December 2019 Archives

It's a commonplace sentiment among fans of streetcars that a cabal of car and tire manufacturers bought out city streetcar systems one by one and shut them down, replacing the wonderful old PCC trolley cars with diesel-belching buses. In reality, there were many factors undermining the popularity and financial feasibility of streetcars: Municipal governments fixed the fares too low for franchisees to make a profit; jitneys competed with streetcars for passengers, offering faster and more comfortable service; the automobile became more affordable, fueling urban growth beyond the reach of the trolley systems. This last factor was the nail in the coffin: More and more people were driving automobiles, the streetcars were blocking traffic, and the tracks were damaging autos.

For example, in the May 26, 1922, edition of the Tulsa World, reader A. E. Stephens complains in a letter to the editor about the decrepit state of the roads leading into Tulsa. Stephens' bitterest complaint is reserved for North Peoria Avenue:

Entering from the north we have for the welcome of out-of-town visitors, the Avenue of Horrors, or our North Peoria street sinkhole, with the only spot where driving is possible, taken up by our antedeluvian relic, the Tulsa Street railway, with rails protruding 4 to 12 inches above the other part of the street. The Avenue of Horrors also takes visitors through the Plunge of Death, or the Peoria Street viaduct under the Frisco railway.

Maps show the TSR tracks extending along Peoria from King Street to 1st Street, where it joined the Kendall branch on the way into downtown. Stephens also complained about the Third Street viaduct over the Frisco tracks, the main route into Tulsa from Sand Springs, "which is a very narrow, roughly paved street and also infested with our old eyesore, the decrepit Tulsa Street railway."

Gil Propp grew up in Brookline, Mass., between the B and C line of the MBTA Green Line streetcar network. His curiosity about some oddities -- the lack of an A line, discrepancies between old and new maps about the E line -- led him to research the history and evolution of the MBTA's streetcar system. A few years ago he turned his research into a short film called "Streetcar Tracks: A Reconstruction of Boston's Lost Streetcar Empire." The film and its script are available for viewing on bostonstreetcars.com, and you can view "Streetcar Tracks" directly on YouTube.

Propp has also posted many detailed articles on the site about the individual lines in the Boston fixed-rail transit system and the slow consolidation of the network and elimination of streetcar lines to the system we see today. The article "Why Are There Still Streetcars in Boston?" offers a compelling explanation for the survival of a handful of lines -- and why so many others disappeared: "The answer is simple: they have private right-of-ways that lead to subways."

The extension of subway tunnels prior to World War II allowed three streetcar lines (B, C, and E) to avoid busy intersections like Kenmore Square. After surfacing, the three lines also had reserved right-of-ways down the middle of Commonwealth Ave., Beacon Street, and Huntington Ave., respectively. Only the E line did not have a reserved right-of-way for its full length, and at the end of 1985, service was cut back to the end of the reserved right-of-way at Heath St. The fourth currently operating branch, the D line to Riverside, is on a former steam railway line that was linked into the subway tunnels. While the A line to Watertown also connected to the subway tunnels, it was street-running all the way, impeding car traffic. In Cambridge, there had been street-running trolleys that fed into the subway via an incline at Harvard Square. These were replaced with trackless trolley buses that used the same overhead wires but could pull to the curb for loading passengers, while the underground tracks were converted from overhead trolley wires to third-rail operation.

One other Boston streetcar line has survived: The Mattapan High Speed line, which runs in a private right-of-way, not parallel to any street and thus not easily bustituted, and provides a connection to the Ashmont branch of the Red Line. This is the last line of the MBTA that runs the old PCC cars -- when I was in college they also ran on the C and E branches of the Green Line.

I have often wondered how Tulsa's streetcar system might have evolved had it and the city begun 20 years earlier. I suspect there would have been at least two cut-and-cover subways through downtown -- one along Main Street and another along 3rd Street, with other east-west streetcar lines being rerouted to take advantage. That might have kept the Oklahoma Union Traction interurban to Sapulpa (now the Tulsa Sapulpa Union Railway) and the Sand Springs Railway interurban, both of which had dedicated right-of-ways outside of downtown. Perhaps a dedicated right-of-way along 3rd or 11th Streets would have been built to maintain service to the east.

Governor Kevin Stitt wants to renegotiate Oklahoma's exclusivity agreement with the state's tribal governments and to increase the state's percentage of gambling revenue from tribal casinos. The original compacts, established starting in 2004, expire at the end of this year. The exclusivity fee starts at 4% for lower levels of income but maxes out at 6%. Originally covering only card games and electronic slot machines (aka one-armed bandits), the compacts were amended to permit ball and dice games, such as roulette and craps.

Here are some links to source material on the topic. I'll be on KFAQ at 8:00 Thursday morning to discuss the issue with Pat Campbell.

• Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA): This is the Federal law that enables tribal casinos if a state permits the same class of gambling, provided that a compact is agreed between the tribe and the state. Here's the text of the IGRA, Public Law 100-497.
• National Indian Gaming Commission: Federal agency that administers the IGRA.
• State-Tribal Gaming Act (STGA): Oklahoma Statutes, Title 3A, Sections 261 through 282, which was passed in the 2004 Legislative Session as SB 1252 and ratified by referendum in November 2004 as SQ 712. Sections were amended in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2017, and 2018.
• Title 3A, Section 280: This section of the State-Tribal Gaming Act offers the Model Tribal Gaming Compact to all federally recognized Indian tribes and earmarks the state revenues to the general fund (12%), the Educational Reform Revolving Fund (88%), and the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services for treatment of compulsive gambling ($250,000 per year).
• Title 3A, Section 280.1: Contains the supplement to the Model Tribal Gaming Compact allowing for "non-house-banked table games" that involve a wheel, ball, or dice. This was approved in 2018 as HB 3375.
• Title 3A, Section 281: This section contains the Model Tribal Gaming Compact.
• Gaming Compliance Unit (GCU): Department of the state Office of Management & Enterprise Services (OMES) responsible for enforcing the terms of the STGA
• GCU Oklahoma Indian Gaming FAQ: Useful Q&A summary of the law
• GCU list of compacted tribes: 34 federally recognized tribes currently have compacts with the state
• Oklahoma Gaming Compliance Unit FY 2018 Annual Report: Revenues with breakdowns by tribe and type of game for the year ending June 30, 2018
• data.ok.gov: Tribal Gaming Exclusivity Fees: In the first three months of FY2020, Oklahoma has collected $39,366,737 from the tribes.

The language at issue is in Part 15, Subsection B of the model compact:

B. This Compact shall have a term which will expire on January 1, 2020, and at that time, if organization licensees or others are authorized to conduct electronic gaming in any form other than pari-mutuel wagering on live horse racing pursuant to any governmental action of the state or court order following the effective date of this Compact, the Compact shall automatically renew for successive additional fifteen-year terms; provided that, within one hundred eighty (180) days of the expiration of this Compact or any renewal thereof, either the tribe or the state, acting through its Governor, may request to renegotiate the terms of subsections A and E of Part 11 of this Compact.

Subsection A of Part 11 deals with exclusivity fees to be paid to the state; Subsection E of Part 11 deals with penalties that would apply to the state if the state were to allow operation of gaming machines in excess of those permitted by the STGA.

Organization licensee appears to be defined in Section 262, which refers back to Title 3A, Section 205.2, part of the Oklahoma Horse Racing Act. Here are the current Rules for Racetrack Gaming from the Oklahoma Horse Racing Commission.

MORE:

Pat Campbell discusses the issue with State Sen. Nathan Dahm (starting about 4:15 before the end of the segment).
Pat Campbell discusses tribal casinos with former State Rep. Wayne Pettigrew, who was one of a handful of Republican legislators to break with their party colleagues to put gambling on the ballot in 2004.
I opposed all three gambling measures on the 2004 ballot. Click to find out why.

The United Kingdom will hold a general election tomorrow, Thursday, December 12, 2019. All 650 seats in the House of Commons, the popularly-elected house of the national legislature, will be on the ballot. Voters cast a ballot only for their local Member of Parliament (MP), but the leader of the party commanding a majority after the election will be asked by Queen Elizabeth II to form a government, so one's vote is simultaneously a vote for one's legislator and, indirectly, a vote for which party will run the executive branch.

