Friday, December 13th, our friend “Mary” with the V1SUT Vantage substack, joined Michael and I to talk about trans teachers. (Find the full video on our YouTube and Rumble channels)
Earlier in the week, Mary published, “First Drag Queen Now Secretly Trans Principal: Progressive Public Ed in America’s Reddest State” about the Western Heights Public School district, where the Superintendent hired a drag queen to Principal a district elementary school (Shane Murnan who has since been fired), who then hired another drag queen as a para professional and then a Chinese immigrant who was found soliciting sex from (what he thought was) a 15-year-old boy.
Now, Mary has found that a biological woman has been working in the district as a male in MANY different roles in the school for over eight years.
In the clip below, Mary talks about how hard it is to find a trans person once they change their identity. Should it be this hard – especially if this person is working with children?
She then goes on to talk about the fact that, according to Oklahoma law, a trans person must use the bathroom of their birth sex, not their preferred sex. If this is the case and it’s hard to find a trans person working in a school, how could we be sure they weren’t using facilities with biological boys?
Mary asked Ryan Walters and other OSDE employees about this issue, but received absolutely no answer in response. Why? Isn’t this a situation parents might want to know about?
In this last clip Mary talks about whether or not parents should know that their child’s teacher doesn’t present their biological sex in public. Not every parent agrees with alternative lifestyles and though there are no accusations of inappropriate interactions with this teacher and other students, don’t those parents have a right to know that his teacher is teaching their child?
I know I would certainly want to know. As I’ve said on the podcast from the beginning – I don’t care what people do on their private time, but people employed by taxpayers to shepherd children must meet a higher standard for their behavior and their lifestyle choices. Children are vulnerable and in need of protection in every way possible – especially at school where personal safety goes hand in hand with learning.
ROPE Report LIVE for Friday, December 6th included our interview with Edmond attorney, Richard Lebarthe, who talked about his lawsuit against Edmond Public schools and a bit about his fight with the Oklahoma Transportation Authority.
Accordingly, Oklahomans for Responsible Transportation and Oklahomans for Transparency in Government request that the Council of Bond Oversight postpone any decision on the proposed OTA bond offering until a full feasibility study and compliance review can be completed by an outside third party. We also request that any future OTA bond offerings be postponed until the State Auditor completes the investigative audit ordered by the Attorney General.
Seriously? Both groups – through their attorney – were only asking for the Council to WAIT A MINUTE WHILE A FEW FACTORS WERE REVIEWED FIRST. Yet the Council voted unanimously to grant the bonds to the OTA. Wow.
Here’s what Richard says about the meeting:
Please, PLEASE, go the the Oklahomans For Responsible Transportation website and follow them on social media. Oklahomans MUST stop the OTA and the Good ‘Ole Boy system propping them up or we’ll get to the point where we can’t afford to travel in Oklahoma, period.
The other topic Michael and I covered with Richard on Friday was a recap of the lawsuit Richard filed for Michael and numerous other parents of Edmond Public Schools, arguing that they had discriminated against their children because of their vaccination status.
If you’ll remember, during the COVID YEARS (eye roll), schools could – and would – arbitrarily tell parents that their kids had to stay home if they ‘contact traced’ them and thought they were at risk of developing COVID. Edmond parents filed suit against EPS because they were discriminating against kids who hadn’t had the vaccine with their policy. So, if you were vaccinated, you were neither contact traced nor sent home, but if you hadn’t been vaccinated, you were contract traced and sent home for 10 days if EPS believed you had been near a COVID positive person within 10 days.
Thanks to Richard, Edmond parents prevailed against EPS in court – demonstrating that EPS’ policy WAS flawed and discriminatory. Hilariously, EPS literally put out a statement to the press after the ruling that they were disappointed with the decision, though the court essentially said what Richard says in his comments below – EPS essentially coerced parents to vaccinate their kids for them to go to school.
