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October 2023

Jenni’s 5 Minute Rant Against Public School Sports – ROPE Report Live 10/27/23

Several years ago, I posted this meme to my Facebook page to watch it viewed and shared numerous times.

At the time, I don’t think I had begun to believe this, but I do now; sports should be removed from public schools.

Please, send your hate mail directly to my email box here (jenni@rope2.org) and feel free to comment on this piece about how I’ve now become so ‘fringe’ that I might as well be run out of town as a researcher and writer on all things education – but it won’t change my mind and here’s why:

Every year, against their own self-interest – citizens go to the polls and vote for school bonds for their district schools. These, the voting public is told via emails from schools (illegal actually) and via other means often at taxpayer expense, are requirements for the schools – they must have a GYM, or a new CAFETERIA, or a new football STADIUM/SOCCER FIELD/BASEBALL FIELD – or the students in the system will perish from the earth.

One of the ways in which we’re not free as Americans today is that the state owns our property and not ourselves. Every single person who owns any property, must pay a tax on that property to the state. That property tax – or Ad Valorum, to which our overlords refer deliberately to confuse the populace and keep them believing they own the address where they lay their head – goes, in part, to fund the public schools in the district. So, on top of property taxes – much of which go to public schools – the property of citizens are also endebted to pay out for the bonds the district has created because the new football stadium was a necessity to insure that children were properly learning.

Now, here’s the real rub – THE MAJORITY OF STUDENTS IN OKLAHOMA CANNOT DO MATH OR ENGLISH PROFICIENTLY. Yes, the majority of students graduated by our Oklahoma public schools can’t “read to learn”, or read to perform higher order skills, or do math well enough even to count change back at a retail job. This should horify ever single Oklahoma citizen, yet nearly every public school parent would have a complete freakout if their school discontinued sports to concentrate on EDUCATION.

It used to be – years ago now – that kids weren’t rewarded with any kind of fun if they hadn’t kept up their studies, yet, no such luck today. Today, we’re more concerned about being able to sit out under those Friday Night lights and have our school be the next 2A champs, than we are that Johnny can’t do math OR read properly for his age.

See, if education of state children were of the UPMOST importance, public schools would get rid of their sports programs and allow private organizations – many of which already exist today to serve homeschooling families – to provide that service for parents who wish their kids to be involved in sports.

One would think CONSERVATIVES would LOVE that idea! Let the FREE MARKET take over! Why should taxpayers not only pay for an horrificly poor education, but the sports programs sucking up the time students could be studying?

Enjoy the rant.

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A Social Media Punking of Leftists Shows Them To Be Not Only Extremely Intolerant But Alarmingly Anti-Christian

Forever it seems, when ROPE, or other conservative organizations, or parents have concerns that, “X is happening in public schools” (substitute the “X” for CRT, SEL, inappropriate ‘sex education’), the Leftists scream, “NO IT DOESN’T”. It doesn’t matter if you have a 3-D color photo of it happening in real time, the educrats inevitably just scream “NO IT DOESN’T”, as though these words are the only ones in their lexicon.

During the Common Core fight, public educators argued nearly every fact we uncovered regarding what the Standards said. Even when we’d publish exactly where we’d found whatever controversial topic we’d uncovered (and believe me there were plenty), the answer from the public school advocates was always some form of gaslighting meant to get people to disbelieve what their own eyes were seeing.

Just since writing about all the books found in public schools – and assigned by English teachers – that were not developmentally appropriate at best and flat out pornographic at worst – the lefties have come out of the woodwork to call any parent who complains about these books “book burners” or “book banners”, as a way to disenfranchise their opinions and deprive them of their First Amendment right to free speech. After all, what’s the fun in being reasonable and saying something like, “Okay, well let’s remove sexually inappropriate materials from school libraries while leaving them at the community library level.” I mean, NO “CONSERVATIVE” IS SUGGESTING BANNING BOOKS, just preventing kids from getting to them unless their parents want them to have them.

Then, there are all the LGBT grooming issues originating in public schools and then being hidden from parents by the school (check below for a substantive list of how often this is now happening in public schools). THIS issue, prompted former Board member, Julia Seay, to pose the exceptionally rational question below. It was merely meant to make people put 2 and 2 together to get the 4 of, if you don’t want your kid baptized behind YOUR back, don’t LGBT my kid behind MY back.

