Perspective - November 2016

NOVEMBER 2016

OKLAHOMA COUNCIL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

WHY GOVERNMENT GOVERNS ITS SCHOOLS WRONG (AND HOW TO FIX IT) ALSO IN THIS ISSUE The Lesser Prairie Chicken and the Constitution When Government Officials View Us as Children Revitalizing Oklahoma’s Rural Communities Survey: Most Oklahomans See Educational Choice as a Moral Right

In Case You Missed It The Oklahoma Supreme Court, which continues to gut workers’ compensation reforms, seems to have forgotten the history lesson that a court’s credibility as a legitimate legal tribunal is shattered when judges simply make policy.

OCPA president Jonathan Small says Dodd-Frank regulations are placing serious burdens on community banks and credit unions in Oklahoma. bit.ly/2dAngRA

In a recent presentation at OCPA, Gene Veith, a longtime college professor and a former Salvatori Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, discussed the resurgence of classical education. bit.ly/2dannoJ

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OCPA president Jonathan Small, who has worked in both Democratic and Republican gubernatorial administrations, sheds some additional light on the Boren tax increase.

As Oklahoma’s higher education chancellor hits the road to lobby for more government spending, budget-conscious lawmakers must ask him some hard questions.

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Should we add more able-bodied adults to the welfare rolls? With the fight over Obamacare Medicaid expansion set to return in 2017, OCPA president Jonathan Small draws inspiration from one of Oklahoma’s first two U.S. senators.

Thanks to the efforts of OCPA and some very capable lawmakers, many Oklahoma teachers and state employees are now seeing significant savings in out-of-pocket medical charges. bit.ly/2cCaOP8

PERSPECTIVE

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Citing OCPA research on Oklahoma’s higher education spending increases, The Oklahoman takes note of a former governor (now a university president) who, by cutting costs and freezing tuition, is reinventing the American university. bit.ly/2daEFjT

Citing budget constraints, one small Oklahoma school district is going to a four-day school week—while also building a $1.5 million press box.

Brandon Dutcher, Editor Alex Jones , Art Director

OCPA Trustees

OCPA Researchers

Blake Arnold • Oklahoma City

David Madigan • Lawton

Perspective is published monthly by the

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Lew Meibergen • Enid

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David R. Brown, M.D. • Oklahoma City

Larry Parman • Oklahoma City

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David Burrage • Atoka

Bill Price • Oklahoma City

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Michael Carnuccio • Yukon

Patrick T. Rooney • Oklahoma City

in Perspective are those of the author,

Tom Coburn, M.D. • Tulsa

Melissa Sandefer • Norman

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Paul A. Cox • Oklahoma City

Thomas Schroedter • Tulsa

representing any official position of

William Flanagan • Claremore

Greg Slavonic • Oklahoma City

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Ann Felton Gilliland • Oklahoma City

Robert Sullivan • Tulsa

John T. Hanes • Oklahoma City

William E. Warnock, Jr. • Tulsa

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Gene Love • Lawton

Steven J. Anderson, MBA, CPA Research Fellow Tina Dzurisin Research Associate Trent England, J.D. Dr. David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow for the Advancement of Liberty Jayson Lusk, Ph.D. Samuel Roberts Noble Distinguished Fellow J. Scott Moody, M.A. Research Fellow Andrew C. Spiropoulos, J.D. Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow Wendy P. Warcholik, Ph.D. Research Fellow

The Lesser Prairie Chicken and the Constitution

By Trent England

What is the best way to protect the environment in Oklahoma?

Is it through local partnerships, where landowners, local industries, and state or local government work together? Or should we surrender power to Washington, D.C., letting people who may have never set foot in Oklahoma tell us what to do?

This is the kind of practical question the Constitution is all about.

Even the simplest children’s game must have a set of rules. As the games get more complicated, or the stakes go up, the rules become even more important. In the old West, a disagreement about the rules of a poker game might lead to a gunfight.

The Constitution provides the rules for our national politics and union of states. It answers basic questions. How much power should politicians have? How should that power be divided up? And then where should the different powers be located—what decisions do we want made in Washington, D.C., and what should we get to decide right here?

The short answer is that Washington, D.C. is supposed to take care of things where all Americans share basically the same interests, like national security, our system of money, and trade that crosses state or national boundaries. After the Civil War, the Constitution was amended to add federal power to protect citizens’ most basic rights.