It’s a shame parents have to pay an attorney to sue their own schools, but many parents today are having to do just that.
Thank you for rerunning my October 2 podcast episode (11.27.24). Since our initial discussion, I’ve gained additional insights that I believe are critical for your audience to understand the depth of the challenges in Oklahoma’s education system.
Following the podcast, I was provided with extensive evidence tying Dove Schools in Oklahoma to the Gulen movement, a network with troubling ties to questionable financial practices and allegations of supporting terrorism. While I had previously noticed smaller concerns, such as H-1B visa abuse and inadequate instruction, the broader picture is far more alarming:
H-1B Visa Exploitation: Dove Schools heavily rely on foreign hires rather than qualified local teachers, mirroring practices seen in other Gulen-affiliated schools. These teachers are often expected to “donate” portions of their salary back to the foundation, with reports indicating up to 40% of their paychecks being funneled back.
Cosmos Foundation Connections: Financial ties to this Gulenist organization suggest that Oklahoma taxpayer dollars are being redirected to entities with global political motives.
Curricular and Cultural Alignments: Participation in events like the Turkish Olympiads and field trips to Raindrop Turkish House, both Gulen-affiliated activities, further demonstrate misplaced priorities that detract from meaningful education for students.
Despite raising these concerns with Brian Shellem and the Oklahoma Charter School Board, their focus remains primarily on the St. Isidore Catholic Charter School initiative. While the intersection of church and state warrants scrutiny, this singular focus has allowed significant issues in other areas to persist unchecked.
The approval of private school vouchers last year already opened the door for families to choose religious education on their own terms. If proponents of St. Isidore wish to create an online school teaching Catholic doctrine, the solution is straightforward: establish it as a private school. There are many schools operating successfully under that model, free to teach as they wish without taxpayer entanglement.
Yet here we are, with the Charter School Board using taxpayer dollars to fight a legal battle that has already failed in Oklahoma’s courts. The push for a federal Supreme Court ruling appears motivated by the current Court’s sympathy toward religious institutions, but this comes at a cost. Resources and energy are being wasted, while the failures of virtual charter schools remain unaddressed.
Take DOVE Schools, for example—a network openly funneling taxpayer dollars meant for education into a global organization tied to terrorism and foreign political agendas. Their ties to the Gulen movement—including misuse of H-1B visas, financial connections to the Cosmos Foundation, and participation in Gulenist cultural events—are well-documented and deeply troubling. The state school boards know, Ryan Walters knows, Kevin Stitt knows, and a majority of the Senate and House know. These schools operate under the guise of education while delivering substandard instruction and contributing to a larger global agenda.
And what is Ryan Walters doing? Instead of addressing these glaring issues, he panders to political bases with symbolic gestures like distributing Bibles in schools, ignoring the fact that 3 out of 4 Oklahoma students cannot read proficiently. He continues to turn a blind eye to DOVE Schools’ questionable practices, perhaps because their success helps pave the way for his self-serving agenda with St. Isidore. This mismanagement of priorities erodes Oklahoma’s already fragile education system and betrays the trust of both taxpayers and students.
Which is sad, because he continually trumpets that Trump was given a mandate, while ignoring the fact that Ryan Walters was given a mandate by the people of Oklahoma to fix our schools. Instead of addressing the glaring issues plaguing our education system—such as literacy rates, teacher shortages, and classroom resources—he’s chosen to focus on superficial initiatives like distributing Bibles to classrooms and touting his stance on cultural and political flashpoints. Meanwhile, he’s manipulating test scores by adjusting benchmarks and lowering standards, ensuring they’ll look artificially improved next year. This will allow him to present a façade of progress as he likely pivots toward higher political ambitions. These tactics do nothing to help the students who are falling behind, the teachers who are leaving the profession in droves, or the schools struggling to provide quality education. It’s deeply disappointing to see that, in terms of improving academic success, he has actually done worse than Joy Hofmeister.
