Single-party rule can be a cesspool of political extremism. Without the natural restraints offered by the checks and balances of the American model for government, there is little to stop the political party in power from doing whatever it wants.
This is a lesson Oklahoma residents are about to learn. For the first time in the state’s history, the Republican Party controls Oklahoma’s Governor’s Mansion and bicameral Legislature.
Take a glimpse at the bills filed for the next legislative session, and you can see how extreme this session will likely be. Just look at the issue of education.
The first bill filed in the Oklahoma House of Representatives (HB 1001) is the Religious Viewpoints Anti-Discrimination Act. If passed into law (which it will be), Oklahoma public schools will be required to create a volunteer speakers pool, comprised of certain eligible students, with the sole purpose of empowering these students to speak of religious matters during the morning announcements, school assemblies and other school functions.
In addition, HB 1001 will allow students to give religious answers on classroom assignments without fear of being “penalized or rewarded on account of religious content.” Under such legislation, Oklahoma schools could see the word “God” become the correct answer to the question, “What is the large, white, round, heavenly object that controls the oceans’ tides?”
This will be really popular in Oklahoma until the first time a student mentions the words “Allah” or “Goddess” at a high school football game.
HB 1029, the “Parental Choice in Education Act,” creates a “scholarship” program that looks identical to a school voucher program.
School vouchers are essentially the philosophical white flag declaring defeat in America’s dream of offering a quality public school education to every child. Instead of fixing what is wrong with our public schools, vouchers call for a retreat from the public schools, and they provide the resources for mass migration into private schools. Those resources will be paid for by stripping tax dollars away from our public schools.
During the past two years, the recession has caused public school budgets to tighten to the point they resemble hangman’s nooses more than they do the fiscal balance sheets of public institutions, and school vouchers create a proverbial platform from which to hang those nooses.
With school budgets already so tight, public schools could be forced to terminate one teacher for every nine students that were given scholarships to leave the school. With the mass layoffs the schools have felt these past two years, it will not take too many more to destroy any chance the schools have of being staffed with the personnel necessary to fulfill their mission statements.
To cripple the financial stability of our public schools even further, we have SB 173. If passed into law, this bill would allow college students to attend remedial education classes free of charge. While that sounds great for people who require such classes, it comes at a great cost to our public schools.
As you know, nothing in life is really free. With that in mind, the legislation calls for sending the bill for remedial classes to the school districts from which the remedial students graduated.
In theory, I can understand the reasoning behind this. However, the bill calls for penalizing cash strapped schools and the current students in those schools. Academic success or failure depends on the student as much, if not more so, than it does the school systems. If a student does not wish to put forth any effort, nothing the school does can change this.
If a student does the minimal amount of learning necessary to pass all of his or her classes with Cs and Ds, finds a college or university willing to take them, which discovers he or she requires remedial education classes, why should a high school be penalized when it tried to teach the student more than he or she was willing to learn?
Many Republican Party activists have long hated America’s public school system. In practice, it is a taxpayer provided service offered to everyone regardless of any individual ability to pay. In other words, it is socialistic in nature. This is why the Republican Party constantly attacks the public school system and why it constantly tries to find ways to shift students away from public schools.
When campaigning, every Republican legislator in Oklahoma runs on the position that schools should be locally controlled. Judging from these three bills, Republicans have already violated this philosophy and are replacing it with state mandates that tell school boards the state legislature knows more than our local school systems about what is best for Oklahoma students.
— Tom Taylor, political science graduate
The Oklahoma Daily is pleased to provide you the opportunity to share your thoughts about this article. We encourage lively debate on the issues of the day, but we ask you refrain from using profanity or other offensive speech, engaging in personal attacks or name-calling, posting advertising, or straying from the topic at hand. To comment, you must be a registered user of OUDaily.com. Thanks for taking the time to offer your thoughts.
You must be logged in to leave a comment. Log in | Register
brandondutcher 1 year, 4 months ago
Well-written article, but I would respectfully suggest that you're violating your own progressive principles.
As Berkeley law professor John E. Coons explains: "We still arrange education so that children of the wealthy can cluster in chosen government enclaves or in private schools; the rest get whatever school goes with the residence the family can afford. This socialism for the rich we blithely call 'public,' though no other public service entails such financial exclusivity. Whether the library, the swimming pool, the highway, or the hospital — if it is 'public,' it is accessible. But admission to the government school comes only with the price of the house. If the school is in Beverly Hills or Scarsdale, the poor need not apply."
As Martin Luther King III said, "We basically have one supplier, the public education system, and it has become a huge bureaucracy. This bureaucracy has to be challenged. Fairness demands that every child, not just the rich, has access to an education that will help them achieve their dreams."
http://bit.ly/egKW5Q