TULSA, Okla. — Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) gave specific details about what education reforms he is hoping to achieve in his second term, especially now that Ryan Walters is in charge of the Oklahoma State Department of Education as State Superintendent of Public Instruction.
FOX23 asked Stitt to provide some specific examples of what he has in mind aside from general terms like “school choice” and “parental control” and asked him to point to a specific city, county, state, or even country that is doing what he hopes to achieve so people can begin to look into what will be put on the table for their children and neighborhood schools.
“We need the dollars to fund the student not systems,” Stitt said. “We’re talking about doing things like what’s going on in Arizona.”
In Arizona, the system follows the formula that the funding follows where the student actually learns, and it is a system that is friendlier to private school voucher use. If a student attends a private school, the money is given to parents in the form of a voucher to assist with education costs. If a student goes from a public school to a private school, the money allocated for that student would no longer be received by the public school.
Also in Arizona, if the student never went into the public school system in the first place, that money would not be allocated to the public school but would go back into the state’s general fund.
It is very heavy on attendance tracking.
Opponents of these kinds of plans have said public dollars should remain in public schools for the benefit of the students whose families can’t afford private education. Other arguments include private school vouchers open up students to for-profit operations that are more interested in making money than they are actually educating students. They have pointed to online charter schools in other states inflating attendance records in order to get more cash. Some Oklahoma education groups have also said Oklahoma schools aren’t properly funded in the first place, and so they have never been able to live up to their full potential and any loss of money through vouchers and charter schools simply takes money away from a system that’s never been able to fully shine.
Stitt said under the reforms he and Walters will work together to propose things like test scores, graduation rates, and college preparations will speak as to which schools are working and which schools aren’t. Parents, free to choose and transfer their students to a better district or private or charter option, will be able to put their student into a system that works, and the money they’ve paid in taxes will follow and help cover the costs.
“If they’re teaching the kids what the parents want, and they’re getting the kids college ready or career ready, there’s nothing that’s going to keep kids from going to that school,” Stitt said. “In fact, they’re going to be more attracted to those schools.”
Stitt already pointed to one education reform put in place under his first term that is giving parents some choices now, public school transfers. Under open public school transfer, if a public school district has room, and a parent can get their student to the school they want to go to versus the school they would be enrolled in simply because of their address, they can transfer into a district that a family prefers for their children.
Stitt said if he can achieve what he hopes, there could very well be some challenges for poorly performing schools and their operations because in theory most or all of the parents would have been free to pull their kids from the poorly performing school and no money would’ve been automatically given to a place that is failing and going through the motions and moving kids up the next grade level simply because another school year has passed.
“If they are failing, and they have high drop out rates, or they’re not getting kids ready for careers, then yeah, we should do something different,” he said.
Parents shouldn’t feel their kids are trapped in poor performing schools simply because it’s the closest option or near where they live and simply because that is just the district’s boundaries they traditionally would have to go to because of their address, Stitt said.
He also pointed to specialized career-focused high schools where students could complete their general education requirements while also training for the career they like. Currently, there is an aviation high school in Norman, where students can train in aviation careers like being an airline pilot while also working on their diploma.
“That gives them a head start on where those students and their families want them to be when it comes to entering the workforce and doing something they have a passion for,” Stitt said.
Bills are still being crafted for the next legislative session, and as of this writing, there are no bills filed that would increase the number of vouchers or change the current funding formula for public schools. Last year, the State Senate passed a bill to increase the number of vouchers given out by the state, but it failed in the Oklahoma House of Representatives after never receiving a hearing.
House members, especially those in rural districts, argued that their neighborhood schools are not just the closest option but the best and often only option to provide an education to their students, and they need every dollar they can get to provide quality operations. Some also pointed out that the nearest private school was more than a half hour’s drive one-way for families interested in using a voucher.
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