Thank you again for the opportunity to share these updates. The work you’re doing at ROPE is invaluable in exposing these systemic failures and pushing for meaningful change.
Sincerely, Rebecca Pellam, Ed.D.
Editor’s note: While on the podcast (links in the opening sentence above), Becky showed how Dove Charter Academy was manipulating test scores by refusing to give state tests to certain individuals in order to improve their scores.
Additionally, while Dr. Pellam provided no research to back up her claims about Dove Charter Academy and the Gulen movement, all one has to do is internet search the terms “Gulen charter schools” to find NUMEROUS pieces of information. Below are a few places to start.
Thursday, November 21st, Michael and I had V1SUT Vantage author, Mary, on with us again, this time to talk about Dr. Aaron Espolt, the Superintendent of Shawnee Public Schools (SPS).
The same Shawnee Public Schools where coach Ron Arthur was sentenced to 5 years in prison for molesting a student his senior year of high school, though allegations indicated that there were multiple victims over multiple years and districts.
Mary took us through her latest V1SUT Vantage substack article about Dr. Espolt – the current superintendent of SPS and how he has a record of alleged sexual misconduct during his time at Little Axe PS and Boone-Apache PS and that he has been employed with 7 districts in Oklahoma during his career so far.
In the video below, Mary talks about “pass the trash laws” – laws that prevent school districts from hiring employees at any level – who have had a history of sexual misconduct allegations at a previous employer. Oklahoma does not have a pass the trash law.
In the video below, Mary talks about Shawnee Public Schools and the odd circumstances under which Dr. Espolt came to Shawnee and some of the circumstances surrounding his employment.
The full live video, which you can find on our YouTube and Rumble channels has much more information! Check that out when you have time! Also, like share and subscribe to our channels! The more these videos are shared, the greater the chances that something will be done about these issues! Pass them on to your legislator as well!
As much as I support Ryan Walters’ attempts to root out leftist ideology from our classrooms, it appears that the most damaging instances are flying completely under the radar, and finding their way into the classroom without anyone noticing.
A recent example of how students are being exposed to left-wing ideas is two books that have been assigned to fifth grade students at McKinley Elementary in their advanced reading course: “The Path to Paper Son”, by Grant Din, and “Louis Share Kim”, by Barbara D. Krasner. Both books can be listened to in their entirety in the YouTube link provided.
The books are fictionalized accounts of how Chinese immigrants in the 19th century tricked American immigration officials into allowing illegal Chinese immigrants to gain US citizenship by falsely claiming that Chinese nationals were a part of their family. The books paint a sympathetic portrait of this dishonest tactic, justifying it on the grounds that living in China was too dangerous for these Chinese citizens, and so they must immigrate to the US by any means necessary on humanitarian grounds.
The books are a part of the MyView Literacy program that is used as the primary curriculum at Norman Public Schools, and I believe the primary pipeline through which this political ideology is infiltrating our schools and reaching our students’ minds.
Are these books appropriate for impressionable elementary students? How will these books alter the worldview of young American children, particularly how it relates to our modern immigration crisis? We are experiencing the greatest crisis of illegal immigration that this country has experienced in decades, and justifications for allowing it to continue are identical with the justifications for the Chinese immigration described in these books.
The MyView curriculum appears designed to foster an emotional judgment of immigration long before the true facts of the negative effects of invasion-level immigration reaches our children, and long before they’ve developed the capacity and maturity to understand them. As we know, a deeply-held emotional prejudice will easily overpower facts learned later.
The implicit moral of these two books is that it is okay to allow illegal immigration, even if it means breaking the law, if doing so allows foreign illegals to escape homeland for a better life.
