Forty years ago, Oklahoma learned a hard lesson about local power without oversight. Some now want its schools to return to a system it once abandoned for a reason.
In the early 1980s, the FBI ran an undercover operation in Oklahoma called OKSCAM. What it uncovered was a public corruption scandal remarkable for its sheer scale: at least 230 convictions touching 60 of the state’s 77 counties, all tied to a tidy and depressingly simple scheme (Holloway & Meyers, 1992). Suppliers padded invoices for road-building materials. Commissioners signed off. Kickbacks flowed back. Rinse and repeat.
It is tempting to file OKSCAM under “bad people taking advantage of the system,” close the report, and move on. That is the comfortable reading, and it is the wrong one. The reason it is wrong has very little to do with roads. It is a lesson about what happens when public money is spent where no one independent can see it — and four decades later, that lesson is being relearned in Oklahoma’s public schools.
The scandal was a structure, not a character flaw
When political scientists Harry Holloway and Frank Meyers spent years studying the scandal — interviewing nearly half the county commissioners who held office after the prosecutions — they were chasing a genuinely puzzling question. How does corruption become normal? How do hundreds of “good ol’ boys,” most of them locally popular and respected, end up doing the same illegal thing across an entire state, often without seeing themselves as the villains of the story?
Their answer was not mainly about character. It was about architecture. Oklahoma’s county government had been built, decade after decade, in a way that handed individual commissioners an unusually powerful combination: control over real money and weak independent scrutiny over how that money was spent. On paper, the three commissioners of each county were supposed to act as a governing body. In practice, each commissioner largely ran his own road district, with decisions about what to buy and from whom sitting close to one person’s discretion. The structure did not simply permit abuse; it made abuse easy to rationalize (Holloway & Meyers, 1992).
The warning signs had been visible for a long time. In 1958, a state legislative subcommittee chaired by Senator Hugh Sandlin examined county purchasing and named county government a “spawning ground” for corruption (Holloway & Meyers, 1992). Nobody acted on it. Twenty-some years later, the FBI did what the structure had failed to do itself.
Here is the part worth carrying forward: institutions democratic in intent — locally elected, locally accountable, close to the people — can still lend themselves to corrupt ends when public money moves through systems without independent visibility. Good intentions were not the problem. Local control was not the problem. The absence of independent eyes was the problem.
What Oklahoma learned
The reforms that followed OKSCAM are the more useful half of the story. Oklahoma did not abolish counties, and it did not centralize everything in Oklahoma City. It did something narrower and smarter: it broke up the concentration of unwatched power. Reformers separated the commissioners’ roles as purchasing and receiving agents, routed major equipment purchases through the state’s central system, tightened bidding limits, and strengthened county record-keeping (Holloway & Meyers, 1992). OKSCAM also helped create the political conditions for broader ethics reform, including the Oklahoma Ethics Commission, written into the state constitution by initiative petition in 1990 as Article XXIX (State Question 627).
The lesson Oklahoma drew was structural. The fix for concentrated local power was not less local government — it was more visibility inside it. Don’t let one office own the whole process. Make the money traceable. Let someone outside the room see in. That lesson cost the state an enormous amount of pain to learn. The question now is whether it is being remembered.
The same road, again
Shift forward four decades, from county roads to public schools, and look at what the state’s own auditor has been finding.
In February 2025, after a two-and-a-half-year investigation, State Auditor Cindy Byrd released her office’s audit of Tulsa Public Schools — the largest district in Oklahoma. The headline finding that traveled fastest was the criminal one: Devin Fletcher, a former district administrator, pleaded guilty in federal court to a scheme that drew hundreds of thousands of dollars from the district and its foundation through fabricated invoices and inflated payments. He was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and ordered to pay more than $593,000 in restitution (U.S. Department of Justice, 2024). The audit itself put the embezzlement total at $824,503 — more than what was charged in the federal plea (Oklahoma State Auditor and Inspector, 2025).
Falsified invoices, public money quietly redirected, a trusted insider working the gaps in the system — if that mechanism sounds familiar, it should.
But the auditor herself was careful to say the crime was not the whole story. As she put it, the administrator’s misconduct soon proved to be the result of a much larger problem (Oklahoma State Auditor and Inspector, 2025).
The larger problem was structural. Auditors reviewed roughly $37.7 million in spending from 2015 to 2023 and identified more than 1,400 irregularities across some 900 transactions involving at least 90 vendors. More than $25 million had been spent without following competitive bidding requirements — nearly two-thirds of the spending reviewed. Hundreds of vendors had been paid without proof that services were ever delivered; some invoices listed no services at all. Payments were routinely structured just below the $50,000 threshold that would have triggered board scrutiny, a pattern the auditor described as “an intentional attempt to bypass policy and undermine board oversight” (Oklahoma State Auditor and Inspector, 2025; Oklahoma Voice, 2025).
Strip away the specifics and you are left with the same two ingredients that produced OKSCAM: control over real money, and not enough independent visibility into how it was spent. Had the board exercised the oversight state law already required of it, the auditor argued, it would have been positioned to catch the fraud. The structure failed first. The crime came through the gap.
None of this means Tulsa is uniquely bad, or that its schools are full of criminals. Most districts will never have an embezzler. But many public systems carry the same control weaknesses — gaps between who spends the money and who can actually see it — that make misconduct easier to miss and mismanagement easier to normalize.
The path the state is on
Two things are true about Oklahoma education governance right now, and they sit in tension.
