By Reed Downey, Jr.

Moore Public Schools had a school board election on April 7th. The Moore School District held a public debate to educate school patrons on which candidate would be the best suited for the seat. There were two candidates. One is running for reelection, the other is running to replace the current board member.

An independent journalist who writes on education issues attended the school board debate and asked the challenger for the seat what the reading proficiency was in the Moore Public Schools. Her answer was 75%. The sitting board member said she didn’t know.

Therein lies the problem, one exhibited total ignorance, the other of willful ignorance and dereliction of responsibility. The actual percentages of kids proficient in reading and math in the district are 37% and 33%, respectively. There are 23,567 kids in the Moore School District, which means that 8,768 can read at grade level, and 14,799 cannot! There are 7,762 proficient in Math, and 15,805 are not! (Source: 2025 schoolreportcards.ok.gov)

To highlight the failure of Oklahoma Public Schools to educate our kids, I selected 11 school districts in southcentral Oklahoma to illustrate academic failure. There is a total of 10,773 students in those eleven districts. The average proficiency across the 11 districts is 31% in English and 26% in Math. Of the total number of students, 3,359 are proficient in English, and 2,814 are proficient in Math. Put another way, 7,415 kids can’t read at grade level, and 7,949 can’t do math at grade level.

These results are deplorable and catastrophic for kids as well as for the future of Oklahoma. Unfortunately, the results are not unique; it’s the same across all Oklahoma public school districts.

The district school board is fully responsible for ensuring that kids receive an education that will allow them to thrive after high school; a small majority will, but the vast majority will have a very difficult time. Employers will be deprived of desperately needed skilled workers. For the kids, it leads to a downward spiral into poverty. In 2023, the poverty rate was 15.9%, and for kids it was 20%.8%. Compared to other states, Oklahoma ranks sixth overall and seventh for children.

Our colleges of education are doing a poor job of training future teachers and, of late, have been more focused on teaching social justice, LGBTQ+, Transgender ideology, and cultural Marxism than on teaching how to effectively teach. We have good, dedicated teachers, but we are losing them due to lack administrative support, disruptive classroom behavior, and parents who fail to discipline their kids. Schools should not and are not in the business of parenting! How bad does it have to get before we realize there must be structural changes in school boards, how we train our teachers, and in the classroom environment?

The current system is not working because no one is being held accountable for such dismal scholastic results. Why do we have pornographic books in our schools by accident or design? W. Cleon Skousen published The Naked Communist in March 1961. The Goals were gleaned from the writings of current or former communists. In 1963, the 45 Goals were read into the Congressional Record by Albert S. Herlong, Jr. (D-Florida). The 25th Goal is to eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press. The 26th Goal is to present homosexuality, degeneracy, and promiscuity as “normal, natural, and healthy.”

Who is most vulnerable to such material? Kids!

In 1960, Sex Education was prompted by a “Crisis” of venereal diseases and teenage pregnancies. Even though the rate of gonorrhea infection had been declining every year from 1950 to 1958, and the rate of syphilis by 1960 was half of the rate of 1950. The rate of teenage pregnancy had declined for more than a decade.

What happened after Sex Education was introduced? The rate of gonorrhea tripled between 1956 and 1975. The rate of syphilis continued to decline, but not nearly as sharply as in earlier years.

“Beginning in the years before sex education was introduced into the public schools on a large scale in the 1960s, the birth rate among unmarried females, aged 15 to 19 years, was 12.6 per thousand in 1950, 15.3 in 1960, 22.4 in 1970, and 27.6 in 1980. At the end of the century in 1999, it was 40.4 per thousand. As a percentage of all births to females in the same age bracket, both married and unmarried, births to unmarried females in this age bracket were 13.4 percent of all births to females of these ages in 1950, 14.8 percent in 1960, 29.5 percent in 1970, and 47.6 percent in 1980. As of the year 2000, more than three-quarters of all the births to females in this age bracket-78.7 percent – were to unmarried females.”

“The reason is not hard to find: The percentage of unmarried teenage females who had engaged in sex was higher at every age from 15 through 19 by 1976 than it was just five years earlier. Nor is it hard to understand why, when the specifics of what was called ‘Sex Education’ included such things as this: A popular sex instructional program for junior high school student, aged 13 and 14, shows film strip of four naked couples, two homosexual and two heterosexual, performing a variety of sexually explicit acts, and teachers are warned with a cautionary note from the sex educators not to show the materials to parents or friends: ‘Many of the materials of this program shown to people outside the context of the program itself can evoke misunderstanding and difficulties.’”

(Source: Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell)

The Communists have been very successful; our school libraries are littered with pornographic books, and the tolerance of LGBTQ and Transgender ideology is being taught in our schools.

The school board has the authority to prevent such books from being in the library and to remove them. However, when confronted at a school board meeting, parents who demand removal are ruled out of order and told to sit down. Isn’t it interesting that when a parent reads from the pornographic books, the board demands they stop reading the text, as it is too graphic and gross to be read in public? How then is it proper for underage kids to read it? Kids do not need prompting about having sex. Their hormones peak during the teenage years. School Boards have the authority to remove sexually explicit, pornographic books. Why don’t they?

The bottom line is that no one is being held accountable for our schools' academic failure. The school boards, as they are currently structured, must be changed, and the replacement must be held accountable for the outcomes. There are 70 school board members in the 11 districts that I illustrated. They are not holding the educators responsible for the low academic achievement in their district; there are 500-plus school districts in Oklahoma with more than 2500 school board members, none of whom are being held accountable for the dismal academic achievement, pornographic books, or allowing LGBTQ, Transgender, and social Marxism to be taught to our kids.

Ultimately, it is the citizens' responsibility to see that kids are properly educated, but they are not! Why? Either they don't know about the very low achievement scores, or, God forbid, they don’t care! I choose to believe the former rather than the latter.

Therefore, I believe we need to return to a county superintendent and a county school board, with board members selected by the county commissioners. The appointed board members hire the county superintendent to begin the process of vastly improving student performance. The board provides the superintendent with the support to make the necessary changes as he/she deems it appropriate to achieve the board's goals. At the end of each school year, when the Standard Test Results are available, the commissioners should call for the County Superintendent and the County School Board to present on the county schools' academic performance. In addition, the commissioners should issue a press release to local media detailing the year’s academic performance, and, at the end of the year, each school's academic results should be included with each property tax bill.

It is far easier to hold three county commissioners, one superintendent, and five county board members accountable than 11 superintendents and 70 board members publicly accountable.

Will the county commissioners appoint their buddies? Likely, that is why the public accounting at the commissioners’ meeting, the press release, and the inclusion of academic results in the property tax bill are so important. If their buddies don’t perform, they will be responsible. Once the public knows what is happening in their schools, it is their responsibility to make the necessary changes. To be effective, there must be total transparency and accountability!

In conclusion, change will only take place when we, the citizens of Oklahoma, come to realize that our children are not receiving the education the future will demand. The likelihood of making major changes through the legislature is extremely unlikely. Therefore, the only option may be to use the Initiative Petition process.

How much more damage are we willing to inflict on our kids’ future before we resolve to say enough? Education is the ball game, and we are losing!