Instead of rational – or even interesting – discussion, we got hundreds of comments similar to the ones posted below. I wanted to put them here because I so often hear people refer to Oklahoma as the “Bible Belt”, or talk about how Conservative (meaning Christian?) we are in this state. HEADS UP: Oklahoma is quickly becoming a-religious and worse – ANTI-CHRISTIAN. If you don’t believe me, read some of these comments posted after Julia’s question, which you can read in full for yourself by clicking on the screenshot above.

PLEASE, IF BAD LANGUAGE OFFENDS YOU, BEWARE!

You get the idea…it went on and on and on…

Finally, a poster hit the nail on the head and – bless her heart – even defended us:

So, there you go. Anita says just what I would have said, but I’ll follow it up with a final thought.

THIS – this lack of critical thinking, narcissistic ideation, hatred of anything religious and/or Christian specifically, unimaginative, literal, inability to reason – did not come merely from the internet, IT CAME FROM PUBLIC EDUCATION. THIS is what we’re doing to kids with the money we earn with the sweat of our brow.

THIS represents educational malpractice of the highest order.

I’m a Christian. I try not to be fearful because I’m told in Isaiah 41:10 specifically not to be, but I can’t lie either; at this point, I’m afraid for our children in public schools and I’m afraid for our society and our way of life. We’re not leaving our kids a legacy to be proud of, we’re miseducating them and then turning them out like dogs on the county dump. It’s unbelievably horrifying and we should all commit to doing everything we can to PROPERLY educate our youth no matter what it takes to do so.

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This Social Media Exchange Helps Explain How DEI Gets Into Public Classrooms

I recently came across this post on social media and stopped. I agreed with the notion and started to look down through the comments to see what was being said about it.

Quickly, I came across this comment:

This comment made me feel the need to respond because of the use of her language, “bringing students into the conversation”, “using diverse methods”, “approaching students” – all which are progressive education buzzphrases – so I responded:

She replied:

I continued, hoping that she would understand what I was trying to say. She wasn’t ugly, she was – probably like me – trying to reach a point of understanding between us.

I wish I hadn’t been so terse in my response, but it’s somewhat shocking – even now – to see someone who so clearly wants to be helpful and so clearly believes she is doing the right thing, when in fact nearly her entire outlook is based on a completely flawed premise – that somehow teachers can overcome family and other outside influences (Tik Tok anyone?) by treating their students differently based on a concept that doesn’t exist in reality (equity). She responded one last time:

As did I:

Looking back on this conversation reminds me of one of the reasons I quit teaching; I saw these ideals bubbling up through continuing education courses and I knew I was never going to be able to assimilate them into my classroom. I couldn’t.

I have ALWAYS believed in the power of the INDIVIDUAL to succeed – or fail – depending upon how much effort that INDIVIDUAL put in. Now, is every kid primed to take up the gauntlet of self-individuation and put their head down with a plan? No. Too many other factors – especially a bad home environment – can put a chip on the shoulder of a kid that may never come off. That doesn’t mean that teachers in public school classrooms are to deal with that chip – even if a kid isn’t learning. Teachers can only do what they can do WHILE INSTRUCTING KIDS IN THE NECESSARY TOOLS OF LEARNING; reading, writing and math.

The particular theory this young teacher espouses asserts that teachers should become the parents of the children – because, obviously, the parents are not doing their jobs if kids are coming to school scared and weak and timid. Sadly, it’s true for many children today. Many parents use school as a babysitter and could care less what their kids are doing in a day to actually recieve an education, but that doesn’t mean it’s THE JOB OF THE TEACHER TO RECTIFY THE POOR UPBRINGING OF THEIR STUDENTS. In fact, most of the time, it’s either a psychologist, or the school of hard knocks that changes students with downward trajectories – if they do – some, sadly, go to prison or wind up dead. Still and all, the lifetrack of a child is not the responsibility of the teacher. The education of that student is – alone – the job of the teacher.

Teachers are not to become the parents of poorly-performing students, they are to work harder to bring parents into the equation (or remove the child from school if the child is disrupting others and the parents won’t help control the child) to help the child, not take on the troubles of the child themselves. In fact, it’s this kind of progressive ‘theology’ that leads to classrooms where feelings and psychological concepts take center stage, NOT INSTRUCTION IN READING, WRITING and MATH. I believe it’s easy to see how wrong-headed this model of ‘education’ is and how it’s RUINING children just by looking at Oklahoma’s test scores. And if you don’t believe me, check out this video for an enormous wake-up call.