Everything else is left to the states, either to regulate, to pass down to local governments, or to keep government out of altogether. This makes sense, especially where policy choices are mostly about priorities and tradeoffs. How much should we tax and what should go to roads versus police versus schools?

People have different opinions; communities have different needs. Why force a top-down solution guaranteed to make a lot of people unhappy?

This structure of states also offers a path to political compromise. If Vermont wants government-run health care, why should Oklahomans care so long as it stays in Vermont? And if Oklahoma wants lower taxes and less regulation, why should Vermonters have a say in that?

When we push our policy choices up to the federal level, we create a lot more losers. More Americans wind up unhappy and even distrustful of government altogether. When we return power to the states, we allow for more diversity. We can let Vermont be itself so long as they let Oklahoma alone, and a lot more Americans get what they want.

The recent flap over the lesser prairie chicken is a good example. Faced with declining populations of the bird, local leaders in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and Colorado developed a conservation plan covering millions of acres of habitat and spending millions of dollars. It worked, and bird populations have been increasing for several years. Yet it took a lawsuit to stop Washington, D.C., from stepping in to take control anyway.

As Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump face off in November, the Constitution points the way out of at least some of the rancor.

There would be no need to fight over whether the whole country needs to turn into Vermont or California or Oklahoma if we just followed our own rules—the Constitution—and left most of these decisions to be made in our states and local communities.

Trent England serves as Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, where he also is the David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow for the Advancement of Liberty and directs the Center for the Constitution & Freedom and the Save Our States project. He also hosts a radio program, The Trent England Show, from 7 to 9 a.m. every weekday on Oklahoma’s AM 1640, “The Eagle.”

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WHY GOVERNMENT GOVERNS ITS SCHOOLS WRONG (AND HOW TO FIX IT) Oklahoma policymakers should take a hard look at school board elections, building-level autonomy, principal training, transparency measures, and other public-school governance reforms.

By Greg Forster

For two generations, “accountability” has been the rallying cry of the education reform movement. Tensions are now increasing in the movement between advocates of decentralized, choicebased accountability and advocates of centralized, test-based accountability. However, those are not the only two ways to hold schools accountable. The movement should also take a hard look at governance reform.

Governance reform means changing the system’s internal decision-making and authority structures. Parental choices and academic standards enforced by tests are both ways of placing external pressure on the system to perform. We can also do a lot of good by changing the shape of the system’s own workings. School board elections, building-level autonomy, principal training, transparency measures, and breaking up our bloated school district system are all places where there’s a lot of potential improvement.

As a champion of school choice, I feel weird writing an article about how to run the government school monopoly better.

But of course there’s no reason we can’t pursue both choice and governance reform. In fact, the two would be mutually reinforcing—the external pressure to improve created by choice would incentivize and legitimize internal reforms.

Besides, there’s good precedent for this kind of thing. There’s

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a notorious section in Aristotle’s Politics in which he lays out his advice for tyrants—how to be a more effective tyrant, how to keep your iron grip on power. Political philosophy professors generally prefer to keep it hushed up; we don’t mind that stuff from charming rogues like Machiavelli, but Aristotle is supposed to be a classier kind of guy. However, Aristotle wrote about tyranny because he wanted us to understand its nature (“no one becomes a tyrant to keep warm”), and we should be glad he did.

Probably the biggest potential area for improvement through governance reform is local school district elections. While states and the federal government have taken an increasing role in education in the last generation, the large majority of real decision-making is still local. And the most effective change would be a change at the top of the school districts—school boards and top district officials—from which the effects of reform would have the greatest reach.

One of the most important things to understand about democracy is that highly concentrated interests are generally more powerful than widely diffused interests. That’s why there are so many government boondoggles; the corn farmers get millions of dollars from ethanol subsidies while you and I each lose only a few bucks, so they have much more incentive to protect the subsidies than we have to fight them. This also

explains why politicians pay so much attention to issues that most voters don’t care about—those who do care about those issues care about them a whole lot, so they invest time and money in getting political attention.

This is why school districts are so widely dysfunctional.

Their boards and top offices have been colonized by allies of the teacher and staff unions and other special interests. Parents do care a lot about schools, but the people and organizations who make their living from education care about them even more intensely.

Still, every 10 to 15 years or so, parents get riled up enough about education to pass major reforms even over the resistance of hardened special interests. While school choice remains the most promising educational reform, in places where choice is less likely to succeed reformers can look at ways to dislodge school boards and district officials from special-interest control.

