In the last article published Monday, I described a contradiction hiding in plain sight: Oklahoma operates one education system—CareerTech—that works, and another—traditional K–12—that struggles to produce consistent results.

That raises a deeper question. Can a large, statewide system actually be fixed? Or are we stuck with whatever we have? Oklahoma already knows the answer—because we’ve lived through it.

When the System Was Corrupt

In the 1980s, Oklahoma’s county government system—especially the county commissioner structure—was widely understood to be broken. Not in isolated cases. Structurally.

County commissioners controlled road and bridge budgets with relatively little oversight. That created a predictable pattern: vendors paid kickbacks to secure contracts, bids were steered to favored companies, and public funds were quietly siphoned off through inflated invoices and sham arrangements. It wasn’t subtle. It was systemic.

Eventually, federal investigators stepped in. The result was a wave of prosecutions across the state. Dozens of county officials were indicted. Many were convicted. The scandal touched county after county.

For Oklahomans, it was a moment of clarity. The problem wasn’t just bad people. The system itself was producing bad outcomes.

What Oklahoma Did Next

Here’s the part that matters—and the part we tend to forget. Oklahoma didn’t just prosecute individuals and move on.

The state changed the system. Reforms were put in place to make the old patterns harder—if not impossible—to repeat:

• Stronger purchasing rules to reduce backroom contracting
• Clearer bidding requirements to increase transparency
• Auditing and oversight mechanisms that actually mattered
• Defined roles and procedures to limit unchecked discretion

In other words, the state stopped assuming that better behavior would fix the problem.

It redesigned the structure so that bad behavior was harder to sustain—and good performance was easier to see. And it worked.

No system is perfect. But the era of widespread, normalized county corruption ended—not because people suddenly became virtuous, but because the system stopped rewarding the wrong things.

The Lesson We’re Avoiding

This is where the connection to education becomes unavoidable. Oklahoma has already proven that it can take a broken, statewide system and fix it—not by tweaking around the edges, but by changing how it operates.

And yet, when it comes to K–12 education, we behave as if that kind of change is impossible. We treat poor outcomes as mysterious. We assume improvement must come from better effort, better intentions, or more funding.

But the county commissioner scandal teaches a different lesson: When a system consistently produces bad results, the problem is the system. Not the individuals working inside it.

Education’s Structural Problem

Like the county system in the 1980s, K–12 education today operates under a structure that often fails to produce consistent, visible results. The signals are different—but the pattern is familiar:

• Performance varies widely, with struggling systems remaining in place for years
• Accountability exists but rarely leads to decisive action
• Resources flow without strong connection to outcomes
• Responsibility is spread so broadly that it becomes hard to locate

Teachers and principals, like many county employees in the 1980s, are doing their jobs inside a structure they did not design.

And like that earlier system, this one absorbs failure rather than correcting it.

What Real Reform Looks Like

If we take Oklahoma’s own history seriously, the path forward becomes clearer. Real reform does not start with programs, slogans, or new initiatives.

It starts with structure. The county reforms worked because they changed:

• Who is responsible for results
• How decisions are made and reviewed
• What happens when performance falls short
• How transparency exposes problems early

Those same questions now sit at the center of education.

• What would it look like if performance in K–12 triggered real, predictable responses?
• What if struggling systems could not remain unchanged year after year?
• What if information about results was clear, timely, and impossible to ignore?
• What if support and consequences were both real—and connected to outcomes?

These are not abstract ideas. They are exactly how Oklahoma fixed a broken system once before.

From Scandal to System Change

The county commissioner scandal forced Oklahoma to confront an uncomfortable truth: good intentions were not enough. The system itself had to change.

Today, we face a quieter version of the same challenge. There are no indictments in education. No headlines about corruption.

But there is something just as serious: a system that does not consistently deliver for students, and does not consistently correct itself when it falls short. That is not a scandal. But it is a failure of design.

A Choice We’ve Faced Before

Oklahoma has already made this choice once. Faced with a broken system, we chose to fix the structure—not just the symptoms. The results speak for themselves.

The question now is whether we are willing to apply that same level of honesty and resolve to public education. Because the lesson from the 1980s is clear: Systems don’t change because we wish they would. They change because we decide they must—and then redesign them to make better outcomes the natural result.

We’ve done it before.

The only question is whether we’re willing to do it again.

About the author: Ken Malloy is a retired energy policy lawyer and former federal regulatory strategist who has spent the last several years working to improve K–12 education governance in Oklahoma. He writes on civic accountability, institutional reform, and the responsibilities of self-government. He can be reached at ken@caem.org.