Jonathan Small, President of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, spoke to the McGrath Breakfast Group on Saturday with a chilling message.

Small said, “Nearly 75 percent of students across any grade you might pick in Oklahoma, have not achieved reading proficiency. While taxpayers spend about $15,000.00 per student per year, achievement has continued to fall.

“When I say, ‘not proficient’ that means the student cannot take a book written for their grade level, read it, comprehend it on their own and understand it,” Small declared.

The McGraph Breakfast, is an ongoing event held at various locations throughout the metro for 35-years. The collective purpose is to break barriers and introduce leaders to each other. Invitees include elected officials, tribal leadership, and top business/community leaders. This story was first publish in greater length on Straight Up on Substack, an email subscription site, here.

Small continued, “Sometimes in government programs, the program becomes more about the adults that are employed in it than who they’re supposed to serve. Coming out of the 80s and 90s, there was a group of people, one group had ulterior motives, one group just had the distraction of focusing on who’s employed. So you had academics who don’t live in the real world. They hear complaints from teachers’ union members. ‘This phonics thing is old and tiring. When you teach phonics, you can’t teach as many other fun things that you want to teach because when you teach phonics, that means all day long the teacher and students are individually going through phonics, learning how to sound and decode words. That’s boring.’

“Also, we find that if we teach students to read well early, it is much more difficult to tell them or their parents what they should be thinking. So, academics come up with a new method called 3Qing, or Whole Language,” Small said.

The Whole Language method relies on associating pictures with words instead of systematic phonics. It has been criticized for hindering children—especially those with dyslexia—from decoding unfamiliar words. Like feeding someone a fish rather than teaching them how to fish to feed themselves for a lifetime. Nevertheless, the Whole Language method was widely adopted in Oklahoma, resulting in dramatic setbacks in reading proficiency scores.

“If you started phonics at age four or five, by the time you were in third grade, you were able to read extremely well. Because you had been taught, this letter says that and it sounds like this. When those two letters are together, they sound like this. Any word could be presented to you and, most likely, you could decode it,” Small said.

Oklahoma initially adopted a mandated full commitment to phonics-based instruction act, leading the nation in reading score gains for four years, but repealed it in 2015 under pressure from teachers’ unions Small noted.

“With our reading sufficiency act, Oklahoma leads the nation in reading score games, but a superintendent and several others, led by the teachers union, didn’t like the accountability that was coming to the employees in the system, because in Oklahoma, for a while, if you got to third grade and you couldn’t read, we helped you until you learned to read.

“Unfortunately, the legislature blinks and repeals our reading sufficiency act. We did it to ourselves. We did it. We did it to ourselves. We’ve declined 10 full points, or almost a full grade, since 2015. What is fascinating is that the state of Mississippi [passed] their reading sufficiency act at the same time Oklahoma did, but Mississippi didn’t blink. Mississippi stays the course, and now Mississippi, basically over the last decade, has had the largest reading gains out of any state in the country. What will depress you even more is that Mississippi is doing it with more than $2,000 less per pupil to spend,” Small added.

More of Small’s presentation may be found on Straight Up on Substack here where he details:

• Proposed Solutions and Recommendations
• Impact of Technology and Other Educational Concerns
• Strategies for Engaging Future Political Leaders
• And Next Steps

“As Oklahoma moves back to what is proven, repeatedly, to work in education, we must be ready for what my family calls weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. When the K-12 school system starts to complain about that first group of third graders that is held back, we need to stay the course just like Mississippi did to go from the bottom to the top in education,” Small concluded.

About the speaker: Jonathan Small, C.P.A., serves as President of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs and joined the staff in December of 2010. Previously, Jonathan served as a budget analyst for the Oklahoma Office of State Finance, as a fiscal policy analyst and research analyst for the Oklahoma House of Representatives, and as director of government affairs for the Oklahoma Insurance Department. Small’s work includes co-authoring “Economics 101” with Dr. Arthur Laffer and Dr. Wayne Winegarden, and his policy expertise has been referenced by The Oklahoman, the Tulsa World, National Review, the L.A. Times, The Hill, the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post. His weekly column “Free Market Friday” is published by the Journal Record and syndicated in 27 markets. A recipient of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s prestigious Private Sector Member of the Year award, Small is nationally recognized for his work to promote free markets, limited government and innovative public policy reforms. Jonathan holds a B.A. in Accounting from the University of Central Oklahoma and is a Certified Public Accountant.