Several weeks ago, we had Peggs Superintendent Dr. John Cox on to talk about his campaign for Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Though I like to make short clips of our interviews, I’ll not be doing that with candidates. ROPE Report will not be endorsing candidates for office, so I fear that creating shorts would run the risk of sounding as though we were attempting to endorse – or knock out – a candidate for office since the clips wouldn’t be seen in the whole context of the video.
Please make sure you watch the video – it’s very instructive. I won’t download the whole video in the blog post, but you can find the full version on either our Rumble or YouTube channels.
Michael and I had so much fun talking to Colonel Putman on the show Wednesday (2.26.25). I swear, that man had some of the best stories about his military career with the Air Force – and one of them is below. Just take a few minutes to watch this because it is guaranteed to make you giggle – although you can watch the entire live program on YouTube and Rumble.
But, among the stories, the Colonel had quite a bit to say about education in our state and I, for one, was bowled over by his thoughts and ideas. At one point, we were discussing ‘distance learning’ – learning out of school and what he thought about that. “Virtual presence is actual absence“, was the comment the Colonel made. How perfect is that? And no, he’s not a fan of learning on a computer in general. Just like Michael and I, the Colonel believes that learning is more functional with a paper and pencil and a teacher in a classroom.
In the clip below, we were talking about what Michael heard from teachers when he was running for school board. So much of it was about how micromanaged they were. The Col. talks about micromanagement and also about the student surveys that the district gives to students. These bother him for the same reason they’ve always bothered Michael and I – most of these surveys actually instill ideas in kid’s heads because they’ll introduce something they’ve never heard about or even thought about. That kind of thing has to stop. It’s a waste of education time and dollars because they don’t provide any real educational opportunities for students they’re just a way to collect data.
In the last clip, we talked a bit about the culture of the public schools and how many good teachers are frustrated by that. The Col. made the most common sensical comment – you don’t quit your job, you quit your boss. He then goes on to talk about how he is a huge supporter of teachers because they are on the front lines and in the classroom with the students and how they need to be supported by administration.
After Col. Putnam ‘retired’ from the podcast (lol), Michael and I start talking about some news for the week (1:15 on the video timer) and there was a lot of pretty interesting stuff there. You’ll want to check out the full video for that and I’ve embedded it below so you can.
Please – if you’re in the Edmond area, or you know someone who lives in the Edmond area – look up Colonel Putnam’s website. Get to know him and share these videos and his website with others in the area. School Boards are the most important thing in a school – they set the tone for the entire school. Let’s concentrate on getting good candidates elected to these positions all over the state!
Friday, February 21, our ROPE Report Regular, Julianne Romanello joined us to talk about the New World Order and the School To Work Pipeline. You can see the full LIVE video on our YouTube and Rumble channels.
So what does all this mean? That’s a whole lot of jargon.
The fact of the matter is that public schools were not created to teach students to learn and excel, they were created to teach students to be compliant. Think back to the industrialists like Carnegie and Rockefeller and Ford. They needed workers. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, families had been eking out a living on a family farm. Now, business is booming in town and parents are leaving their family farms for the promise of a good wage in the city. These people weren’t highly educated and were used to working. They made wonderful workers for the Industrialists, but what about their kids? Why not create a system where they could be taught to be compliant?
Sadly, it gets worse. Here, Julianne tells us how the one thing that the rich and powerful can count on is the ‘resiliency’ of human beings and how that ‘resiliency’ can be fostered in government schools to provide the one thing they really need – a way to adapt to changing workforce needs.
This is the article Julianne references in the video. You can see by just a cursory review of the article how people are using computer programs, for example, to mold students into ‘resilient’, ‘adaptable’ people who can ‘take on any job’. The article lists out why Impact Investing is so bad all the way around – not just for student autonomy.
In the video below, Julianne, Michael and I all talk about how education – as done by government schools – is completely off base. How it functions to create compliant students and not students who can really think about things critically.
Luckily, some parents have seen this and are already homeschooling their children. Those of us who have, should work as hard as we can to get other parents to remove their children from the system before its too late for them and for society.
