Oklahoma leaders are trying to trick Trump into thinking we need more education spending freedom

It feels like Oklahoma officials have lost touch with reality and think President Donald Trump must be the biggest idiot on the planet.

Because why else would they be first in line in trying to snooker the Trump administration into giving a state that has some of the worst education outcomes in the entire country essentially carte blanche power to decide how hundreds of millions of federal dollars should be spent in our schools?

Recently, our state superintendent and some Republican legislative leaders urged Trump’s administration to bypass the U.S. Department of Education’s traditional funding pathways and give federal dollars directly to the state so that Oklahoma’s Education Department can categorize schools “into types based on need” and offer a “diverse marketplace of solutions.”

Our leaders stupidly argue that federal officials tie too many administrative and bureaucratic strings to that funding. Those “strings” are used to ensure compliance with pesky things like our children’s civil rights.

In a video posted to X, Superintendent Ryan Walters said that having direct access to the funding will ensure more money gets into the classroom and to teachers and improve academic outcomes and results, instead of being tied up in administrative costs.

“This will forever change education. It will forever empower states and give states the ability to truly empower parents,” Walters said.

If this happens, it will forever change Oklahoma education, but I suspect it won’t be for the better.

Our lawmakers and Walters haven’t proven yet that they deserve this enormous amount of trust. It seems like a terrible idea to give them unchecked powers to determine winners and losers in our already struggling school system. Why on earth would we want to enable them to underfund certain rural and urban schools, increase funding to private schools, undercut services offered to impoverished or tribal students, or demolish programs that serve special education or English learners?

Walters pledged that he’d continue supporting disabled students, but made no guarantees about protecting anyone else. We don’t know how our leaders would spend the money differently in a way that bolsters math and reading literacy rates.

Recent nationwide tests showed that only 23% of fourth graders and 20% of eighth graders were proficient in reading. Only 31% of fourth graders and 17% of eighth graders were proficient in math.

Without cheating, that needle stubbornly refuses to move under our Legislature, which has wisely zeroed in on improving academic outcomes while somehow simultaneously managing to demonstrate their overall lack of understanding of how learning happens.

House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, R-Bristow, said in a statement that “Oklahomans are best-equipped to determine what education should look like for our students.”

I’d like to know why he believes we’re suddenly best equipped to oversee hundreds of millions in additional dollars.

Perhaps it is because we’re bottom 10 in reading and math proficiency. Or is it because the private school tax credit program lawmakers are wasting our money on is serving an outsized number of rich families? Is it because Republicans are unveiling increasingly bizarre schemes amid growing public pressure to improve academic performance? Or maybe it is because GOP lawmakers are apparently so bad at state budgeting that they’ve padded the existing state Department of Education budget so much that Walters was emboldened to buy Bibles and give his employees $600,000 in raises, including a $45,000 payout to the agency’s chief adviser.

Meanwhile, because we can’t get enough qualified educators in our classrooms, lawmakers are looking to remove a requirement that our early childhood educators have a college degree. Even though that strategy has not measurably improved performance in the upper grades, they want to allow those without a formal education to teach our youngest students the building blocks of reading and math. Yikes. Maybe instead of lowering the standards of who we allow in our classrooms, we should just acknowledge teaching is hard and make sure we’re paying a wage that makes qualified people want to teach.

State leaders are still pointing the finger at each other for last year’s insane effort to bamboozle Oklahomans into thinking our children’s academic prowess had dramatically increased under Walters’ tutelage. In reality, our leaders secretly lowered the bar students must meet to be proficient and didn’t tell anyone — until Oklahoma Voice uncovered it. Even then Walters ignored the fiasco for months.

And for a state that likes to lament overtesting, our legislators sure are proud of mandating an unnecessary exit exam. Starting this year, Oklahoma students must complete the U.S. Naturalization Test in order to graduate. It’s just one more unnecessary hurdle that could prevent someone from graduating and distracts from our real struggles.

Frankly, none of that gives me a lot of confidence that Oklahoma’s government would know how to spend federal dollars for policies and initiatives that would ensure that our schools and students are achieving their maximum potential.

If anything, our leaders should be begging Trump’s federal government to increase its scrutiny of our school system or perhaps fund increased teacher and school support staff wages.

Because only states that meet the highest academic outcomes should be given the flexibility to control their own fate.

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.