1889 Institute: OKCPS Sup't focused on BLM chapters in every school, not academics?

Another Suburban Draw: Black Lives Matter Chapters in Every Oklahoma City School

By Byron Schlomach

“You don’t want to live in the Oklahoma City school district” was the universal advice when moving from Phoenix. OKC district schools were pitiful and to be avoided. You’d think with such a poor reputation, the last thing on the mind of the superintendent would be making sure every school has a Black Lives Matter chapter, but you’d be wrong.

During a recent OKC school board meeting, that is exactly what Superintendent Sean McDaniel said. He wants a BLM chapter in every school. OKC district leaders should be concerned about academics, student motivation, and how to hold students and educators more accountable for attaining decent educations. Instead, proposed guiding principles for the district are: Health and Safety; Learning; Social and Emotional Needs; Equity; and Flexible Learning Models.

Two guiding principles have something directly to do with education, one expressing the need for online instruction due to Covid-19. “Health and safety” is a given, but is also Covid-19 related. “Social and emotional needs” refers to the state superintendent’s emphasis on making excuses and turning the schools into social work centers. “Equity” is equity of outcomes, which is inevitably a race to the bottom.

As for Black Lives Matter, let’s be clear; the sentiment expressed in the name is not the organization. The sentiment is unarguable. Human life, regardless of race, color, or creed, matters, so absolutely, black lives matter. However, BLM was cofounded by two avowed Marxists. The official 2015 platform called for disrupting “the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” While police brutality and misconduct is a real issue, BLM makes claims about differential impacts that are manifestly not true.

And by the way, OKC district schools are, indeed, pitiful. The state’s school report card grades schools on five criteria and an overall score is reported - of six different A through F grades per school. For the eleven graded high schools in OKC, F’s are the most common grade, double the number of D’s, triple the C’s, quintuple the B’s, and over seven times the number of A’s. Three of four A’s are earned by a single school, Classen High School of Advanced Studies, but it earns an F for chronic absenteeism.

Increasingly, public school leaders everywhere are less concerned about the critical job of passing on knowledge and far more concerned with leftist social transformation, at taxpayers’ expense. It’s one thing to turn schools into social work centers, relegating education to secondary status. It’s another thing to actively promote an ideology that undermines a way of life and an economic system that together have done more to advance human freedom and raise humanity out of subsistence poverty than any others in the history of mankind. Oklahoma taxpayers should not be forced to fund planting the seeds of future oppression and poverty, the inevitable result of the ideological poison, and rank ignorance, promoted by the OKC District.

Byron Schlomach is 1889 Institute Director and can be contacted at bschlomach@1889institute.org.