While the details may look different in every district, the key reform would be to hold all school district elections at the same time as presidential elections, so people who show up to vote for president will also participate. Typically, school district elections are held in the spring, held in odd years—held just about any time other than the normal election season. That’s so the educational special interest groups will show up to vote, and no one else.

There is also a lot we can do to increase what is called “building-level” autonomy. That’s the authority of principals to run their own schools. Principals are extensively tied down by regulations, by union contract requirements, and by informal but very strong expectations in the culture of the system that principals don’t have the power to change much. We expect these people to deliver better schools but we don’t do much to increase their power to deliver.

Those who are familiar with the way leaders run other kinds of organizations—whether for-profit, non-profit, or even branches of government—are often shocked when they discover how handcuffed school principals are. I’ll never forget the state legislative hearing in which I heard a principal asked why she left her position running a regular public school to run a charter school. “Because now I can hold a meeting,” she said, exasperated.

While we’re talking about principals, another promising idea would be alternative principal certification. Research suggests that the dominant system for training teachers is essentially worthless; teachers with alternative certification and even no certification produce students with similar outcomes. Yet the special interests howl in protest at any hint of expanding alternative paths into the profession—because the dominant teacher training model puts money in their pockets. (Remember that the next time you hear them wail about “teacher shortages.”)

Education reformers have done great things with alternative teacher training and certification. Well, we train our principals through the same lousy system that fails to do much good training teachers. Why? Why not create new alternatives,

this time focused not on teaching but on executive leadership training for schools—preferably with some training on how to get around special-interest obstacles to good school management?

Transparency is another area of major need, especially in finances. Our government school system is enormous, and almost totally opaque. Its finances are kept in outrageously Byzantine ways. If you doubt it, go try to find out even a simple piece of information, like how much money your state spends per student on special education.

These anti-transparency accounting systems keep power and influence concentrated in the hands of the few people who know them really well. Everyone who wants to do anything that requires this information—even legislators considering budget decisions—has to come crawling to the tiny elite who know anything about school finances. But don’t worry, I’m sure there isn’t a horrifying morass of waste and fraud concealed behind the curtain.

One potentially very powerful reform, but the one that would probably be the hardest to get, would be breaking up our huge school districts. America once had more than 100,000 school districts. Their small size kept them close to their neighborhoods and communities, so people knew what was going on and could take action much more easily if there was a problem.

It also created choice-based pressure to improve. Smaller school districts meant parents had much more choice between districts when they decided where to live, so districts had to perform well or lose families to other neighborhoods. Social scientists call this “Tiebout choice” (pronounced “tee-bow,” like the quarterback), and empirical research finds that smaller district size improves educational results.

Today, we have fewer than 15,000 school districts. For generations, the unions have been pushing for consolidation of districts, and getting it. They offer up lots of false promises about efficiency and eliminating redundancies, but their real motive is to insulate decision-makers from accountability and (above all) eradicate parental choice.

The barriers to governance reform are serious. The special interests want their gravy train, and state and federal governments enjoy taking power away from local communities. But school choice has racked up an impressive list of victories in spite of similarly strong resistance. A push for governance reform might do the same—and it might unite education reformers who are divided over other strategies for accountability.

Greg Forster (Ph.D., Yale University) is a senior fellow with EdChoice. He is the author of six books, including John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and the co-editor of three books, including John Rawls and Christian Social Engagement: Justice as Unfairness. He has written numerous articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, as well as in popular publications such as The Washington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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REVITALIZING OKLAHOMA’S

RURAL COMMUNITIES

By Steve Anderson

In recent months I have written several articles about a rural revitalization program for Oklahoma that mirrors the Rural Opportunity Zone (ROZ) program in Kansas, a program I helped to create. ROZ was the first economic plank in Governor Sam Brownback’s plan to address 50 years of lackluster economic performance by the state.

Governor Brownback understood that if you looked at the state as an economic entity, the most undervalued asset on the balance sheet was in the rural areas. Before ROZ, Kansas’s existing rural programs shared the same characteristics as current Oklahoma rural programs, such as the Rural Economic Action Plan (REAP). They merely throw money at the symptoms instead of addressing the cause. He knew that the status quo was unacceptable.

Governor Brownback made the decision to empower local citizens and local economic development directors by creating Rural Opportunity Zones. These initially applied to counties who had lost population over the prior decade, but lawmakers soon discovered the idea was so popular that additional rural counties were added in successive legislative sessions.

