Statewide Charter School Board President Talks St. Isadore And Raising The Bar On Education In Oklahoma

Wednesday, August 28th, Michael and I talked to Brian Shellem (who’s name I KEEP mispelling and changing the second “e” to a “u” – sorry Brian!), who was recently named the Chair of the recently-created Statewide Charter School Board. Once a separate Virtual School Board and a Charter School Board, the NEW board has combined BOTH virtual and brick and mortar charter schools into the one Board.

This was a significant change ordered by the legislature in order to create more taxpayer transparency of the publicly-funded charter school model thanks to the horror show that became EPIC Charter Schools. (I’m not going into all of that here. If you’re unfamiliar with the EPIC mess, just search the interwebs for “Epic” and you’ll get the whole story in a relatively short time!)

Oklahoma charter schools are publicly-funded schools to which any student can apply – many have a lottery system for entry – that function by a “charter”, making them different than a ‘regular’ public school. They are created by private entities, not the state, but are approved and funded with state tax dollars. The job of Brian Shellem – and the rest of the Statewide Charter School Board – is to approve (or disapprove) applications submitted to the Board for charter school renewals and new charter schools attempting to operate in the state.

In the clip below, Brian talks about the fact that, now that the new Board is functioning, they will also have a NEW job – sponsoring a charter school. As Brian explains, it used to be the public school in the immediate area of the proposed charter that could sponsor a charter, but – as you can imagine – the charter schools that were getting sponsorships, were having to get them from public schools of higher education, not k-12 schools, most of which have never been supportive of competition for dollars from charter schools.

This change could allow for many more charter school applications to be made – to a Board full of appointed people. This initially alarmed me because, as you know, I detest the lack of accountability usually had by appointed Boards and Commissions. Hearing Brian talk about the way he intended to have the Board do business and the transparency he was going to expect from the Board made me much less suspicious and more inclined to see the positivity in this change.

Charter schools have private boards though they receive public money, yet if the Board seated to oversee them is doing their job and is transparent about the way in which the schools are functioning, having the same Board sponsor the charter schools over which they are tasked with approving could actually create greater transparency. In the end, it’s still a Board with appointed – not elected – individuals whose job should be overseen and checked by the public to ensure they are correctly performing their duties.

In the short clip above, Brian talks about the fact that public school leadership has fallen down on the job. Brian wants to raise the bar and make sure charter schools are performing to the best of their ability.

Although the full live video went on for 2 hours (!), we had more people watching the whole two hours than we’ve had watch some of our shorter videos all the way through. People are truly concerned about the issue of education in Oklahoma and wanted to hear our discussion. You can find the full video on Rumble and YouTube. I suggest you watch the entire thing when you can.

I don’t agree with Brian on everything – like authorizing religious schools to be funded by taxpayers and offering ‘school choice’ to homeschoolers – but I agree with a whole lot of what he said and the discussion surrounding our disagreements were instructive.

Again, as I’ve said hundreds of times, ARGUMENT IS NOT A BAD THING! It is if you’re going to scream and yell and throw things, but you shouldn’t. We should all be able to talk to one another about our differences calmly and respectfully, because we might just learn something from each other. I think we all did that here.