Is this really a lesson that we want our kids learning in school? This is virtually identical to the justifications used today by our leftist-dominated political and humanitarian institutions, that have allowed millions of unvetted and undocumented migrants to flow unimpeded into our country, with tens of thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians, and other nationals given automatic parole and flown in to the US to be settled in unsuspecting communities, bringing cultures, habits, and even crime, that are incompatible with the American communities that are forced to contend with these newcomers.
Books like this smuggle a pro-immigration worldview into our classrooms right under our noses, molding the worldview of our children to automatically support the waves of immigration, and opposing any attempts to stop the flood.
I would urge Ryan Walters to, instead of pushing bibles and chaplains in our schools, instead thoroughly scour the current reading curriculum, primarily MyView Literacy, for political activism disguised as ordinary reading material. This is the overriding manner in which leftist orthodoxy is finding its way into our schools, and it must be rooted out.
With our state reading levels sitting at embarrassing levels, why should SEL and other forms of stealth political activism be given priority? Why is there not a concerted effort to focus like a laser on real literacy and math proficiency, or, God forbid, typing proficiency? In our computer age, typing proficiency is vital, and yet a typing class has not been offered to my children in either elementary or middle school.
Our priorities are totally out of whack, and as a result we’re condemning our children to a diminished future.
Becky Pellam, PhD, spoke to Michael and Jenni on Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024, about her teaching experiences in Oklahoma.
Dr. Pellam came from Texas, where she taught in the Dumas district. She loved it there, but she met a man from the Oklahoma panhandle and settled in on a ranch they bought there together. Hungry to teach again, she applied to Guymon PS and was hired as a Teaching Coach.
Before she started, she had great feelings about her time there and what she could do to help the kids – the majority of whom had ACT scores in the single digits. After she began, her experience changed drastically.
During her year of employment in Guymon, she was bullied by the other teachers, many of whom told her she was a ‘plant’ from the central office sent to spy on the other teachers and refused to submit their benchmarks to her. She talked to her superintendent about the situation but she seemed to get nowhere.
She talked to the school board president, who listened intently and believed her report, but asked her to contact the Board’s vice-president. When she did, the long-time, active OSSBA (Oklahoma State School Board Association) member told her that he had heard she was a trouble maker and knew she was the problem, not anyone else.
Needless to say, after she was told by the Superintendent to falsify benchmark data to the school board, she had it in her mind to quit, but then the school essentially fired her anyway.
Here’s Becky’s story about her employment with Guymon in her own words:
After being forced to leave Guymon public schools, she was hired at DOVE Virtual Acadmy (DVA) – an Oklahoma online public charter school.
Dr. Pellam talks about how – just like her experience with Guymon PS – everything started fine, but quickly turned sour.
The Principal almost immediately had Dr. Pellam teaching THE ENTIRE HIGH SCHOOL class of nearly 100 kids to the tune of 12 and 13 classes per week. For those who aren’t teachers, that’s 3 TIMES a ‘normal’ amount of coursework. For each class, there is a certain amount of ‘prep’ that has to happen to develop the course and to assist/grade/monitor the students. This level of coursework would exhaust anyone, but Becky also was helping to run a ranch and raise their daughter at the same time.
In the end, she found that DVA was ALSO cheating the accountability system by enrolling ‘ghost students’ to get their enrollment up (in Oklahoma, schools are appropriated funds via the number of ‘butts in seats’), but then unenrolled over 40% of their students – the ones on the lower end of the academic spectrum – when it came time for state testing.
Here is Dr. Pellam telling the story about her employment with Dove Virtual Academy:
Toward the end of the LIVE 2 hour+ broadcast, Jenni and Dr. Pellam began to talk about what education actually is.
Few people – including teachers and administrators today – know what it means to EDUCATE a child. It’s certainly NOT what we’re doing in Oklahoma right now. Right now, we’re training kids for jobs, not educating them in order to be the people best able to decide what they want to do.
There is method to this madhouse approach of education, however. Uneducated people are compliant people because they don’t know how to think for themselves. They do what they’re told because they’re conditioned to do that. They can’t think for themselves because they’re not educated, they’re conditioned.