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I Spoke Before The Oklahoma State Textbook Committee. Here’s Why and What I Said.

Author: Janice Danforth, Chapter Chair, Moms For Liberty, Tulsa County

On Friday, October 6, 2023, I spoke before the Oklahoma State Textbook Committee. Back in September, the Tulsa County Chapter of Moms for Liberty spent time reviewing textbooks that were up for approval and discovered that McGraw Hill has embedded Social Emotional Learning (SEL) into its elementary-level math books. We do not support SEL and it most definitely does not belong in Mathematics.

Social Emotional Learning was coined in 1994 at the Fetzer Institute and came about in the face of school violence. In 2002 ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) either encouraged or required the inclusion of SEL in schools. By 2022 SEL instructional materials cost $1.725B up 25.9% from the previous year. Does anyone believe that school violence has declined since 1994? No, the opposite is true. In fact, a headline from an article in 2021 states, “Violence in schools seems to be increasing, why?” We are being sold an ideology that not only isn’t working but is costing taxpayers a lot of money.

Oklahoma students are suffering with proficiency, not only in reading, but mathematics as well. In 2022 The proficiency rate in MATH for OK 4 th graders was at 27%. We are ranked 49 th in education and I’m certain all can agree that it is time to move the needle in the other direction. Oklahoma students deserve to learn the core subjects and 100% of the material should be focused on academics. SEL takes time away from academics and also undermines parental rights which clearly state that we are the authority of our child and are the ones to direct their moral upbringing. SEL interferes with that. We along with many other parents see the failings of this ideology and by no means desire for the government to mold the character of our children.

As the chapter chair, I had three minutes to state my reasons for why we were requesting the committee to reject this contract with McGraw Hill, and in turn, McGraw Hill had the same opportunity to share why they felt the committee should accept their contract. The State Textbook Committee has a month to make their decision.

While the committee may not reject the contract with McGraw Hill, I firmly believe we make changes one conversation at a time. Going up against a Goliath like McGraw Hill may seem daunting and even impossible, but change only happens when we fight, when we stand up, even if we lose this time. Because eventually, we get a win, and then another, and then another. But it takes all of us willing to stand up to the giant, to ignore the noise of the haters, and to go into the battle, win or lose because our children deserve for us to try. Our children deserve for us to fight for them, because if not us, who else will?

My Remarks

Good morning. My name is Janice Danforth and I am the chapter chair of the Tulsa County Moms for Liberty. I am here because our chapter spent time reviewing textbooks that were up for approval by the State Department of Education. We discovered that McGraw Hill has embedded Social Emotional Learning into its elementary level Math Books. We do not support SEL and it most definitely does not belong in Mathematics.

I want to give a quick background about SEL so you as a committee can understand why SEL is a concern. Social Emotional Learning was coined in 1994 at the Fetzer Institute and came about in the face of school violence. In 2002 ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) either encouraged or required the inclusion of SEL in schools. By 2017, K-12 was spending $21-47B annually on SEL. By 2022 SEL instructional materials cost $1.725B up 25.9% from the previous year. Does anyone believe that school violence has declined since 1994? No, the opposite is true. In fact, a headline from an article in 2021 states, “Violence in schools seems to be increasing, why?”

So, here are some concerns related to SEL:
SEL undermines parental rights
SEL is designed to become the “Parent Voice”
SEL is designed to be woven throughout all subjects
SEL impersonates mental health services
SEL allows teachers to psychologically evaluate students
SEL removes/doesn’t take into account beliefs existing at home
SEL coerces students to pick the “right” answer
SEL distracts and takes time away from actual education and gaining knowledge
SEL sets the focus on feelings rather than truth/facts. Why? Because emotions are easy to manipulate. You can’t manipulate the truth.

So, as a parent and as a taxpayer I have to ask the question, why are we spending so much money on a program that not only isn’t working but is undermining how a parent raises their child? And SEL has now become embedded into all subjects at school and this is a problem.

McGraw Hill creates textbooks and has been doing so since the late 18 hundreds, but that does not mean we blindly trust them and continue to allow their textbooks into our schools. In this particular instance, they have embedded an ideology into a core subject of Math, this is a red flag and should be for each of you. Oklahoma students are suffering with proficiency, not only in reading, but mathematics as well. In 2022 The proficiency rate in MATH for OK 4 th graders was at 27%. We are ranked 49 th in education and it is time to move the needle in the other direction. These students deserve to learn the core subjects and 100% of the material should be focused on academics.