Each constituency elects a single member of Parliament. There are no party primaries. Candidates are selected and nominated by registered political parties. Each candidate pays a £500 deposit to be on the ballot, which is lost if the candidate receives less than 5% of the constituency vote. In the last election in 2017, 47.5% of all candidates lost their deposits.

Election is by plurality, with no runoff, which is called "first-past-the-post." Nearly every seat has at least three candidates standing, so a large number of seats will be won with less than a 50% majority. In 2017, one seat in Wales was won with 29.2% of the vote and a slim 104-vote advantage over the second place candidate. About 40 seats were won with less than 40% of the vote.

In the first-past-the-post environment, canny voters will conduct a pre-runoff in their heads, calculating which two or three candidates will have the most support from their fellow voters, then voting tactically to block the least preferred candidate from winning and to avoid splitting the votes of like-minded voters among multiple candidates. National polls play a big role in shaping the perception of who stands a chance of winning, but the picture in a given constituency may vary significantly. Tactical voting websites have sprung up to assist voters who want to make the best choice in their area to help their principal goal -- whether that be ensuring the UK's departure from the European Union (known as Brexit for short), preventing Brexit, or blocking the Conservative Party from achieving a majority. For example, oneuk.org, Brexit Pledge, Tactical Brexit, and Unite2Leave all provide independent analyses to tell pro-Brexit voters whether the Tory, Brexit Party, or another candidate is the best choice in their particular constituency, while Brexit Kitemark is focused on about 70 key seats where credible Brexiteers are running. There are concerns that some ostensibly independent tactical voting apps and websites are in fact fronts for political parties.

Shortly after polls close at 10 pm British Standard Time (4 pm Tulsa time) exit poll results will be released. TV and radio coverage will start right around the same time. Here are a few places on the internet where Americans might be able to see and hear the results come in:

• LBC, a commercial radio station, will stream audio and video of results coverage from 4 pm Tulsa time.
• BBC Radio 4 will offer live audio-only coverage from 3:45 pm Tulsa time.
• Sky News, the UK sister network of Fox News, will be streaming TV coverage, which should be viewable in the US
• BBC One will offer televised coverage, but it may or may not be viewable in the US, because the BBC, funded by domestic television license fees, exercises tight geographical controls on access to its TV programming

C-SPAN used to simulcast British election coverage, but it isn't on their schedule. BBC America is more America than BBC; they'll be showing The Princess Bride twice back-to-back, rather than election coverage.

Ballots are counted by hand and results are announced one constituency at a time. Constituencies in Sunderland, County Durham, in the northeast of England, are typically the first to report results at about 11 pm (5 pm our time). All but a handful of seats will have reported by 7 am Friday (1 am our time).

Members of the House of Commons are elected in single-member districts, each with an average population of about 103,000 in England and in Northern Ireland, 93,000 in Scotland, 78,000 in Wales. The average electorate (number of eligible voters) ranges from about 56,000 in Wales to about 72,000 in England. By comparison, the average Oklahoma state senate district had a population of 78,153 in 2010, and the average congressional district had a population of 750,268.

National exit polls are used to forecast an overall "swing" from the previous election result to this election between the two main parties, the Conservative Party and the Labour Party, which is then applied uniformly to predict how that will translate into seats changing hands.

The actual swing of votes is anything but uniform and will be affected by which parties are standing in which seats. By convention, the parties give the sitting Speaker of the House a bye, because it is supposed to be a non-partisan position. The Conservatives (aka the Tories) and Labour (the socialist party of the UK) will contest all of the other 631 seats in Britain. The Liberal Democrats, a party that currently holds 20 seats, have entered into an anti-Brexit pact with the Green Party and Plaid Cymru, so they have stood down their candidates in 20 seats in Britain. The Brexit Party, which won the European Parliament elections in May on a platform of a clean-break separation from the European Union, opted to stand down in all 317 seats which were won by the Tories in 2017, so as not to split the pro-Brexit vote and put Britain's departure at risk. The Brexit Party is hoping to win the votes of working-class Labour voters who support leaving the EU, who are alienated by the party of their forebears as it becomes more metropolitan and globalist in outlook, but unwilling to vote for a Tory party they associate with the upper class, so the party is contesting 276 seats, mainly in the industrial Labour heartlands of South Wales, the English Midlands, and the North of England.