The first is that the appetite for reform is real. Oklahoma has spent years near the bottom of national education rankings, and voters know it. Polling from the Oklahoma Center for Education Policy finds residents hold a strongly negative view of the state’s schools and are open to a wide range of changes (Oklahoma Center for Education Policy, 2024). The state has poured in money — spending now runs into the billions, with recent budgets adding hundreds of millions more. The will to do something is not lacking. The second is that much of the structural debate has been about who holds power rather than who can see how power is used.
The recurring proposals tell the story. There is a long-running push to make the state superintendent an appointed rather than elected office, which would concentrate selection power in the governor; the most recent version, House Joint Resolution 1055, advanced through the House in early 2026 before stalling in the Senate (Oklahoma Voice, 2026). There are competing bills to reshuffle the State Board of Education, with the legislature wanting appointment power of its own as a counterweight. Lawmakers have openly acknowledged the worry that consolidating these choices could hand one office unintended extra influence.
And an older idea has been circulating again: a return to county superintendents of schools, pitched as a way to wring efficiency out of a state with too many districts. Oklahoma tried that before. The elected office of county superintendent of schools was phased out under House Bill 1017, the 1990 education reform package, with the last elected county superintendent’s term ending in 1993. HB 1017 emerged in the same late-1980s reform climate that OKSCAM helped create — a climate in which Oklahoma was finally willing to look hard at structures it had tolerated for too long. The county-superintendent office was not abandoned because local control is bad. It was abandoned because the courthouse model let an elected county officer treat schools as part of a political base, where a position or a contract might follow loyalty rather than merit, and where the quality of a child’s schooling could depend on which side of a county line the family lived on.
Set that history next to the OKSCAM lesson and the pattern is hard to miss. Almost every current proposal is about rearranging authority: moving appointment power from voters to a governor, from a governor to a legislature, from many districts to fewer and bigger ones. Very few are about building independent visibility — the thing OKSCAM identified as the missing ingredient, and the thing the Tulsa audit shows is still missing.
The instinct after a governance failure is to grab the levers: put the right person in charge, consolidate the boxes on the org chart, reassign the power. It feels decisive. But OKSCAM is a forty-year-old warning that concentration is not the same as accountability. The county commissioners were local authorities — elected, close to the people, known in their communities. None of that was enough when the structure gave them discretion over money without enough independent eyes on the transaction.
That is the caution Oklahoma should carry into any serious conversation about school consolidation. Folding roughly 500 school districts into 77 county-sized units would not automatically close the gap between spending and oversight. Bigger units do not watch themselves better just because they are bigger; they simply have more money to hide and more distance between the people spending it and the families it is meant to serve. It could create 77 larger arenas in which the gap can hide — each with boards that, as Tulsa shows, can still be routed around if internal controls are weak. Holloway and Meyers reached the same conclusion about Oklahoma’s splintered county system: fragmented governance makes it difficult for voters at large to control officials effectively (Holloway & Meyers, 1992). Past a certain point, the people inside the institution become the constituency that matters most, and the public’s practical ability to see and influence what is happening shrinks. That is not accountability. It is opacity with a larger service area.
Information that arrives too late
The Tulsa audit also shows the cost of the other missing piece: neutral, trusted information produced before a crisis rather than reconstructed years after one.
Because no such standing source existed, the Tulsa findings landed in the middle of a political brawl. The audit had been requested by a governor publicly feuding with the district’s leadership; the board, in turn, accused the auditor’s office of politicizing the process, noting that the auditor was running for higher office (Oklahoma Voice, 2025). When the only deep look at a district’s books comes two and a half years late, after relationships have collapsed and political incentives have hardened, the findings are no longer received as information. They are received as ammunition.
That is what opacity does. It does not merely hide waste — it manufactures the politics that make waste impossible to address calmly. A functioning oversight system should not depend on scandal, feud, or prosecution to produce visibility. Public money should be legible while it is being spent, not years later when everyone is already choosing sides.
This generation’s report
The Sandlin Report went unread for more than twenty years. The risks it named were real the whole time; they simply were not urgent enough, to enough people, to force action. Then they were — at the cost of a scandal that sent officials from most of the state’s counties to prison and took years of federal investigation to unwind.
The Tulsa audit is this generation’s Sandlin Report. It does not allege that Oklahoma’s schools are criminal enterprises. It says something quieter and more important: that the structures meant to make public money visible are not doing their job, that a determined bad actor found the gap, and that the gap is still there.
Whether that warning is heeded is a choice the state is making right now, in every proposal about boards and superintendents and consolidation. The most recent push — to make the state superintendent appointed — collapsed in the Senate in late April, with its own sponsor citing what Oklahomans had told her: keep the office elected. Voters, polled by the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Education Policy, opposed the change two-to-one (Oklahoma Voice, 2026). The instinct to consolidate has been answered. The instinct to see has not been.
Oklahoma already paid full price once for the lesson that local power without independent eyes invites the very abuse everyone claims to oppose. The county commissioners learned it the hard way. The reforms that followed — separating the roles that spent the money from the roles that signed off, routing major purchases through state systems, making the books legible to people outside the room — were not glamorous, yet they worked.
The question worth asking of every current education proposal is not who ends up in charge? It is the question OKSCAM should have permanently retired: who, outside the room, can actually see? Oklahoma built that answer before, on purpose, for a system that had failed it. It does not have to wait for its next audit to build it again.
About the author: Dr. Rebecca Pellam, EdD, is founder of Diamond P Academic Consulting and a literacy researcher and advocate. With classroom and reading specialist experience in Oklahoma and Texas and a doctorate in education, she writes the Oklahoma Education Forum on Substack.