I found this in my mail this morning and consider it worthy of wide spreading
to those of us concerned about our schools, which I consider to be totally in the
wrong direction as when they had me as a student, 1930 to 1943, K-12.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brandon Dutcher" <digital@ocpathink.org>
To: "Friend" <abdmcfpi@localnet.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2020 6:44 AM
Subject: How big a Department of Education does Oklahoma need?
How big a Department of Education does Oklahoma need?
From curriculum to nutrition to family engagement to technology, the Oklahoma
State Department of Education's interference in your local school never rests. And
when the state isn't overregulating schools, it's promoting the indoctrination of
students into a progressive political agenda.
By Greg Forster, Ph.D.
A lot of educational problems have remained consistent in Oklahoma over the
years, stubbornly resisting all efforts to remove them. Spending goes up while
outcomes stay flat. Local schools are buried under mountains of unnecessary regulation.
Political agendas of the Left and Right (but usually the Left) get shoved into the
classroom in hopes of indoctrinating the young.
There's no magic wand to remove all these ills, but what if there were something
we could do that would at least mitigate all of them?
No, no, I mean something else besides the patently obvious thing we should be
doing, which is enacting universal school choice. While we wait for the advent of
greater wisdom on that topic, Oklahoma could take a look at another solution: shrink
the state department of education. (Absolutely & Amen, RWM)
According to Oklahoma Watch, the Oklahoma State Department of Education
has 485 employees. The state has only 1,924 public schools, so that's almost exactly
one department employee for every four schools in the state. It's not quite the old
joke about the U.S. Department of Agriculture employee who was found distraught at
his desk because his farmer had died, but it's getting there.
What do Oklahoma schools get in exchange for all this? Not funding. The state
legislature appropriates funds for public schools according to formulas written into the
law. Indeed, state funding for education is one of the very few places left in American
governance where legislatures still make their own decisions instead of delegating all
the hard choices to the administrative state. Oklahoma could fund its public schools
with no more than a handful of state employees involved, to gather data and program
the check-writing machines.
Red Tape
No, the main thing local schools get from the state department of education is
officious regulation. You can see this by glancing at the list of divisions (https://sde.
ok.gov/directory?utm_source=OCPA+Master&utm_campaign=c3f4654b4b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_10_03_32
_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&
utm_term=0_1acebeac5c-c3f4654b4b-137165401) in the department. Almost all
of them are concerned with exercising various kinds of state control over local
schools. From curriculum to nutrition to family/community engagement to technology,
the state's interference in your local school never rests.
But surely having all these state employees turned out to be a huge help to local
schools when the coronavirus emergency hit, didn't it? On the contrary, the
department informed local schools that they needed to submit plans for dealing with
the crisis to the state for approval—unless they chose to adopt the state's preferred
plan, in which case they were off the hook. Because local schools had nothing better
to do at the height of the crisis than lobby the state government for permission to
handle the crisis in the way that would work in their communities.
The document informing local schools of this helpful assertion of state control
even bragged about how the department was considering the needs of local communities
(https://sde.ok.gov/sites/default/files/documents/files/20200325124831229.pdf?utm_source=OCPA+M
aster&utm_campaign=c3f4654b4b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_10_03_32_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term
=0_1acebeac5c-c3f4654b4b-137165401) . If it had been, the document wouldn't have existed in the
first place.
The state even closed down virtual charter schools
(https://www.ocpathink.org/post/oklahoma-closes-public-schools-including-online-schools
utm_source=OCPA+Master&utm_campaign=c3f4654b4b-
EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_10_03_32_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1acebeac5c-c3f4654b4b-13716
5401) for a while, denying them an exemption to the order that
schools had to close for quarantine. It would be nice to think this was mere bureaucratic
inertia—an inability to make an exception to the rules for anything, even for digital
learning during a pandemic. The more likely explanation is that the state saw an
opportunity to flex its muscle and shut down an alternative to the government monopoly.
Before you cry "libertarian!" and make preparations to burn me at the stake, let me
make three observations. First, this is not about the extent to which government controls
private citizens, it's about the extent to which state government controls local government.
