By Linda Murphy

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and other global organizations have had a large role in driving the centralized control of education and the models which have been produced and proven to fail. That includes: President Clinton’s Outcomes Based Education (OBE); President Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB); and President Obama’s Common Core.

It is time to take back more local control of education and promote a model of education where teachers love to teach and students love to learn. Our primary goal for Oklahoma Public Education K-12 grade must focus on strengthening each student’s academic foundation in K-8th grade – Reading, Writing and Math. As we strengthen each individual student’s academic foundation, we will see improved results for students and for our state in: 1. Academic success in High School; 2. Completion rates in College; 3. Completion rates in Career Training programs; and 4. Availability of Skilled Workers.

We must move away from the global ideology put in place through

the National Governors’ Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). In repealing Common Core from law in 2014, we were moving in the right direction, but the standards and testing developed under Superintendent Joy Hofmeister gave us a “Common Core Lite” model. The federal law requires a state plan for education and that too was written to reflect the same ideology – enforced through student testing. We should all be able to see that the statewide test scores are proof that we are on the wrong track.

Common Core was started through benchmarks set by the OECD working with the NGA, a bi-partisan group, chaired by then-Democrat Governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano. Napolitano was later appointed by Obama to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where she got a severe public backlash for a 2009 report labeling military veterans and conservatives who have views against government as potential “domestic terrorists.”

The OECD is a non-governmental organization of the United Nations. It tests students using the PISA (Program for International Student Assessments) to measure and monitor education globally and evaluate progress on the UN Agenda 2030 SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) Goal 4 – Education. The OECD website states “In September 2015, world leaders gathered to set ambitious goals for the future of the global community. Goal 4 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) seeks to ensure ‘inclusive and equitable quality education.’”

“OECD works with the UN’s SDG 4 Steering Committee and the technical working groups that have been put in place to help build a comprehensive data system for global reporting, agree on the data sources and formulae used for reporting on the SDG 4 (education) global indicators, and on selected thematic indicators for OECD and partner countries” which includes the United States.

Oklahoma’s current low scores in student testing reflect the failed system which we must change. Local Control of education, common sense and experienced educators can solve the issues before us. We should know by now that our answers are not going to come from people who want top-down control through a centralized system and ideology that most Oklahoma’s oppose.