As Moms for Liberty, Tulsa County I am asking you to reject the contract with McGraw Hill. The only way we change the trajectory of where we are headed is to say no to publishers like McGraw Hill who have embedded an ideology into a core subject. If enough states start standing up and saying no, these publishers will be forced to get back to academia and will be forced to remove programs like SEL because let’s be honest, for them, making money is the bottom line.

Set a precedent today for McGraw Hill and for other publishers that want to do business in Oklahoma that we will not tolerate nor invest in publishers that have embedded ideologies into their textbooks. Instead, let’s invest and partner with publishers that desire to increase proficiency and that is their only motivation. This is what Oklahoma students deserve!

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What Do The Oklahoma Tax Commission (OTC) Rules Say About The Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit?

The Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit Act (OPCTCA) – HB1934 – directed the OTC to create/promulgate rules “to implement the provisions of the [Act]” (page 6 and page 8). To that end, the OTC has created rules and now has them open for public comment until 4:30pm on Thursday, October 12th of this year. The rules can be found here. The Oklahoma Statutes created from HB1934 can be found here.

Beginning Monday (10/2), I began to compare the rules to the bill. The rules cannot mirror the bill/statute word for word, because the OTC rules will include verbiage specific to the Act’s implementation. After speaking with Representative Sherrie Conley, I did learn, however, that the rules do have to mirror the legislative intent of the Act – the OTC couldn’t add things via the rules process that weren’t already specified by the Act or the intent of the Legislature in creating the Act. Consequently, I confined my review of the rules to that parameter.

Wednesday, October 4th on our ROPE Report LIVE podcast, I explained my findings – but also, the reasons ROPE cannot abide the Act in the first place. You can find a clip of this video on the front page of the website, but the FULL video can be found on YouTube and Rumble. I think it’s worth a watch for the topics covered.

WHAT CONCERNS DID I HAVE WITH THE RULES?

I really didn’t find any place that did not mirror the legislative intent of the Act. In other words, I couldn’t find any law making through the rules. I did, however, take issue with a couple things:

  • There are two versions of “Taxpayer” in the rules. One called “Taxpayer” that copies the definition from the Act, and another called “Oklahoma Taxpayer” that defines that OTC verbiage for a tax payer. These two should be combined because it is confusing to have two “Taxpayer” definitions.
  • Under the definition of “Eligible Student”, the OTC adds to the Act’s definition by including the words, “and is registered with the Oklahoma Tax Commission”. What? Why would a child under 18 be registered with the Tax Commission? Their taxpayer parents/guardians are registered, not the child. This designation needs to go in my opinion (IMO). I don’t even see how it’s helpful here and it makes me nervous because we ALREADY collect so much data on CHILDREN in Oklahoma.
  • Warrant. There are several problems here IMO.
    • The Act’s definition of “Warrant” says, “means an order for payment directing the State Treasurer to disburse funds to a designated payee. A warrant operates like a paper check.” (page 2 near the bottom of the page)
    • 3D (top of page 5), says this, “Payment of the credit shall be made by the Tax Commission with an individual warrant made payable to the taxpayer and mailed to the private school where the eligible student is enrolled or expected to enroll. The taxpayer shall restrictively endorse the warrant to the private shcool for deposit into the account of the school, unless the tuition and fees for the eligible student have already been paid by the taxpayer.”
      • Why would the OTC send a paper check two places? Why does the school get it and the school ALSO get a warrant mailed to them? The taxpayer has to ‘restrictively’ (meaning they can’t endorse it for personal use – but then, how many people are going to have to be hired to check up on this?) endorse the check they receive to the school. Why doesn’t the parent just take the warrant to the school and not have the OTC issue two warrants?
      • This makes no sense IMO. In fact, the only reason I can see this ‘procedure’ being used is to make it seem as though the payment is coming from the family to the private school – which it is not. According to Forbes Oklahoma Income Tax Calculator, a married couple filing jointly have to make $180,000 before their Oklahoma income tax is $7500 (it’s $7,497) – the ‘reimbursement’ provided by the state for each child to go to private school. Therefore, the state pays the tuition to the private school for every child who applies for the ‘credit’ in a family that earns $180,000 or less.
      • This is extremely important because AG Gentner Drummond “is withdrawing a legal opinion that gained national attention for its support of creating religious charter schools” citing that he believes that state money going to private schools is unconstitutional. Not ony that, but there is a lawsuit to stop the publicly-funded Catholic online charter school already proposed.
      • Incidentally, a KOSU poll from last year found that voters oppose public money going to private schools – which is probably why House and Senate leadership (with cover provided by “school choice” groups Americans For Prosperity (AFP), OCPA and American Federation of Children) – lied to legislators and/or twisted arms to get them to agree that the Act was a ‘tax credit’.