Further complicating the picture are parties that only run in the constituent countries of the UK: The Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru (the first word is pronounced to rhyme with "blithe," the second is pronounced COOM-ree) runs only in Wales, and the Scottish National Party, which pushes for Scotland's independence, runs only in Scotland. Northern Ireland's voters are split between those who want to remain in the UK (Unionists) and those who want to reunite with the Republic of Ireland (Republicans), the former principally represented by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the latter by Sinn Fein (pronounced Shin Feyn), the political branch of the terrorist Irish Republican Army. Unusually, four seats in NI are being contested by Conservatives.

I've been fascinated by British politics since the late '70s, starting with Margaret Thatcher's rise to power. In 1992, the first post-Thatcher election and the last pre-internet election, I knew that C-SPAN's simulcast of the BBC would be pre-empted in Tulsa by the weekly City Council meeting, so I drove to Claremore and rented a room at a motel that would have cable and C-SPAN, but my effort was wasted because the House of Representatives session lasted well into the evening. We taped the rebroadcast and watched it the next day, and I was delighted to hear my name read out as a Conservative victor in a marginal seat; 15 years later, that other Michael Bates (nowadays Lord Bates of Langbaurgh) gave me a tour of his city of Durham.

A brief bit of background after the jump:

UPDATE 2019/12/03: Here is the final list of candidates who filed for the February / April 2020 school board and municipal elections in Tulsa County. The following school board seats had only a single candidate file (Office No. 5, unless otherwise noted):

This is a reworking of a post from four years ago, but it has been updated with current information about open seats and candidates, and there is some new information below.

We are in the midst of the annual filing period for public school board positions in Oklahoma, which ends Wednesday, December 4, 2019, at 5 p.m. K-12 school districts will have a single seat, Office No. 5, up for election to a five-year term. K-8 dependent districts (Keystone is the only one in Tulsa County) have three seats that rotate through three-year terms. Liberty, in far-south Tulsa County, also has Office No. 4 on the ballot. After the first day of filing in Tulsa County, 9 seats have drawn one candidate, but only 4 have drawn two candidates. No one has filed in Skiatook, Broken Arrow, or Keystone school districts, or the Tulsa Technology Center board.

Filing is also open for a number of municipalities; candidates have filed for city office in Collinsville, Owasso, and Sand Springs.

(Here is the current list of candidates for Tulsa County school board seats. And here's where you'll find maps showing school district and election district boundaries.)

School board filing always comes at a busy and distracted time of year. As I've written before, it's almost as if school board elections were deliberately scheduled to escape the notice of potential candidates and voters.

The school board primary election will be held on February 11, 2020, for those seats where there are three or more candidates. If no one wins a majority of the vote in the February election, a runoff will be held on April 7, 2020. If a seat draws only two candidates, the election will be held on April 7, 2020.

The Tulsa district, largest in the state, has two out of seven seats up for election to a four-year term, Offices No. 5 and 6.

Tulsa Election District 5 is midtown Tulsa, bounded by Riverside Drive, Yale Avenue, 11th Street, and 51st Street, minus the area NW of 21st and Peoria, minus the area SE of 41st and Harvard, and plus a few streets south of I-44 between Riverside and Peoria.

The current member for District 5 is Brian Hosmer, a professor of Western American History at the University of Tulsa. He was appointed in February to replace Cindy Decker, who was elected in 2016 and resigned to serve as director of Educare, a project of the George Kaiser Family Foundation.

As of Monday night, Hosmer has not filed for re-election, but Kelsey Royce and Shane Saunders have filed for the seat. Royce, a registered Democrat, wrote a strongly critical analysis of Tulsa Public School finances published in Tulsa Kids in September 2019. Saunders, a conservative Republican, is current vice chairman and former chairman of Iron Gate, head of Trident Energy, and served as press secretary and legislative assistant to Congressman John Sullivan. He applied to fill the vacant seat when Decker resigned. It looks like either candidate that has filed so far would be an improvement and would hold the administration accountable on fiscal issues, but it remains to be seen where they stand on educational and social issues affecting the schools.

