Empirically clear fear, loathing and education don't mix, perhaps Oklahomans will demand new direction

A few words from the University of Oklahoma president help to make everything clear

Kevin Stitt and Ryan Walters.

Yesterday, late Thursday night on KFOR, we learned Ryan Walters’ department of education stole monies allocated to improve the security of Oklahoma schools, good chance covering for federal grants for which it failed to apply.

So there’s that and a million other things needing dissecting, or an impeachment inquiry, but that’s not where we’re going today. 

Today, we keep it simple.

Today is easy, and to get things going, let’s hear from Joe Harroz, University of Oklahoma president, who spoke Wednesday about education in our beloved state.

He offered a couple money quotes, each reported out by The Oklahoman’s Murray Evans in Thursday morning’s paper.

Here’s one:

“There are a lot of headwinds that still exist,” Harroz said. “We look at it, and our students, as they’re coming out of common education — although it’s being remedied, I can tell right now — the numbers are a problem.

“When you look at those students that are qualified under the ACT standards, that are college-ready in all four ACT subjects, it’s not a good picture. Of those students, we’re 43rd in the nation. We’ve got a long way to go in making sure our students are ready to come.”

Here’s the other:

“We’re trying to attract world-class talent to come to OU, and faculty and staff, they look at the education system here in K-12 for their families,” Harroz said. “They don’t want to see drama, and they don’t want to see an education system that doesn’t give their kid the best opportunity to be successful.”

So there you go, and maybe I’d have come up with today’s thought on my own, or maybe it’s the influence of Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who has this gift of making things that could be very complicated actually very simple.

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Because when you think about those best able to administer a public education system, that might send more students to our state’s best universities, to begat an entire generation of students that might close the bachelor’s degree gap between Oklahoma’s 28.5 percent rate and a national average of 35.7 — numbers Harroz provided — who are you going with?

The book banners or those who want to give students the whole world and help them to learn to think for themselves?

A state superintendent of public instruction and governor happy to turn down federal money designed to keep students well fed and thus able to focus in the classroom, or legit education leaders, and maybe a political party, that’s been trying to put students’ interests first for years and years and years?

Will you go with the dividers, accusers and pathological liars who seek not to cooperate but to conquer, who equate legitimate oversight with, as Walters said of state senator Mary Boren, wanting to “make it where we can’t remove pedophiles from classrooms,” who equate a well rounded education turning out intelligent and critical thinkers with anti-American indoctrination when the only would-be indoctrinators are so clearly themselves, who don’t want to educate Oklahoma students nearly so much as control them, who want to hold on to a time in American history they wistfully wish to return yet never existed in the first place?

They are the parents in the neighborhood none of the kids like.

They are the self-important assholes in every checkout line who think wherever they must be next to be so much more important than anything on the agenda of those with whom they’re sharing the line.

They are the public figures who operate through threat and intimidation to make happen what they want to make happen but never the problem solvers, cooperators or partners.

Or, worse, they are those who don’t even believe their own backwardness, only in performatively unleashing it as a means to power, wealth or fame.

Like, when have we ever heard about Ryan Walters walking into a school looking to learn something himself, or to support teaching and learning where it’s actually taking place?

The answer, of course, is about never and far, far, far, far less frequently than he appears on extreme right wing media nobody watches nor listens to and some, like Fox News, people do.

Not to mention such folks perpetually suck at their jobs.

Walters can only flout the law and lie about why he’s flouting it, forever hoping Republican super majorities in the state house and senate continue sitting on their hands in efforts to not be replaced by even crazier Republicans.

If you haven’t clicked it already, you should really click on that KFOR story once finished reading this. The last thing house member Mark McBride, R-Moore, said in it was this:

“I hate to use the world ‘impeachment.’ I think we’re getting to that point.”

Governor Kevin Stitt can only sit quietly despite the fact standing up to Walters would turn his approval around in the state, just not in the world of weirdo Republicanism he can’t allow himself to cross.

It is so horrendously, abundantly and preposterously clear these are not the folks trying to create serious students, bound to attend serious universities, bound to move the numbers the president of the state’s best university wants to see move.

“That’s the one that’s holding us back,” Harroz said, referring to the bachelor degree gap between Oklahoma and the nation. “Attracting those companies and those enterprises, we’ve got to be closer to the national average in order to attract those employers with that kind of top talent.”

In fact, that’s probably what the weirdo yahoos fear most. 

If Oklahoma were to live up to its potential, it would leave them behind.

It’s time to leave them behind.

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