Rural Opportunity Zones were created to address the cycle of depopulation which leads to decreasing local property and sales tax revenues, which in turn lead to poor infrastructure

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and limited services available locally. As necessary services like hospitals either disappear or provide very limited treatment options, this further incentivizes people to move out of that county.

The basic idea was to make any individuals who moved to those counties from out of state free from individual income tax for five years. If an eligible county chose to participate (and not all did), the state agreed to waive individual income taxes for five years on a qualified individual. Qualifying required that you have lived outside of Kansas for five or more years and earned less than $10,000 in Kansas source income in each of the five years before moving to a ROZ county.

Moreover, the state agreed to pay up to $15,000 of a new resident’s student-loan debt if the county matched or exceeded that amount. (Not all of the participating counties elected to participate in this part of the plan.) Some of the participating counties formed 501(c)(3) charitable organizations to allow citizens to contribute while obtaining the tax benefits. A good measure of the community support was that some created funds that exceeded the state’s contribution. To qualify, the individual had to meet criteria listed in the preceding paragraph and hold an associate’s, bachelor’s, or post-graduate degree with a student-loan balance outstanding.

The state’s objectives were intertwined with the county’s interests but a key element—which is missing in programs like REAP—was that there was no cost to either the state or the county without a successful outcome. If the incentives did not work to bring out-of-state residents to rural Kansas, then not one dollar would be expended. We were well aware that there was no one silver bullet that would reverse more than 50 years of shrinking rural population. We left almost all of the marketing of the plan initially to the counties and required the matching school-loan payments to ensure active participation from the locals.

The student loan provision was specifically designed for the short-run goal of bringing young college graduates to the rural areas. Health care services were especially crucial. One example of ROZ success is Dr. Aaron Zook, who, after doing his medical residency in Denver, relocated to rural Pratt, Kansas, in part because of Kansas’s debt-reduction offer. “Any help I can get is going to be real nice,” he told KSN TV, referring to his $200,000 in student-loan debt.

Attracting younger people to the rural areas has even more widespread impact on low-population counties than is first perceived. Greeley County, which is located in the far western

Opportunity Zone program working in rural Kansas”) as saying, “We’re seeing population growth for the first time since the 1980s and school enrollment has recently grown, with a 25 percent increase from 2013 to 2014.”

Mike Thon, a member of the county Board of Supervisors, is quoted as saying: “It doesn’t take many children enrolled in our school district to offset the cost of ROZ. We’ve seen an increase in student enrollment in Greeley County and it’s not just because of the ROZ program, but we’ve seen growth where other counties haven’t and ROZ was a part of that.”

The Salina Post also reports that “Ken Bockwinkel, superintendent of Greeley County Schools, said in addition to experiencing an increase in students, the school district has been able to hire more teachers. Since the student loan repayment is an incentive for individuals with degrees and certifications, Thon said it is an important recruiting tool for schools and hospitals.

‘Working in schools, it’s hard to recruit teachers out here to western Kansas,’ Bockwinkel said. ‘By having the ROZ program available, teachers can take advantage of that and hopefully stick around for more than just a year.’”

These sorts of stories are exactly why a Rural Opportunity Zone plan is needed for rural Oklahoma. It is not a

Rural Opportunity Zones were created in Kansas to address the cycle of depopulation which leads to decreasing local property and sales tax revenues, which in turn lead to poor infrastructure and limited services available locally. As necessary services like hospitals either disappear or provide very limited treatment options, this further incentivizes people to move out of that county.

part of the state, is an example of what happens when a wellplanned incentive is given to a motivated community. During the previous decade, the county experienced the state’s greatest population loss—a 19 percent drop. The ROZ student-loan program in the first full year had 25 participants, but it created a far greater economic impact. All but one of the recipients was under 40 years old, and the ROZ households account for 17 children, five of whom are in school and 12 of whom are preschool age. Christy Hopkins, the county’s community development director, is quoted in a Salina Post article (“Rural

comprehensive fix for what ails rural Oklahoma, but it’s a great tool that can help empower locals to take charge of their future without having to come to Oklahoma City to beg state lawmakers for money.

OCPA research fellow Steve Anderson is a Certified Public Accountant with more than 30 years of experience in private practice. He has also served as budget director for the State of Kansas and as a budget analyst in the Oklahoma Office of State Finance. At one time he held 17 state teaching certifications, ranging from mathematics to physics to business.

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Survey: Most Oklahomans See Educational Choice as a Moral Right

By Jay Chilton

Should parents be allowed to use the tax dollars intended for the education of their child to subsidize the cost of an education at a privately operated school?

Most Oklahoma voters say yes, according to a new SoonerPoll Quarterly Poll, with regular church attenders and evangelicals expressing even stronger support.

The survey question, which attempted to provide the strongest argument for educational-choice proponents and opponents alike, was worded as follows: Educational choice gives parents the right to use tax dollars associated with their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school which best serves their needs. Some people favor educational choice because they believe that parents, not government officials, have the moral right to determine a child’s path. Other people oppose educational choice because they believe it drains money from public schools and allows only a select few students to choose a different school. Which viewpoint comes closest to your own?

Respondents favored educational choice at a rate of 51.5 percent, with 37.3 percent opposed.

SoonerPoll CEO Bill Shapard said his firm has asked the same question many different ways with the same result.

“Time and time again, we’ve asked Oklahoma voters in a variety of ways about the concept of school choice and a majority continues to support it,” he said.

A deeper look into the demographics of the poll’s respondents shows that among regular church attenders support for school choice rises even higher: 59.1 percent of Oklahomans who say they attend religious services weekly support educational choice while 29.5 percent

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oppose.

Voters who identify as “evangelical” support educational choice by an even wider margin, with 63.4 in support and 26.1 percent opposed.

Rev. Craig Eidson is lead pastor of Freedom Church in Piedmont and is a vocal supporter of educational choice.

“My wife and I have homeschooled, used private schooling, and had our children in the public school system,” he said. “We believe that utilizing all three methods allowed for a great education for our kids. However, it would have benefited us greatly as parents to have been able to offset the cost with an education savings account (ESA), tax break, or other means to help with the costs involved in homeschooling and private schooling.”

Eidson’s wife, Michelle Eidson, serves as the principal of Spring Creek Elementary School in Deer Creek.

Rev. Eidson told attendees at the July 29 meeting of the Oklahoma School Choice Coalition that he and his wife have always tried “to do what’s best for the kids.”

“You hear that a lot,” he said. “’Do what’s best for the kids.’ The question is, if that’s what (those) people are really for. … Vouchers cannot hurt, and they are almost certain to help. We need God’s help. Allow parents to have total control of their children’s education.

“When we say we’re for what is best for the kids, do we really mean it? Or is it all about the agenda for public schools?”

Wade Burleson is the senior pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Enid, a prolific author, and a strong supporter of both public schools and educational choice.

Burleson said that among the members of his church, he sees 80 percent support for educational choice. He said that he and the congregation of Emmanuel Enid see the implementation of educational choice as not only a moral right but as a logical imperative.

He said that competition creates improved outcomes in all situations, and education is no different.

“When people have a choice to send their children to a different school, then the public school—by the very nature of competition—becomes better,” he said.

“When education becomes a monopoly, as in business, then service, product, efficiency all decrease in value.

“From history, from logic, from scripture, it’s the parents’ responsibility to educate their children,” he said.

Jay Chilton serves as Director of OCPA’s Center for Investigative Journalism. The center focuses its investigations on education, legislation, corruption, and critical issues facing Oklahoma not covered by other news outlets.

Oklahomans’ Support for Educational Choice Is Becoming Difficult to Deny In the last two years, seven different public opinion surveys have shown strong support for various forms of private-school choice (vouchers, tax credits, ESAs) among Oklahomans, while one survey found that Oklahomans oppose school vouchers (it didn’t ask about tax credits or ESAs). To learn more, go to https://shar.es/1x5snx.

—Editor

When Government Officials View Us as Children

By Trent England

The Oklahoma legislature passed a straightforward law legalizing brewers to sell their own beer on their own premises.

They could already give out samples, and wineries were earlier freed to sell their own wine and host wine tastings. With the brewery law set to take effect on August 26 of this year, everyone was happy. Everyone except Keith Burt.

The Director of the ABLE (Alcoholic Beverage Laws Enforcement) Commission, charged with enforcing the policy choices of the legislature, decided to play dumb. “I didn’t know they wanted on-premises consumption because it doesn’t say that,” Burt told the press. Thankfully, he punted to Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who clarified that Senate Bill 424 means exactly what everyone except Burt always understood it to mean.

The law was not unclear. What was Burt’s problem?

Government officials, like the rest of us, have their biases.

And because bureaucrats are not robots, and no law can address every possible circumstance, enforcing the law will always involve some interpretation and discretion. The most fundamental bias for officials is whether to interpret laws in favor of freedom for their fellow citizens, or in favor of government control.

English law recognizes as a principle of liberty that “everything which is not forbidden is allowed.” Many writers have formulated the opposite to describe totalitarianism: everything is forbidden unless government gives permission. An editor’s footnote in Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England traces the idea back to ancient Rome:

the Bill of Rights offers far more protections against a criminal prosecution than a regulatory enforcement action). Outside of criminal law enforcement, government officials have a choice about whether to lean in favor of freedom or not. ABLE Director Burt has shown that he leans in favor of government control.

Citizens have a choice as well. We can either accept government officials who view us as children or serfs in need of general constraints, or we can insist on their removal. Even better, we can ask the legislature to dismantle or at least reform agencies that show a proclivity to meddle and overreach.

Trent England serves as Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, where he also is the David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow for the Advancement of Liberty and directs the Center for the Constitution & Freedom and the Save Our States project. He also hosts a radio program, The Trent England Show, from 7 to 9 a.m. every weekday on Oklahoma’s AM 1640, “The Eagle.”

It was one of the laws of the twelve tables of Rome, that whenever there was a question between liberty and slavery, the presumption should be on the side of liberty. This excellent principle our law has adopted in the construction of penal statutes; for whenever any ambiguity arises in a statute introducing a new penalty or punishment, the decision shall be on the side of lenity and mercy; or in favour of natural right and liberty....

Of course, as the footnote observes, the principle is only a binding rule for the interpretation of criminal statutes (just like

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@OCPAthink 1. U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe stopped by OCPA to discuss national politics, foreign policy, Obama’s legacy, and more with Trent England. Listen to The Trent England Show weekday mornings from 7:00 to 9:00 on AM 1640 The Eagle or online at ocpa.us/TrentEnglandShow.

2. OCPA president Jonathan Small discusses HealthChoice Select with Ali Meyer of KFOR, the NBC affiliate in Oklahoma City. In 2015, OCPA and OCPA Impact pushed for the state to create this innovative program which will help teachers and other state employees save up to $30 million annually in out-of-pocket medical charges.

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3. Gene Veith, a retired professor and the author of 20 books, discusses “Why Classical Education Works” at OCPA. 4. Brandon Dutcher discusses OCPA’s role in the public policy process with a group of high-school seniors from Southwest Covenant School in Yukon.

5. OCPA’s Estela Hernandez (left) is pictured here with state Superintendent Joy Hofmeister at the ceremony announcing the 2017 Oklahoma Teacher of the Year. Hernandez served as a judge in the competition.

6. Congressman Steve Russell speaks at the Oklahoma School Choice Coalition meeting on September 1 at OCPA. 7. OCPA president Jonathan Small tells Alex Cameron of News9 there needs to be greater accountability in higher education.

8. In a story broadcast on the CBS affiliates in Tulsa and in Oklahoma City, OCPA president Jonathan Small points out that the state’s school employee labor unions have been unable to secure pay raises for their members.

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QUOTE UNQUOTE “$8.7 billion”

“Oklahoma is not a ‘low-revenue’ state at all.”

Total revenue for Oklahoma’s public education system in 2015, the most in state history

Economist Byron Schlomach, a scholar-in-residence at the Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise at Oklahoma State University.

Dr. Schlomach writes that “out of the 50 states and D.C., as a percentage of GDP, Oklahoma’s state and local governments are 36th in how much they extract from the state’s GDP in taxes and fees.”

“Progressive education is self-destructing. [With the

“Well, I actually watch CNBC, NBC, MSNBC. I watch. I see the viewpoints.”

OCPA trustee Tom Coburn, in a recent appearance on MSNBC, informing a disbelieving Chuck Todd that those networks are indeed liberal

spread of trigger warnings, etc.] it’s like a parody of itself. ... It would be funny if we saw it in a movie.

It’s reality. But when it gets to that point, it’s coming apart.”

“When you impose a (budget) limit, people suddenly begin to do common sense

Longtime college professor and former Heritage Foundation fellow Gene Edward Veith, in a September 1 presentation at OCPA

things they should have done before. When money is easy, when you can dial up tuition or fees, people tend to postpone even the most basic efficiencies.”

Purdue University president (and former Indiana governor) Mitch Daniels, quoted in a recent Chicago Tribune editorial titled “How Purdue is reinventing the American university”

“All of us are recovering racists.”

Oklahoma State University professor Lawrence Ware, in a September 12 campus presentation on white supremacy