Tulsa Election District 6 is just to the east of District 5 bounded roughly by I-244, 61st Street, Yale Avenue, and 89th East Avenue, minus wedges of land NE of I-44 & 31st (around Skelly Elementary) and SW of I-44 and 41st Street (around Promenade Mall), and minus the section SW of 51st and Sheridan. The incumbent is Ruth Ann Fate, a registered Democrat who was first elected to the seat in 1996. She has one opponent so far, Jerry R. Griffin, a registered Republican.

Two candidates have filed for Bixby Office 5: Tristy Fryer (Republican) and Todd Hagopian (Libertarian).

Two candidates have filed for Union Office 5: Ken Kinnear (Republican) and Brad Swearengin (Democrat).

In addition, Tulsa Technology Center board seat 4 is up for a seven-year term, representing the City of Tulsa west of the river, plus midtown Tulsa from 21st to 81st, Riverside to Yale, plus a square mile from 71st to 81st, 49th West Ave to 33rd West Ave in Creek County, and the half-section from Yale to Hudson, 21st to 31st in Tulsa. TTC seems to have more money than it knows what to do with; it would be lovely to have a fiscal conservative on the board who could curb their building spree. Incumbent David Charney, a real-estate developer and a registered Democrat, has not yet filed for re-election and no one has yet filed to challenge him.

Looking through the online biographies, I think it's fair to assume that there is not a single conservative on the Tulsa School Board. Five (Stacey Woolley, Jennettie Marshall, Shawna Keller, Ruth Ann Fate, and Suzanne Schreiber) are registered Democrats; two (Jania Wester in District 2 and Brian Hosmer in District 5) are registered as independents.

TPS has received increasing criticism from across the political spectrum for fiscal irresponsibility and educational failure:

Black Wall Street Times, 11/26/2016: Anonymous teacher writes, "I literally feel like at TPS, we are set up for failure," cites disastrous educational results, teacher resignations. The same article includes achievement statistics for African-American students; Deborah Brown charter school leads the way with 45% meeting proficiency, while numbers at all but a few schools are in the single digits.

Tulsa World, 11/26/2016: The number of Tulsa schools receiving an F on the Oklahoma School Report card increased from 21 to 28. Only Booker T. Washington High School received an A in academic achievement; Edison HS has a B, Webster, Memorial, and Will Rogers have Ds; the rest of the high schools have Fs. Only 18% of TPS students who were assessed were at or above grade level.

If you're a conservative, you should give serious thought to running for school board, even if you have no school-aged children, even if you have children that are homeschooled or in private school, even if you've never had a child in the public schools. The public school system exists to serve all citizens by educating the children of the community, so every citizen has an interest in the curriculum being used, the way discipline is handled, the condition of the school buildings, and the credentials, skills, and philosophical presuppositions of the teachers, principals, and administrators. Property owners support the school system through ad valorem taxes, and so they have a reasonable interest in the proper and efficient expenditure of those funds. So do all citizens who pay state income and sales taxes, which provide funds to supplement local property taxes.

If you are, like me, a homeschool or private school parent, you will have experience and valuable insights with successful, classical alternatives to the faddish and failing teaching methods, priorities, and content currently in use in the public schools.

I ran some numbers, comparing 2010 census data, broken down by age, with the closest school attendance data I could find, from the 2010-2011 school year. In the Tulsa school district, the average daily attendance was only 67.2% of the number of school-aged children (5-18) who lived in the district on Census Day 2010. That means about a third of school-aged kids were either homeschooled or in private schools, the highest proportion of any district in the metro area. The Tulsa district also had the lowest percentage of residents in the 5-18 bracket -- 17.9%. Compare that to the Sperry district, where 91% of school-aged residents attended the public school, and where 22.6% of the residents were school-aged.