Now, I could go more in depth about the OPCTCA here, but I did that in the video – and will continue to do it as time goes on with the vain hope that the people will see the errors in this idiodic scheme and tell the Legislature to do away with it because, in the long run, this WON’T help parents like the Legislature REDUCING OUR TAXES IN THE FIRST PLACE. The idea that the government overtaxes me and then wants to return money to me – most of it that it stole from OTHER PEOPLE to give me (redistribution of wealth) in the first place – is anathema because the government’s ‘gift’ gives it so much more control over me than if the taxes weren’t taken from me (by force) in the first place.

Believe me, as a Christian, I HATE being the one to stand up and say, “You can’t give my taxes to a private school”, but I’m only doing it because I firmly believe that this whole “school chioce” scheme is to make sure that the public money going to private schools will make private schools public so that NO PARENT HAS A CHOICE as to how their child/children is/are educated.

WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?

According to the OTC website, “Written comments will be accepted until 4:30 p.m. on October 12, 2023, at the Oklahoma Tax Commission, Oklahoma City, OK 73194, Attn: Lisa Haws, or by email to parentalchoice@tax.ok.gov.”

So, I’m sending an email to Lisa Haws that says,

Dear Ms. Haws,

Please consider the following comments regarding the Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit Act rules:

There are two versions of “Taxpayer” in the rules. One called “Taxpayer” that copies the definition from the Act, and another called “Oklahoma Taxpayer” that defines that OTC verbiage for a tax payer. These two should be combined because it is confusing to have two “Taxpayer” definitions.

Under the definition of “Eligible Student“, the OTC adds to the Act’s definition by including the words, “and is registered with the Oklahoma Tax Commission”. Why would a child under 18 be registered with the Tax Commission? Their taxpayer parents/guardians are registered, not the child. This designation needs to go in my opinion (IMO). The designation of “taxpayer” already covers who pays taxes.

The Act’s definition of “Warrant” says, “means an order for payment directing the State Treasurer to disburse funds to a designated payee. A warrant operates like a paper check.” (page 2 near the bottom of the page)

  • 3D (top of page 5), says this, “Payment of the credit shall be made by the Tax Commission with an individual warrant made payable to the taxpayer and mailed to the private school where the eligible student is enrolled or expected to enroll. The taxpayer shall restrictively endorse the warrant to the private shcool for deposit into the account of the school, unless the tuition and fees for the eligible student have already been paid by the taxpayer.”
  • Why would the OTC send a paper check two places? Why does the school get it and the school ALSO get a warrant mailed to them? The taxpayer has to ‘restrictively’ (meaning they can’t endorse it for personal use – but then, how many people are going to have to be hired to check up on this?) endorse the check they receive to the school. Why doesn’t the parent just take the warrant to the school and not have the OTC issue two warrants?
  • This makes no sense IMO. In fact, the only reason I can see this ‘procedure’ being used is to make it seem as though the payment is coming from the family to the private school – which it is not. According to Forbes Oklahoma Income Tax Calculator, a married couple filing jointly have to make $180,000 before their Oklahoma income tax is $7500 (it’s $7,497) – the ‘reimbursement’ provided by the state for each child to go to private school. Therefore, the state pays the tuition to the private school for every child who applies for the ‘credit’ in a family that earns $180,000 or less.

Thank you so much for your consideration of my comments.

Sincerely,

Jenni White

Education Coordinator

Reclaim Oklahoma Parent Empowerment (ROPE)

jenni@rope2.org

CLOSING

Please feel free to make any changes to my letter – also, feel free to examine all the information for yourself to see if I missed something or if you don’t particularly agree with my criticisms of the Rules.

Please watch the ROPE Report LIVE video for more information on the OPCTCA.

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