Becky and Jenni took several minutes to flesh out this fact so that people could hopefully understand what it is that Oklahoma is doing wrong in public education. And that’s after we spoke about the horrible public school culture – the teacher/administration bullying that goes on against those who want to come in and actually teach and do the right thing.
Here are Becky and Jenni discussing the idea of what REAL EDUCATION looks like:
Dr. Pellam is VERY BRAVE for coming forward in this way.
Jenni had the very same kind of experiences while she was teaching in Oklahoma public schools 25 years ago, so this is not a new thing – THIS IS TEACHER/ADMINISTRATION CULTURE IN MOST OKLAHOMA SCHOOLS. Good Oklahoma teachers simply leave rather than try to do anything because they know nothing they will say will be heard or addressed.
See, no one listens to them because the fixes necessary REQUIRE HARD WORK, not just THROWING DOLLARS AT THE PROBLEMS and no one from public school administration, to our legislature, to our Governor really want to do the work that is required to solve the deeply entrenched problems with public school culture in Oklahoma.
Oklahoman’s shouldn’t BE FORCED TO PROVIDE THEIR TAX DOLLARS FOR THESE UNFUNCTIONAL SCHOOLS. If we really care about kids – and do we really? – we would FIX the broken public school administrative culture, instead of forcing taxpayers to provide private school tuition dollars to people who can already afford a private school education for their kid/s!
Once the concept of anonymous isn’t anymore, trust is gone and transparency is dead.
Look, I read the Oklahoma Watch. Sometimes they’re the only online media source from which I can get any kind of real information about our Republican elected officials. But there you go. I’ve personally found their stories to be biased to the left – which, as I said, works for me sometimes because their interest in taking out Republicans at least results in some kind of transparency for one side of the isle.
But right, or left, NO media source should request information that is meant to be anonymous and Oklahoma Watch did.
September 13th, reporter Jennifer Palmer posted a story to the online paper entitled, “State Seeks to Decertify Teacher Over 5-Year-Old Instagram Family Photo“. Palmer contends that Edmond Public School teacher Regan Killacky – who took a picture of himself and his son threatening a Donald Trump mask with plastic swords during an outing to a Halloween store in 2019 – should not be fired for the post.
Here is a legitimate sentence from Palmer’s piece: “But in Killackey’s case, Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters prioritized punishing a teacher over political speech he disagreed with in order to score political points”. Is anyone going to try and argue that this statement is somehow objective ‘journalism’? That it ISN’T completely biased? I hope not. You simply can’t make that argument. You’d look like a dope.
At any rate, Palmer’s desire to “get the story” and apparently prop up Killacky, resulted in her open records requesting (ORR) from the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) information on who filed the (supposedly) anonymous tip about Killacky’s Instagram post to the state’s AWARITY reporting system.
Now, granted, there’s PLENTY of blame to go around here. Yes, Palmer requested information that was supposed to be anonymous, but the OSDE GAVE IT TO HER. What the absolute HECK? What would be the purpose of something so reckless?
Watch the short video below to get the full story, but suffice it to say, either tips are anonymous or they’re not. If they’re not anonymous and the public is told they’re anonymous, even the most ardent Walters supporters will lose faith in the system after getting doxed the first time by Oklahoma’s poor excuse for objective journalists.
Oklahoma Watch (Jennifer Palmer) AND OSDE – both of you had better do better ASAP.
An email sent out by McKinley Elementary in Norman last week, informed parents that the school has been selected to participate in an “innovative research study examining how school librarians can help students learn to detect and avoid misinformation by developing their information literacy skills”.
While participation in the study itself is voluntary, all K-5 students will be taught the misinformation program curriculum from August to April.