It seems that a substantial number of families move from the Tulsa district to the suburbs when their children reach kindergarten, or, if they stay, many opt for homeschooling or private schools. Those numbers make a strong case for new leaders in the Tulsa district. And if the school board is going to be strictly representative, at least two of the seven members should have children in homeschool or private school, and a majority should be conservative.

Filing is simple: A notarized declaration of candidacy, and a signed copy of the statutory requirements for school board candidates. For this office there is no filing fee. You can view the Oklahoma school board filing packet online. And although school board elections are officially non-partisan, the local and state Republican Party organizations will provide assistance to registered Republicans who are candidates for non-partisan office. (I suspect the same is true of the Democrats.)

There was a time when it was generally agreed that schools existed to transmit knowledge and the values of the community to the rising generation, working alongside parents. At some point, as part of the Gramscian long march through the institutions, the public schools were infiltrated by Leftists who saw them as a venue for missionary work, converting children away from the values of their parents, away from the ideals that made America a prosperous and peaceful nation. The Left has influence over schools of education, textbook publishers, teachers' unions, and continuing education for teachers, administrators, and board members.

Shortly after President Trump was sworn in, Tulsa Schools Superintendent Deborah Gist issued a statement to assure everyone that leftist policies on immigration and transgenderism would continue to be followed in Tulsa Public Schools:

We do not ask for immigration status when families enroll their children. We would not share information about immigration status with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. The Supreme Court's 1982 decision in Plyler vs. Doe found that every child has a constitutional right to equal access to education regardless of their immigration status, and we welcome immigrant and refugee families at Tulsa Public Schools.

We honor the dignity and equality of our transgender and gender non-conforming students. These students have the right to present themselves in a way that is consistent with their gender identity so long as rules are followed for appropriate dress that apply to all students. They also have the right to use restrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities that are consistent with their gender identity. This may include the use of gender neutral restrooms. We recognize the privacy of students in transition and would not disclose information about gender identity or expression without their consent.

Also in 2017, TPS sponsored a series of meetings called "Exploring Equity," featuring one-sided panels pushing intersectionality.

The next step in the LGBTQ fight for equality lies in increased representation and intersectionality, panelists said Thursday during the latest talk in a Tulsa Public Schools series meant to foster equity.

About 150 people sat with each other at 19 rectangular tables to hear a panel on LGBTQ issues and then discuss ideas that struck them during the talk.

The panel included Moises Echeverria, with the Oklahoma Center for Community and Justice; Toby Jenkins, with Oklahomans for Equality; Abril Marshall, with Camp Fire Green Country; Tulsa attorney Alyssa Bryant; and longtime local advocate Nancy McDonald.

If you live in a suburban or small-town district, you might suppose your district is safe from Leftist influence. Think again. Through their college training, their teachers' union newsletter, continuing education courses, peer relationships, and curriculum, your districts' teachers and administrators work in an atmosphere of Leftist presuppositions about the world. It takes strength, conviction, and vigilance for a conservative educator to be conscious of that atmosphere and to resist its influence.

Back in fall 2017, Mandy Callihan, a teacher and parent in Jay, Oklahoma, was infuriated to learn that her 12-year-old daughter was being taught in school about mutual masturbation and anal and oral sex, complete with a worksheet she had to fill out. She and other parents went to the school looking for answers and discovered that the curriculum had been approved by the school board and the middle school principal. The superintendent, claiming ignorance, halted the program, but parents were told it would have to be brought back the following year.

In Minnesota in 2017, the Center for the American Experiment has published a detailed 10-page report on slipping standards at the once-successful Edina school district in the suburbs of the Twin Cities. While academic achievement has declined, Leftist indoctrination is on the rise:

Today, for example, K-2 students at Edina Highlands Elementary School are learning--through the "Melanin Project"--to focus on skin color and to think of white skin as cause for guilt. "Equity" is listed as a primary criterion on the district's evaluation for K-5 math curricula. At Edina High School, teachers are haranguing students on "White Privilege," and drilling into them that white males oppress and endanger women. In a U.S. Literature and Composition class, 11th-graders are being taught to "apply marxist [sic], feminist" and "post-colonial" "lenses to literature."

In short, in Edina, reading, writing, math and critical thinking skills are taking a backseat to an ideological crusade.

