Legislative Retaliation Against Ryan Walters For Neutrality On Jeb Bush’s Plan To Collect Data On Your Kids?

Today, at nearly 3pm, Representative Dell Kerbs and Senate Pro-Temp Paxton took a bill already on the floor calendar in the House for today under Title 20 – SB646 (An Act relating to judicial and federal official security and privacy😉 – gutted it and amended the entire bill to amend the education statutes under Title 70 to An Act relating to education which relates to State Board of Education membership;).

The bill now creates a board of 10 members from 7. One will be the Secretary of Education who will be the chair plus, five members shall be appointed by the Governor by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, two members shall be appointed by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and two members shall be appointed by the Pro Tempore of the Oklahoma State Senate.]. It also changes the way items may be added to the agenda. If three or more Board members wish to add an item to the agenda, they may – it does not have to be approved by the State Superintendent who is the chair of the board. (it was not heard 5.8)

This is a problem because if the governor has five appointments to the Board and the governor is interested in making changes to the Oklahoma State Department of Education, policy or procedure, he could conceivably ask Board members to take that issue to the full board by asking for an item to be added to the agenda. As we’ve seen, Governor Stitt – who has about a year left on his term – has made radical changes to the board in just this year alone because he didn’t like collecting data on illegal children (even though we already do that) so that conception isn’t really out of the question.

Why would this bill be changed just today?

Possibly because our friend Mary with V1SUT Vantage published a story on SB224 – the government data sharing bill we’ve been pushing back on for weeks – OEQA Will Hold Oklahomans’ Lifelong Data Under SB 224: Why You Should Be Concerned. I urge you to read it. It’s eye opening about so many things!

Midway down the page, Mary reports:

During committee hearings, Caldwell claimed the SDE under State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ (R) supports SB 224. We reached out to Supt Walters who denied any public support and asserted his agency’s neutrality concerning the bill.

“I have never publicly supported the bill. Not sure where that would be coming from,” said State Supt Ryan Walters of SB224. “SDE has always been neutral on the bill. We are required to provide data to legislators when they request it.”

OEQA’s claims of having “worked collaboratively with SDE, Regents, OESC, and CareerTech to advance the development of a Statewide Longitudinal Data System (SLDS)” are also exaggerated.

When asked if he had personally attended any meetings with any OEQA personnel concerning SB 224 or a centralized database over the last year, Walters replied, “No, I was not personally involved in that.”

Until today, the Superintendent of Public Instruction had not made a comment – publicly – about whether or not he supported the bill.

Now, put the two things together.

WHAT IS JEB BUSH’S INVOLVEMENT WITH OKLAHOMA AND SB224?

Let me be clear – I do not definitively know. What I’m about to report is pure speculation, but speculation that deserves real consideration.

We know that Jeb Bush has a long history of involvement with Oklahoma education policy. He was heavily involved in pushing Common Core here in our legislature. We know that Superintendent Barresi and others got a free trip to Bush’s – then Foundation for Educational Excellence, now ExcelInEd – during her tenure. We also know that he has come to Oklahoma – at least once – to push school “choice” in 2021.

Here’s a bit of an article summing up Bush’s influence here in Oklahoma, but let’s also not forget, that – not only does Jeb have his own educational policy-pushing organization – his father was the guy who STARTED THE IDEA OF TAKING DATA ON KIDS FOR ‘EDUCATIONAL’ PURPOSES.

The many of us who are trying to stop this bill from passing the legislature this year have heard that ‘someone big from outside the state’ is interested in seeing this bill pass. A few names ran across my brain, but Jeb was at the top. On his ExcelInEd website is something called, “Pathways Matter: How The Right Combination of State Policies Builds a Skilled, Educated Workforce“.

So, this initiative by the non-profit ExcelInEd organization run by Jeb Bush, has a MODEL POLICY that states can use to create an initiative in their state to allow kids to be tracked from birth through workforce to make sure they can get a job.

No, scratch that – make sure our businesses have the workers they’ll need to keep their business open, pay taxes and wine and dine legislators to create policy to help them do business. Listen below.

Notice “How Can We Fix It?”. Gosh. That sounds a whole lot like what bill SB224 is attempting to do, doesn’t it?

Here’s the Power Point program all about Oklahoma where – shockingly so much legislation stacks up to mesh with the intent of Bush’s initiative. Look specifically at the last three pages on data collection. So uncanny!

BOTTOM LINE

Do we know that Jeb Bush is influencing Oklahoma education? No. Do we have enough evidence to believe so? YES.

I fought hard to have Oklahoma repeal the Common Core State Standards from law. I never really thought anything had been accomplished afterward, because teachers/schools went right back to using them and there was nothing to make them stop. After reading the contents of a search I asked Grok to run for me, I’m having second thoughts.

Groks analysis indicated that the 2014 Common Core data repeal and NCLB waiver revocation “created policy turbulence, potentially disrupting COWIBs alignment with Oklahoma Works’ educational goals. Political resistance to federal mandates may have complicated WIOA implementation”.

So, call your Senator and Representative RIGHT NOW and tell them you

1. don’t want Oklahoma to be like every other state,
2. you don’t want your kids to be trained to fill a job, you want your kids to be educated so they can make up their own mind about what they want to be when they grow up
3. and Oklahoma doesn’t need an out-of-state globalist, policy-monkey ,wrenching up Oklahoma’s education policy.

We MUST defeat SB224 and keep the Oklahoma State Department of Education data from being hooked up with Workforce data (collected at the Department of Commerce) at the Oklahoma Educational Quality and Accountability board, helping to create the Planned Economy our overlords – like Bush! – want!