Tag Archives: Education Tulsa

Discipline Retains Teachers

By Jonathan Small

As policymakers seek to improve the poor academic outcomes in Oklahoma’s public schools, strengthening teachers’ ability to maintain discipline will be a key component of that effort.

State Rep. Rob Hall, R-Tulsa, recently led a legislative study exploring that challenge and declared, “A well-ordered classroom is a precondition of effective instruction. It is the foundation upon which all other educational activities are built. Because when chaos reigns in a classroom, both teaching and learning become exponentially more difficult, if not impossible.”

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Second Lady Vance’s Reading Challenge 

By Staff Report

Second Lady Usha Vance’s Summer Reading Challenge concluded this week with over 30,000 Submissions and 360,000 books read in the three months of encouraging childhood literacy.

“I am so proud of all the children who completed my Summer Reading Challenge! I hope every participant saw just how fun and exciting reading can be and that they continue reading beyond this summer. Thank you to all of the parents and teachers who encouraged their kids and students to dive into books over the past few months and to all of our partners who made this such a rewarding experience,” said Second Lady Usha Vance. 

Second Lady Usha Vance Summer Reading Challenge
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Schools Teach. Health Providers Treat.

By Deborah Campbell

Analysis: School-based healthcare is no longer limited to services traditionally connected to special education. Oklahoma already permits certain health-related and rehabilitative services through schools, while federal policy is encouraging states to expand school-based Medicaid and behavioral-health services. At the same time, school-based health centers can introduce a broader healthcare-delivery operation into a public school.

The question is not whether children need healthcare. They do. The question is whether public schools should become a larger part of healthcare delivery systems, and if so, where the boundaries should be drawn.

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Fixing Oklahoma Education

By David Arnett

It was a simple declaration to the Tulsa County Republican Men’s Club (TRMC) that first got the crowd chuckling. At a deeper level, Dr. James Taylor illustrated the struggle in our state education system. Wednesday July 8, as a candidate for the office of Oklahoma State Superintendent, Dr. James Taylor said that contrary to his critics’ assertions, “I am actually not a white Christian nationalist.”

To a broad group of racially and age mixed mostly conservative men and women, Dr. Taylor framed parents — not the state, school districts, or churches — as the primary owners of a child’s education. Further Dr. Taylor argues that classroom transparency and parental notification are non-negotiable as are literacy and math, with specific pushes for phonics, cursive writing, and insistence on grade-level reading.

Dr. James Taylor in Tulsa July 8, 2026
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The Road Not Taken Twice

By Dr. Rebecca Pellam

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.

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