Oklahoma’s 2026 legislative session produced one big loser: Our kids in the public education system

Normally I’d write about who was the big winner during Oklahoma’s annual legislative session, but this year all I can think about is who emerged as the big loser.

Because, unfortunately, my kids and the state’s nearly 700,000 other public school children took home the booby prize.

I could only watch in slack-jawed disbelief as lawmakers proved, yet again, that they have no grasp of how our schools actually function on a day-to-day basis. Not to mention the policies, funding and resources needed to move that pesky performance needle.

Seeing how little they know about how to educate our children, despite spending close to $4 billion on public schools, was downright embarrassing. Plus, during the three-month session that ended May 4, they showed an unwillingness to publicly consult with the experts: members of our workforce with education degrees.

Here’s more about what they did:

• We watched them underfund what was pitched as a $2,000 raise for all teachers. (Turns out the $100 million they budgeted did not fully cover the cost. Raising pay by $2,000 actually costs districts $2,500 because of increased payroll taxes and retirement costs.)
• We watched them micromanage schools to the point where they stripped teachers of one of the few discipline tools they have at their disposal: recess. By removing educators’ ability to withhold it as a punishment for misbehaving or to ensure they finish their school work, what sort of lesson are we sending kids about our expectation that they be accountable for their behavior? 
• We watched them mandate retention of third graders who fail two standardized tests despite no concrete strategy that guarantees we’re putting highly trained and competent teachers in all of their classrooms. Because by golly, now legislators are going to punish 9-year-olds for their failures to make our classrooms the most sought after place to work in the country and in our inability to pay competitively.
• We watched them pass an unfunded mandate requiring seven more days of school without actually giving districts unrestricted money to cover the costs of those extra days. Apparently in the world inhabited by lawmakers, school buses don’t run on high-cost diesel, but are instead fueled by the hopes and dreams of children. And in their world, utility, maintenance and insurance costs aren’t rising, and districts wouldn’t need more money to pay school staff, like cafeteria workers and bus drivers, who are often hourly employees.
• But, perhaps worst of all, we watched legislators, state Superintendent Lindel Fields and lobbyists ignore the generation of Oklahoma students who are actually showing signs of being illiterate. 

Everyone has seemingly thrown their hands up in despair and abandoned the upper elementary, middle and high school students whose national test scores show that fewer than 1 in 4 are proficient in reading. These, by the way, are the students who likely missed out on fundamental educational building blocks of reading and math during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when brick-and-mortar buildings were shuttered and education was in chaos.

Rather than do the hard work of getting them back on track, we’re instead tossing our resources at the students coming up behind them. Make that make sense?

To pile on the bad news, lawmakers, as usual, seem oblivious to reality based on all the backpatting about these policies and the paltry $232 million increase in public education funding they made.

Even as lawmakers continue to brag that we’ve hit historic education spending levels, our per-pupil spending remains dead last in the surrounding states. In fact, we’re about $1 billion short of simply meeting the regional spending average of $14,975, according to reporting by Oklahoma Watch.

And only two states nationally spend less than us on their students — Utah and Idaho, the media outlet reported.

But I suppose that’s OK given legislators’ philosophy of always ignoring the purple, polka-dotted elephants in the room in favor of the easy, low hanging fruit.

Is it any wonder we’re bottom five in student outcomes?

While I agree that students shouldn’t be advancing through schools functionally illiterate, retaining small children solely based on their performance on two, high-stakes standardized tests is foolhardy.

I, for one, was one of the worst standardized test takers in the entire universe when I was 9. (I still am.) My scores at one point showed me behind grade level. After my mom questioned why as a third grader, I was being assigned second-grade level reading materials while reading complicated chapter books at home, I was given more comprehensive screening.

It turned out, those test results were wrong. I was actually more than proficient. I was reading at a fifth or sixth grade level, and my elementary school had to move me mid-school year to the most advanced reading class.

Thank goodness that Pennsylvania educators were respected enough to not face testing mandates and were empowered to decide which students should be retained based on actual measures.

Maybe our schools would function better if Oklahoma lawmakers embraced the same philosophy of trusting their local schools and teachers to do what’s in the best interest of their students.