKLAHOMA CITY – OCPA Impact, an advocacy organization associated with the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, filed a challenge to the gist of State Question 779, commonly known as the Boren Penny Tax.

American consumers have come to expect lower cost and higher quality (think of that miraculous-yet-affordable supercomputer you’re carrying around in your pocket). This week the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the 1889 Institute, and former Gov. Frank Keating kicked off a conversation meant to bring the lower cost/higher quality dynamic to one place it is conspicuously lacking – higher education.