As always, if you have questions, please reach out to me and I’m happy to do what I can to help you get started on YOUR journey toward fully educating your kids! Just email me at jenni@rope2.org.
According to a press release sent out by Senate Media, the bill, “empower[s] schools to adopt ‘bell to bell’ cell phone policies”, yet the bill summary says, “An Act relating to schools; requiring school district boards of education to adopt a policy prohibiting use of cell phones while on campus during certain time period”. Requiring and ’empowering’ do not have the same meaning – the first includes force.
In fact, the bill goes on to say that it will require schools to set discipline policies for students who break the school’s required policy on cell phone use (the force part). Originally, it had allotted up to 2 million taxpayer dollars (“if available”, whatever that means) to be granted to middle and high schools so they can buy something to STORE cell phones during the day. Because a basket can’t hold cell phones in a classroom and we need a cabinet (or something) for THE SCHOOL to hold EVERY STUDENT’S cell phone.
Problems With The Bill
What is the point of a school board? According to state law, individual local school boards have the right and ability to set policy – including policy over cell phones. This bill actively usurps local school board authority by forcing them to create a policy. On one hand, we expect parents to execute control over their minor children, yet so much of what the state does actually removes parental executive control in favor of a government policy, rule or law. How can a parent execute parental control if we keep removing their executive function?
This is NEW LAW. How many laws do Oklahomans need to restrain them – or, in this case, their children? What about schools? Could an argument be made that part of the reason public schools in Oklahoma are failing is that they are constrained by state laws that may not have been needed at the local level? How many laws does Oklahoma actually need – especially when this one has no teeth, making it a suggestion.
This law forces schools to create disciplinary actions to be meted out when students break cell phone policy. What happens if a school DOESN’T create a cell phone policy? What happens if they don’t create a discipline policy? How many times has state law required schools to create a policy, but then never forced the school to write the policy when they don’t? Tulsa attorney Maria Seidler has told us numerous times, for example, that public schools don’t adhere to all of Oklahoma’s Parental Rights law, but there isn’t an enforcement mechanism in the law to make them, forcing parents to use their own money to sue schools while schools use taxpayer dollars to fight them. How many times has the state forced schools to follow the policies they DO create – about bathrooms, free speech, bullying, or student safety, for example? This law, then, would be meaningless, just like so many others our legislature creates, because there isn’t a mechanism of enforcement.
Our state has real problems with school employees who misuse and abuse children in their care. We have only to look at the number of multi-million dollar lawsuits being settled by schools in the last several years like Kingfisher and Ninnekah and Salina and Perry and Shawnee and Wewoka… Yet, parents who suggest CCTV for classrooms are confronted with an uproar like a tsunami from certain teachers and administrators against such a thing. Now, we want to remove the only way students have to ‘catch’ a school employee doing something they shouldn’t be doing. Just this thought should be concerning.
So much learning is now done on computers but somehow the kid’s cell phones are causing distraction? How does that work? Countless studies have shown that computer learning isn’t the best thing for students, but not only do we still do it, there are real problems with students accessing porn and other sites, as former Oklahoma resident Denise Roberts told us during an interview on our podcast – but cell phones are the problem?
This is a national movement. Why? Why we are attempting to do what so many other states are doing? Why do we play Follow The Leader so often in Oklahoma when we’re an individual state. What about, “I don’t care what the other kids do”. What about being an “laboratories of Democracy“?
Each and every teacher could create their own class rules about cell phones, but we’re not letting them – “Put the phones in the basket on my desk until the end of class everyone”. We’re telling teachers that we don’t trust them with a policy over a cell phone, but you trust them to educate the kids in their class? How much sense does that make? This is all talk out of both sides of the mouth of the legislature – here, have more money teachers – but you can’t manage your own classroom.
Bottom line. This is a bill in search of a problem that already has a solution. This isn’t even a bandaid for the horrible educational results we have in this state. This bill is vanity, not good governance.
Contact the Senate Education Committee and ask them to say NO to SB1389.
