“Vote to let us destroy publicly owned schools (that allow access to all) so that we can skim profits from educating only the most well-adjusted students at taxpayer expense.”
How do you think that would go over? It wouldn’t. That’s why we hear a much more subtle, carefully staged argument.
The first day of classes for Oklahoma City Public Schools was Monday, August 3rd.
That district is the biggest and most criticized school district in the state. It is also the most ethnically and economically diverse. School “reform” advocates love to show just how bad they think it is in OKCPS. The A-F school grading system is meant to show that.
It is up to the rest of us to remind “reform” folks of reality, which is more complex than their portrayals.
And it is not just out of charity that we move in close to stop the shaming and advocate for OKCPS. Many of the problems with economic and cultural diversity present in the core of the OKC metro are coming to our communities eventually.
Continue reading No More Shaming — Stand Up For OKC Public Schools!
For profit charter school corporations have proved in several states that they aren’t likely to abandon their crusade to turn the public good of public education into a private investment opportunity.
This is fair warning: They won’t quit in Oklahoma, either.
And leading up to the November elections this year, voters in Oklahoma have every right to ask for answers about each candidate’s policies toward for-profit charters, how transparent they should be, and who will control those charters.
Continue reading For-Profit Charters Still A Live Idea — Let’s Demand Answers from Candidates
Earlier this week I featured Dr. Freda Deskin’s answers to questions that I suggested in two earlier posts: The 3 Education Questions We Should Ask all Candidates for Public Office; and, Necessary Questions for Oklahoma Supt of Schools Candidates .
She is in a Democratic Party Primary Runoff race with Dr. John Cox. 
He has responded to those same questions, and has some interesting answers. Some of those answers diverge significantly from Deskin’s.
I have included all questions from each blog post for readability. These are Cox’s answers as sent to me on Thursday, July 24th.
Continue reading Cox Responds to Questions About Charters, ALEC, Campaign Finances
Some people just won’t go away when they should.
Barresi has revealed a lot in her recent self-righteous comments that I included in the post Barresi Misses the Fact that She Is the “Power”. Those comments show us that she believes she and her allies are the righteous few – misunderstood geniuses – fighting against a stupid, corrupt rabble of teachers unions and administrators who are just trying to defend their turf at all costs.
Of course, she never seems to believe that her opponents may be the ones who are right.
Certainly too many education “reformers” fall into this category. While talking a “disruptive innovation” game, they bring only disruption and not for the sake of innovation.
Instead, it’s about the money.
Continue reading Barresi as Fallin’s Education Secretary — That OK With You?
Right on cue, she delivered.It’s just what we were expecting. Amazing.
There was a larger-than-usual crow
d gathered at the Oklahoma State Board of Education meeting yesterday, June 26th. The room filled completely although the location had been changed to a huge Oklahoma Senate hearing room to accommodate it.
After some formalities, Supt. Barresi started off saying that she wanted to first make “some brief comments”. Here is about the first 2 1/2 minutes of those opening remarks. If you can’t take even that much, just stop it and keep reading.
Continue reading Barresi Misses the Fact That She Is the “Power”
The election of Janet Barresi was the culmination of many years of planning and working by the Far Right in Oklahoma to reduce and eliminate the power of a large group of intelligent people who just ask too many pesky questions: teachers.
Contempt for teachers, administrators, and inexplicably the students, has been at the bottom of most of her administration’s missteps. It was the main reason she was elected in the first place. Now it’s time to remove her because of that contempt.
Continue reading June 24th Matters – So Does the Plan for the Next Day and Following!
There are 3 education questions that, when answered or dodged, tell all about a politician’s stance on public education:
Continue reading The 3 Education Questions We Should Ask All Candidates for Public Office
Our children deserve our political protection as much as our face-to-face protection in the classroom.
It is time for Oklahoma teachers in even larger numbers to claim what we know from what we see every day in the classroom. That view is very different from that of lawyer legislators or corporate chieftains.
Continue reading Teachers: Oklahoma Children Deserve Political Protection, Too
Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.
— Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of Britain’s House of Commons
One of the biggest issues in my deep red state of Oklahoma is that liberals and progressives very often shrink from the larger, harder debate about how government should be conducted for The People. You know, us.
The recent rise of nation-wide interest in progressive thought comes from a frustration with earlier generations of liberals who maybe tried, but failed to effectively engage in the debate for those who need a voice.
We have seen a transformation over time with President Obama as he tried to take the old liberal approach of reaching out to the other side. It didn’t work. It won’t.
He is just now starting to understand that this is a debate and a contest of ideas. And he seems to understand that unless we advocate for our ideas, no one else will. They won’t be understood or heard.
I wish he had known that in 2009.
We have seen that here in Oklahoma, where one year after another over the last 30, liberals seemed tongue-tied when opposing corporate-sponsored Republicans. Corporate tools who call themselves “conservative” rode into office on the most bogus of claims about
What old-style liberals found out the hard way was that strategies for trying to negotiate with conservatives so that “we all would get along” and so that “we can all be winners” didn’t work then. It doesn’t work now. All it does is buy time for the right wing, whose approach is always – and I do mean always – “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.”
Most importantly, that strategy conceded too many points that the public needed them to stand up for. Without knowing the other options for thinking through ideas, the bulk of uninformed voters had an “oh well” approach or showed angry resignation against those politicians who essentially betrayed the cause. Perhaps they never understood that it was a cause in the first place.
In politics, there really is no such thing as “business as usual”. Either you are winning the debate or you are losing it.
The debate itself is important. Period.
What I mean by “the debate” is engaging the prevailing mindset and the prevailing party with the determination to not allow a temporary campaign defeat to stop the engagement at the level of ideas.
What we know from history is that groups that have started out small in a democracy can become larger and more powerful by engaging in the debate over time and insisting upon being heard.
Conservatives in general seem to understand this. So do their politicians, either intuitively or because big money donors actually listen to their think-tankers and force their puppets to listen, too.
The value of the debate itself is that more people become informed by the opposition. Most importantly, they are informed from a different viewpoint than the prevailing narrative that slick corporately-funded hired guns deliver to a lazy, compliant media.
Modern-day progressives must push to win in the debate of ideas. It does not serve our concepts or the people who need us to advocate for them if we don’t.
Will we always win? Of course not.
Will we ever win if we never try to win? Of course not.
That’s why the debate of ideas has so much value in and of itself. And debating to win in the arena of public politics and policy is critical.
In earlier posts I have suggested ways in which progressives in this red state can be a part of the debate. It is time to be a bigger part of the debate in this red state.
In the post “Five Ways That You Can Have a Progressive Influence In Your Red State” I showed how you really can have positive, progressive effects on the process in a red state where the dominant Republican Party wants you to believe that you should not be wasting your time.
And since that message is often a real bummer to progressives, I wrote the post “Five Ways for Liberals to Overcome Those Red State Blues”, and posted “Decide that the Ugly Side of Oklahoma Will Note Defeat Us.”
Since pastors are often co-opted by right-wingers in their own congregations in red states, I tried to give progressives some ideas about how to counterbalance that process in this post: “Three Ways to Sway Your Red-state Pastor From Blessing the Radical Right”.
Here are some very good examples of how liberals and progressives can be the fierce, loyal opposition to conservative control of government.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/n/neil_kinnock.html#60iKRfGGqFpyc1O4.99
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/n/neil_kinnock.html#60iKRfGGqFpyc1O4.99
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/n/neil_kinnock.html#60iKRfGGqFpyc1O4.99
Reps Inman and Pittman speak to the 2014 Education Rally at the Oklahoma Capitol (video is trimmed to start at 9:21 mark)
From Great Britain: Margaret Thatcher – Tory (conservative) Prime Minister Vs. Neil Kinnock – Labor Leader, on Education
From Great Britain: The first ever House of Commons prime minister’s question time that was televised.
My post tomorrow will focus on how public school teachers, generally known for their cultural conservatism, and especially in “red” states like Oklahoma, are a stand-out group who are more progressive than people think because of what they see every day in the classroom.
“Enough is enough. Somebody stand up! Get up!” — Chuck D and Public Enemy