The program itself, entitled “Awareness and Critical Thinking (ACT) Program: How School Librarians Can Teach Children to Detect and Avoid Misinformation”, was developed by Tara Zimmerman, assistant professor at the School of Library and Information Studies at Texas Women’s University. Her sole specialty for the past few years has centered around “misinformation”, and she’s received a $400,000 grant from the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program to fund her research.
A few of the papers she’s published on misinformation provide the trajectory of her target.
In 2020, she published a paper entitled, “COVID-19: Mask Misinformation and Social Noise”. The paper begins with this statement:
“Disinformation and misinformation are pervasive in unregulated social-media environments, which are used habitually for obtaining news.”
I think we know where this is going.
Further into the article she says:
“Facebook on July 20th, 2020 removed a group called themselves Unmasking America that had more than 9,000 members for spreading COVID19 misinformation (Lynos 2020). The group claimed that masks obstruct the flow of oxygen and have a negative psychological impact on wearers. Facebook responded to an inquiry from the Verge and stated that “We have clear policies against promoting harmful misinformation about COVID 19 and have removed this group while we review the others,” according to the Verge article. This is one of many groups on social media spreading lies and conspiracy theories about COVID19 and against wearing masks for various reasons. In the US, wearing masks has become a partisan issue and represents more of a political statement than a safety and health care guidance issue. Most social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and others are coming under pressure to encounter such negative messaging and take steps to minimize the spread of COVID19 misinformation.”
Yet another paper, published in 2022, “Misinformation and COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy”, reads just as you’d expect:
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-vaccine beliefs have been at an all-time high, and vaccine hesitancy has become a major threat to public health [1]. The World Health Organization has labeled the increased virulence of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic an “infodemic” [2]. Throughout 2020, scientists, healthcare professionals, and politicians speculated about vaccine timelines, distribution, and effectiveness; and media platforms presented widely varying opinions as well as misinformation that negatively influenced people’s attitudes about COVID-19 vaccines [3]. By the end of 2020, the self-reported likelihood of getting vaccinated against COVID-19 had declined sharply from 74 % in April to 56 % in December [4]. While the availability of COVID-19 vaccines improved between the fall of 2020 and late spring 2021, indications of public distrust in vaccines continued. This public distrust contributed to waves of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the US, increasingly among those who were not vaccinated.”
There’s something archaic about Zimmerman’s papers, her attitude prevalent at the height of COVID hysteria, and later, her vaccine mandate hysteria that rings hollow today.
Masks didn’t prevent the spread of COVID. Neither did the vaccine. It’s almost common knowledge now, but both facts were branded as misinformation during the dark days of the COVID pandemic.
In fact, her continued study of “misinformation” feels like a discarded relic of the past. It might have held weight in 2020, or 2021, when any opinion not perfectly aligned with the official narrative surrounding COVID-19 was branded as misinformation, and censored. Even scientific research that failed to dovetail with the pronouncements of the public health establishment was blacklisted. We all remember it, and we’d rather not return to those dark days of censorship.
Zimmerman might, though. What else explains her passion for routing out or dismissing altogether non-approved opinions?
“Misinformation” is not a neutral term.
It’s shown itself to be nothing more than a bludgeon used to silence right-wing criticisms of left-wing orthodoxy. During the authoritarian days of the pandemic, it was a powerful weapon used to silence critics by the thousands with one fell swoop. We remember the social media behemoths enacting a scorched earth policy of censorship at the behest of the Biden White House. But now, in the age of Elon-owned X, the term “misinformation” has lost its power. Like a T-Rex transformed into a chicken.
Professor Zimmerman clearly isn’t a neutral actor, and the ACT Program isn’t an objective study. I fear that the goal of her program is less to teach children to think critically, and more to teach them to hold up a crucifix when confronted with unapproved opinions. “Get them while they’re young” is the new strategy among activists embedded within the public school system.
The ACT Program appears to be yet another attempt to cloak the wolf of left-wing orthodoxy in a sheep’s coat of scientific objectivity.
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.
