House lawmakers reject communism education bill, advance new scholarship requirements

OKLAHOMA CITY — As Oklahoma lawmakers consider how to best prepare students and regulate schools, a House panel approved new pre-college testing requirements and struck down a bill that would have required teaching of the “atrocities of communism.”

After a 6-4 vote, House Bill 1094 was the only bill to fail on Monday before a House subcommittee focused on education funding. Rep. Gabe Woolley, RBroken Arrow, said he wrote the bill to ensure middle and high schools don’t skip lessons about the human cost of communist regimes.

Rep. Dick Lowe, R-Amber, pointed out these chapters of history are included in the Oklahoma Academic Standards for social studies, which dictate which topics schools must teach. The Legislature approves those standards, and he said lawmakers typically don’t select individual topics to require through statute.

“I don’t think there’s a person on this committee that doesn’t agree this is something that we need to cover,” Lowe said. “… I think it’s very, very dangerous to start setting this precedent. We’ll be doing nothing but that on every standard throughout the whole school system every year if we start doing that.”

Lowe’s HB 1087 earned unanimous support Monday. The bill would add 10 steps to the salary schedule for public school teachers. If it passes, teachers’ mandatory annual pay raises would continue for up to 35 years while working in public schools instead of stopping at 25 years.

It advances to the full House Appropriations and Budget Committee for further consideration.

A proposal to set a universal minimum ACT score for the Oklahoma’s Promise Scholarship also passed through the subcommittee.

The state requires a minimum ACT score of 22 only for students who are homeschooled or who attend a school that isn’t accredited by the Oklahoma State Board of Education. Students graduating from public K-12 schools or a state-accredited private school don’t have to make a specific ACT score to qualify for the scholarship.

Rep. Rick West, R-Heavener, called this “discriminatory” for homeschool families and proposed HB 1184 to “make it even for everybody.” The bill passed 7-2.

After lengthy questioning from Republican and Democratic members, the panel also advanced HB 1096 after a 7-3 vote. The legislation came from the subcommittee’s vice chair, Rep. Toni Hasenbeck, R-Elgin, and would allow students to qualify for state-funded scholarships with a Classic Learning Test score.

The CLT is a lesser-known alternative to the ACT and SAT and is accepted in Oklahoma at only six small private universities.

Hasenbeck said the state should accommodate students who prefer the CLT as their college entrance exam by allowing them to use their scores when applying for scholarships from Oklahoma’s Promise and the State Regents for Higher Education Academic Scholars Program.

Rep. John Waldron, D-Tulsa, said he took the exam and questioned whether it upholds the state’s emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

“I had a good Catholic education that helped me answer the questions about Thomas Aquinas and (Pope) John Paul II,” Waldron said during the subcommittee meeting. “But I did find that it was light on math questions. And given that we have an agenda about STEM education in Oklahoma, are we giving students an opt-out from exam systems that would require a higher level of the skills we’re trying to encourage for the future of our workforce?”

Hasenbeck’s bill also would create a new Academic Performance Index to grade public schools’ rates of student attendance, dropouts, graduation, college remediation and Advanced Placement class participation, as well as their state test results.

The index would create another level of evaluation on top of the existing A-F report cards that grade school performance.

“We need to look to groups who are excelling at teaching students reading and math,” Hasenbeck told the subcommittee. “We need to look at their model, and we need to repeat that.”

The panel unanimously passed a bill from its chairperson, Rep. Chad Caldwell, R-Enid, that would create a new full-tuition scholarship for topperforming Oklahoma students who stay in-state for college.

Students would qualify if they score in the top 0.5% of the nation on a college entrance exam like the ACT or SAT. The bill doesn’t specifically mention the CLT.

The scholarship would offer the full amount of resident tuition if the qualifying student attends a public or private university in Oklahoma.

Oklahoma Voice (oklahomavoice. com) is an affiliate of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization, supported by grants and donations. Oklahoma Voice provides nonpartisan reporting, and retains full editorial independence.