School districts and even charter schools are government entities. Our constitutional order
depends on a healthy division of powers between these entities. That division is destroyed
when states turn local governments into mere administrative units of the state, existing only
to carry out what the state dictates.
Second, there is no reason in the world local schools can't be trusted to handle these
issues for themselves. Are local school boards incompetent to supervise lunchroom
nutrition or classroom use of computers? What is the argument against letting each district,
or even each school, control its own family/community engagement, technology, menus,
and even curricula?
There are, it is true, real problems with local school governance structures—such as
school board elections held at odd times so only the special interests vote. But that's no
excuse to take power from imperfectly accountable school boards and give it to even less
accountable state bureaucrats. Fix the local governance systems instead of using their
anemia as an excuse to subvert the constitutional order, protecting more and more
decisions from democratic accountability with a wall of bureaucratic insulation.
Third, there is ample evidence of harmful state overreach. I've written before ("Relax
school regulations
(https://www.ocpathink.org/post/relax-school-regulations?utm_source=OCPA+Master&utm_campaign=c3
f4654b4b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_10_03_32_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1acebeac5c-c3f4654
b4b-137165401) ") about how badly overregulated Oklahoma schools are. The
1889 Institute counted 610 systems of state regulation controlling Oklahoma public schools
[download the Excel sheet here
(http://1889institute.org/education-regulation?utm_source=OCPA+Master&utm_campaign=c3f4654b4b-E
MAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_10_03_32_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1acebeac5c-c3f4654b4b-137165
401) ]. They cover everything from tracking teachers' professional
development "points" to specifying the permissible calorie content of diet soda.
It's not 100% clear to me that schools ought to expend any portion of their scarce
labor and budget bandwidth on the vital task of monitoring how many calories are in the diet
soda their students drink. But it is clear to me that if there is any question—any question
whatsoever—that ought to be settled at the local level in our constitutional order, this is it.
If
states can control this, we should give up on pretending we still have a constitutional
division
of powers; it's diet soda all the way down.
Clawing back this overregulation is not just a matter of downsizing the state
department
of education. The regulatory laws themselves will have to be reformed. But those are just two
sides of the same coin. Shrinking the bloated and burdensome administrative state and
reforming laws that overreach are really the same job.
Progressive Ideology
When the Oklahoma State Department of Education isn't overregulating schools, it's
promoting the indoctrination of students into a progressive political agenda. Last year the
department pushed recommendations that Oklahoma public schools scrap moderate,
sensible solutions to the transgenderism
(https://www.ocpathink.org/post/oklahoma-education-agency-newsletter-includes-transgender-bathr
oom-policy-other-lgbt-best-practicesa-recent-oklahoma-state-department-of-education-osde-newsle
tter-advises-school-districts-to-allow-students-to-use-the-bathroom-of-their-choice-based-on?ut
m_source=OCPA+Master&utm_campaign=c3f4654b4b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_10_03_32_COPY_01&utm_medium
=email&utm_term=0_1acebeac5c-c3f4654b4b-137165401) conundrum—such as allowing students who
identify as
transgender to use faculty restrooms or other separate facilities—and instead forcibly invade
students' most intimate bodily privacy by bringing biological boys into the girls' rooms and
vice versa. It also pushed schools to work with Generation Citizen, a civic-education
nonprofit whose student activities bear the heavy stamp of progressive ideology
(https://www.ocpathink.org/post/oklahoma-education-agency-promotes-progressive-activism-masquer
ading-as-civics?utm_source=OCPA+Master&utm_campaign=c3f4654b4b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_10_03_32_
COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1acebeac5c-c3f4654b4b-137165401) .
Of course, Oklahoma is not going to just eliminate its department of education. Some
state regulations of schools are sensible—especially monitoring respect for civil rights.
Defining clear educational standards is a valid state function. Compliance with federal
regulations is also an important issue; one might even think the state could learn something
about the burden of state overreach upon local governance from its experience of federal
overreach upon its own governance.
But while some kind of state educational department is a necessity, one employee for
every four schools seems excessive. Oklahoma could save a few bucks on bureaucratic
salaries if it could only find a way to get its state government out of the business of
regulating
the diet soda in every one of its schools.
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