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There are a number of good reasons to support creation of an Education Savings Account program that provides Oklahoma parents a portion of their child’s per-pupil allocation for education to use for public or private school tuition and other services. But one of the best reasons is that no one school can meet the needs of all children who live in the local area, regardless of the best efforts of those who work in that school.

The Oklahoma Health Care Authority (OHCA) has proposed a plan to “rebalance” Medicaid eligibility in the Sooner State. But this “rebalancing” is really just an Obamacare expansion by another name. The plan has three major components: (1) increasing taxes to raise reimbursement rates for traditional Medicaid, (2) shifting enrollees (women and children) out of Medicaid in 2019, and (3) expanding Medicaid eligibility to a new class of able-bodied adults under Obamacare.

If you’re white you shouldn’t sing a Rihanna song. That’s what a white student in a human relations theory class at the University of Oklahoma was told during a recent lesson on “privilege” and “microaggressions.”

In the Tulsa World this last weekend, OCPA’s Brandon Dutcher wrote about the fiscal impacts of educational choice programs, pointing to the cost savings happening for choice programs at the higher-ed level.

Oklahoma has become known for a number of efforts recently to implement policy with the intention of promoting freedom in the delivery and payment of health care. Oklahoma lawmakers have passed laws that protect the ability of medical providers and their patients to negotiate with each other and set up payment arrangements that benefit both parties.

Recently, the Oklahoma Health Care Authority announced another scheme to entangle Oklahoma with the Medicaid expansion proposed in the federal Affordable Care Act. The OHCA has attempted this a few times, and policymakers have wisely rejected the various proposals, refusing to repeat the mistakes of history.

University of Oklahoma President David Boren is promoting a sales tax increase to finance a $5,000 pay raise for all teachers and $125 million for higher education.

I recently sat with my son to watch a television program he had accessed through Netflix about the sport of boxing. A significant portion of the program was devoted to the sociology of the sport. It was pointed out that as you look at the best fighters over the decades, their backgrounds tell a story of which ethnicities were struggling in America at the time. Although it was not at all a focus of the program, an interesting and tragic insight into the impact of professional licensing struck me as I watched.

One of the oldest puzzles in the school choice movement is why religious communities and leaders aren’t more interested in school choice. The government school monopoly promotes a stereotype that school choice is promoted by religious fanatics, but in fact religious leaders have been underrepresented in the school choice coalition. The most likely reason is a fear of compromising the independence of religious schools—but experience doesn’t support those fears, and I hope the time has come to get past them.