The Leftist bent of the school district came to public attention after the overwrought reaction by students and teachers to the election results, but the roots of the problem went back several years, to the school's decision to try to close the achievement gap between students of different races by focusing on structural racism as the cause:

The All for All plan's fundamental premise is that white racism--not socio-economic factors like family breakdown--is the primary cause of the achievement gap. If minority students' academic performance is to improve, "systems that perpetuate inequities" must be "interrupt[ed]" and "barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings" must be "eliminate[d]," according to the district's position statement on "Racial Equity and Cultural Competence in Edina Public Schools."

The story mentions one race-conscious elementary school principal who adopted a curriculum provided by the slanderous Leftist group that calls itself the Southern Poverty Law Center. The same principal eliminated flex groups -- opportunities during one period for children of similar ability levels to work together with a teacher, receiving targeted instruction -- because they were perceived as insufficiently diverse. A high school literature class describes a course goal in this way: "By the end of the year, you will have... learned how to apply marxist [sic], feminist, post-colonial [and] psychoanalytic... lenses to literature."

There are, it must be said, many good conservatives, many devout Christians serving in Oklahoma's public schools. But they need support in the form of school board members who will set policy and curriculum and ensure that the paid staff adhere to it. Conservative school board members should not give undue deference to "professionals" who have been trained to see education through a Leftist lens. The subject matter taught, the methods used, and the values undergirding it all should be firmly under the control of our elected representatives on the school board.

Education is necessarily ideological, because it rests on presuppositions about knowledge, truth, goodness, and beauty. The ideology of the public schools should reflect the ideology of the community.

If I were running, here are some of the planks that would be in my platform:

• Introduce the classical trivium as the philosophy and method of instruction in schools that are currently failing. That includes a heavy emphasis on memorizing facts in the elementary years, which gives children a sense of mastery and accomplishment and provides a solid foundation for subsequent learning.
• Instill pride in our city, state, and country. America has its flaws, but it is a beacon of liberty and opportunity that inspires hope in hundreds of millions of people around the world who wish they could live and work here. Our children should understand the aspects of our culture and history that have made our country prosperous and peaceful. The "black armband" view of history should have no place in our schools.
• Keep the Land Run re-enactments in our elementary schools. It's a fun and memorable way to introduce students to our state's unique history. There is an activist in Oklahoma City who managed to convince historically ignorant principals and school board members there that the '89 Land Run was an act of genocide. Oklahoma City, founded by the '89 Land Run, no longer has reenactments of that event, because of a zealot who pushed her slanderous revision of history on ignoramuses in charge of the schools.
• Return music to the elementary grades. An early introduction to classical music and learning to make music by singing have tremendous developmental and behavioral benefits.
• Review all federal grants and determine whether the cost of compliance and the loss of independence is worth the money.
• Young people who foolishly believe that swapping sexes will solve their deep unhappiness deserve pity and guidance. It is utter cruelty to humor their misplaced hope that "changing gender identity" will cure their misery. Leadership at each school should craft a way to accommodate these deluded young people with compassion and dignity, while protecting the dignity of everyone else, and while affirming the biologically undeniable reality of the two sexes.

Thankfully, doing the right thing on that last point will no longer require resisting Federal pressure, because the Trump administration halted the Obama administration policy that denied funding based on a perverted interpretation of Title IX. But as shown above, Tulsa's school administration is fully on board with radical gender theory, and it's likely that your school administration has been thoroughly indoctrinated in the same way.

Our public schools need principled, intelligent conservative leadership. Will you step forward to serve?

FROM THE ARCHIVES: My 2015 post on school board filing included links to two important articles about the leftist direction of your local public school board, particularly on sexual morality and gender identity.

Stella Morabito wrote, "Ask Not Who's Running For President, Ask Who's Running For School Board," citing the recent battle in Fairfax County, Virginia, over transgender policy as one among many reasons.

Walt Heyer, a man who underwent sex-change surgery and then, realizing that the change failed to give him the happiness he had hoped for, changed back, wrote about the Obama Administration using its perverted interpretation of Title IX to force public schools to trample their students in the transgender war against science and reason.