“Keep those cards and letters … OK, and e-mails and Tweets … plus text messages coming, folks”.
A look at how a red state not known for academic innovation became a leader in one aspect … and the former Democratic legislator who helped make it happen.
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The other day, the redoubtable DK author twigg wrote about an education bill in the Oklahoma legislature that represents a threat to public education in the Sooner State where he lives. Undoubtedly, there are more examples of this … which can be found not only there, but across this country.
Yet, a success story from the state of Oklahoma was recounted in an essay in the Nov/Dec 2012 issue of The American Prospect entitled Pre-K on the Range - which explains how the Sooner State is a leader in this field. Do read the entire essay, but here is a summary.
→ Pre-K is treated not as a frill, but like another school grade (so that it does not stand alone at budget-cutting time).
→ Oklahoma’s pre-K teachers are paid the same as elementary and high-school teachers.
→ Because Oklahoma’s law enables private organizations to provide pre-K, a good deal of its (oil) wealth has been leveraged to bolster the public system
→ And perhaps most satisfyingly: a Democratic legislator used sleight-of-hand (and personal friendships) to steer the bill that created this system (which greatly expanded state support for Pre-K) past his .... unwitting conservative colleagues, in trying to resolve a problem with kindergarten funding that everyone wanted to fix.
It wasn’t until 1998 that a legislator named Joe Eddins quietly pushed through a law that supplied the funding to expand Paul’s vision into a mostly full-day program that would be offered throughout the state. Eddins, too, was well suited to advancing early education.
A Democratic legislator who had worked as a rancher and high-school biology teacher, he had spent his first few years in the legislature learning about early education—and becoming convinced that school failure was sending a growing number of Oklahoma’s kids down a life path of poverty and underperformance.
“I didn’t explain that we’d have this huge collaboration with Head Start,” Eddins says. “I emphasized the part that said you could contract with private providers. Republicans have always loved that.”
This American Life went further in-depth on how Joe Eddins spoke to his colleagues across-the-aisle:
Joe Eddins
I probably sat down at their desk with each Republican and showed them two or three things in the bill that I thought they ought to know.
Alex Blumberg (This American Life)
And what were those things?
Joe Eddins
Well, I showed them where we were keeping four year-olds out of kindergarten, we're saving enormous amounts of money, you can contract with private providers, and they loved it. That's all I said.
Former OK Rep. Joe Eddins
All true: except that, as the reporter for This American Life explained about why the bill was passed with strong bi-partisan support:
Probably because in almost all his discussions with lawmakers about his bill, Eddins left out the main part. You know, the part about how he'd put the state on the hook to pay for an entirely new grade level.
He knew almost nobody in any legislature actually reads all the bills, and the number of people who actually understood Oklahoma's school funding formula, you could probably count on one hand. And his strategy worked. It was a huge and costly expansion of the government's role in public education in a state more opposed to costly expansions of government than perhaps any other in the country.
Joe Eddins is now retired (at age 81) yet a few years back was both cited by Rachel Maddow and had his state’s program noted in a Barack Obama State of the Union address, seeking a national program based on what some states were doing. "If the president calls me, I'll be just delighted to go up and help him," said Joe.
Not only has the state’s program been cited by many think tanks as a cost-effective way to provide education … as of now, no Tea Partyer dare proposes its elimination. Perhaps being ranked #1 in Pre-K (along with Georgia, as President Obama noted) counts for something.
Let’s close with a song from .. Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, of course. Surrey with the Fringe on Top is one of the play’s best-loved tunes, and I have always been partial to the version sung by the cabaret singer Nancy Lamott — who performed twice at the White House during the Clinton administration — and who died of cancer less than a month before her 44th birthday.
Now, on to Top Comments:
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From a2nite:
In the front-page story about the CNN apologist for whatever alleged police brutality is alleged — Eric Nelson has a great comment about lack of police accountability to answer whether the police are prosecuted. It's rare (and should be a diary itself).
And from Ed Tracey, your faithful correspondent this evening ........
In this morning’s Abbreviated Pundit Round-up — and after AfricanLived wondered about Mitt Romney’s 2012 tax returns — an intrigued ksh01 wanted to ask Mitt a question.
TOP PHOTOS
February 24, 2016
Next - enjoy jotter's wonderful *PictureQuilt™* below. Just click on the picture and it will magically take you to the comment that features that photo.
(NOTE: Any missing images in the Quilt were removed because (a) they were from an unapproved source that somehow snuck through in the comments, or (b) it was an image from the DailyKos Image Library which didn't have permissions set to allow others to use it.)
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And lastly: yesterday's *Top Mojo* - mega-mojo to the intrepid *mik* ...... who rescued this feature from oblivion:
