Tag: Education

Clearly, Market Forces Work in Public Education

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It turns out that small education systems in California are balancing their books by approving any Charter school that comes to them, and then charging them fees for non-existent “oversight”.

I’m not sure if this is charter schools bribing boards of education, or if it is boards of ed extorting charter schools, but it is indicative of the corruption inherent in the system:

The superintendent’s plan was born of necessity.

 In the aftermath of the Great Recession, as tax revenue plummeted, small school districts across California quickly felt the pain. Many were already lean, where administrators did the work of two or three, and students were counted in tens, not thousands. The economic collapse threatened their very existence.

 In Superintendent Brent Woodard’s rural district, which covered the towns of Acton and Agua Dulce about 45 miles north of Los Angeles, enrollment in 2013 had fallen by more than a quarter over five years. The area’s population had aged, the birthrate declined and some students were choosing to attend schools outside the district. Without increasing revenue or making harmful cuts, the district was facing insolvency and the threat of a state takeover.

 In California’s charter school law, Woodard saw financial salvation.

 ………

 Court records detail how — methodically and rapidly — the Acton-Agua Dulce Unified School District began approving new charter schools. The first year, there were two. The next: 11. By 2017, the district, which operates only three schools of its own, had authorized 17 charter schools.

 Some were located outside the district’s geographical boundaries, in places like L.A., Santa Clarita and Pasadena. Some were based entirely online.

 Each charter brought the district something it badly needed: money.

 ………
 Across California, other small districts hatched similar plans as word spread that they could fix their financial problems by approving certain types of charters and then charging them for a range of services.

This sort of corruption is the rule, rather than the exception, and  it is a feature, not a bug.

Looting, and busting teachers’ unions, are the real goals of the charter school movement, and so these activities should come as no surprise.

Just How Corrupt is Our Society?

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Here is a quote:

We’re Not Talking about Donating a Building ………We’re Talking about Deception and Fraud.

—Andrew Lelling

Who is Andrew Lelling, you ask?

He is the US Attorney for Massachusetts who filed multiple indictments for people falsifying tests and bribing university officials to get their kids into exclusive schools.

I do not see how this is different from how Jared Kushner got into Harvard.

America:  Where people who are born on third base, and think that they have a triple, still need their parents to buy their way into school.

We are dealing with the myth of meritocracy and the reality of kakistocracy, and I fear that it is only going to get worse.

And Now the Koch Brothers are Corrupting Our Children

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Their network is now trying to foist their Objectivist propaganda on schools:

I was one of a number of community residents who reviewed the textbook, Ethics, Economy and Entrepreneurship (EE&E), proposed for use in Tucson Unified School District high schools.

To me, the first clue that this textbook lacked academic integrity was when the authors, three philosophy and marketing professors, began their section on trade 40,000 years ago with the claim that the Neanderthals became extinct because they “weren’t entrepreneurs.” Further nonsense included the idea that Jamestown failed because the settlers didn’t have private property rights, that American bison almost became extinct because Native Americans drove them off cliffs, and that towns were founded before agriculture.

………

The EE&E textbook does not adhere to textbook guidelines recommended to educators. It was not written by experts in the field, peer-reviewed and published by a reputable publishing house — it is published by Sagent Labs, which is owned by the authors. Moreover, the textbook does not have footnotes, an index, a bibliography or references to help students distinguish between credentialed subject matter experts and propagandists. Why the textbook was written, though, is an interesting tale of dark money advancing libertarian propaganda.

Fortunately, in December, a small group of academics and concerned citizens convinced the Tucson Unified School Board to not include the textbook and its related course in their high school curriculum. This vote seems like such a minor thing: one textbook, one elective high school course, one school district. But elements of the yearlong effort by this small group, called Kochs Off Campus, has a number of national implications.

These are evil men who want to starve education so that they can prey on our children.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

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Did you hear the one about the 12 year old who was arrested for not saying the pledge of allegance?

No, it’s not a lead in to a joke, though (of course) it’s from Florida.

The substitute teacher took umbrage, and decided to taunt the the student and then call in the school cop.

One of the people involved in all of this was acting like an adult, and he was 12 years old.

Teachers Just Won Another Strike

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Something odd is going on in this country, and the successful action by the Denver Teachers’ Union is a part of what I hope is a change in our political culture:
Denver’s teachers may soon be returning to school.

More than 2,000 educators, who have been on strike since Monday, said they reached a tentative deal Thursday with the local school district.

Details are not yet available, but the deal includes an average 11.7 percent pay raise and annual cost of living increases, according to the school district and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, a labor union representing more than 5,000 educators in Denver public schools. It will also include raises for school support staff. Bus drivers and cafeteria workers may also get a raise, but that’s not part of the official agreement with the teachers union.

It also addresses the teachers’ biggest concern: the need to overhaul the merit-pay system, which relies heavily on annual bonuses that fluctuate from year to year. The new system will place more emphasis on education and training when considering promotions, while keeping some bonuses in place.

Where will they find the $23 million to pay for this? The district agreed to cut back on administrative costs, and will eliminate about 150 positions in the school’s central office. Five-figure bonuses for senior school administrators will also come to an end.

5 figure bonuses for senior school administrators?

Am I the only one who thinks that America’s managerial class behaves a lot more like pillaging Vikings than they do stewards of their domains?

Athletic Education is to Education as Athletic Supporter is to Supporter

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In a development that could only have occurred in the sports crazy state of Texas, a mandate for improved physical education has been shown to diminish educational outcomes:

It’s almost too easy to satirize physical education, better known by its eye-roll-inducing abbreviation P.E. From Clueless to Superbad to Spiderman: Homecoming, parodies of gym class are a pop-culture darling. Perhaps that’s because they speak to one of America’s fundamental truths: For many kids, P.E. is terrible.

A recent working paper focused on a massive P.E. initiative in Texas captures this reality. Analyzing data out of the state’s Texas Fitness Now program—a $37 million endeavor to improve middle schoolers’ fitness, academic achievement, and behavior by requiring them to participate in P.E. every day—the researchers concluded that the daily mandate didn’t have any positive impact on kids’ health or educational outcome. On the contrary: They found that the program, which ran from 2007 to 2011, actually had detrimental effects, correlating with an uptick in discipline and absence rates.

………

According to the study, the program resulted in a roughly 16 percent increase in the number of disciplinary actions for each student. The study also found that the proportion of misbehaving students went up by more than 7 percent.

The findings of the study, which has yet to be published in an academic journal, are limited in scope. Still, the new paper adds much-needed nuance to the body of research that has evaluated the effectiveness of various approaches to P.E., complicating the findings of studies that generally assert the importance of school policies that encourage regular opportunities for physical activity.

………

The results of Packham’s paper on the Fitness Now program support the basic takeaway that the design of P.E. courses is what’s most consequential, and they hint at two interconnected factors that experts suggest tend to undermine the impact of such curricula. For one, P.E. programs often rely on a superficial notion of gym class—conceiving of physical activity as little more than a timed run around the track, for example, or a game of kickball—and this results in worse offerings. And then, when students feel forced to take these basic offerings, they may resent the classes more than they would otherwise. “Older kids have already formed these important eating and exercising habits, and changing their daily decisions is more complicated than just providing money for jump ropes,” Packham says.

Despite greater recognition of the academic benefits of physical activities—including guidelines from agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stressing that kids should get at least an hour of such activities a day—schools began to deprioritize P.E. about two decades ago, and the cuts have persisted in many cases, suggests Kohl. Accompanying this shift has been a movement away from casual activities such as recess, which experts argue is one of the more effective means of promoting children’s physical health. An immense body of research demonstrates the positive benefits of increased recess time, which schools started to cut after No Child Left Behind was signed into law, because of the policy’s emphasis on academic subjects such as reading and math.

I think that many people what the real purpose of education actually is:  It’s there to give an unchallenging class major for student athletes, because those TV residuals don’t generate themselves.

The evidence is clear:  Recess is better for academics and physical fitness than gym class.

In fact, nothing is better for academics and physical fitness than gym class.

A Deal Inked in LA Teachers’ Strike

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And true to their word, the contract is primarily about protecting the public school system from the predations of the hedge fund crowd:

What was going to be a fierce morning march on school district headquarters became a celebration instead Tuesday as thousands of striking teachers learned of a tentative agreement to end a six-day strike.

“You just taught the best lesson of your life,” union President Alex Caputo-Pearl told a sea of supporters in union-red T-shirts gathered in Grand Park.………

“Public education is now the topic in every household in our community,” he said. “Let’s capitalize on that. Let’s fix it.”

“We can’t solve 40 years of underinvestment in public education in just one week or just one contract,” he said.

The Board of Education is expected to move quickly to ratify the deal. Board members convened a morning closed session to review and discuss it. The deal also must be approved by United Teachers Los Angeles through a vote of its members.

………

The tentative deal includes what amounts to a 6% raise for teachers — with a 3% raise for the last school year and a 3% raise for this school year. (Teachers also lost about 3% of their salary by being on strike for six days, according to the school district.)

This 6% offer had been on the table before teachers went on strike, but the walkout was always about more than salary.

The agreement, which runs through June 2022, also includes a reduction of class sizes over four years to levels in the previous contract, but removes a contract provision that has allowed the school district to increase class sizes in times of economic hardship, Caputo-Pearl said in an interview. It was not immediately clear how that issue would be dealt with going forward.

………

Under the agreement, the district agreed to create 30 community schools — a model that has been tried in Cincinnati and Austin, Texas. These schools are supposed to provide social services to students and family, rich academic programs that include the arts and leadership roles for parents and teachers.

The district also agreed to expand to 28 the number of schools that will no longer conduct random searches of middle and high school students. That provision was especially important to students who marched in support of their teachers.

What is remarkable is just how much support that the UTLA has received throughout the entire strike was amazing.

I hope that this is an indicator of some sort of sea change in society, but I fear that it is not.

It’s On

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The teachers of the Los Angeles Unified School District have gone on strike, meaning that over 30,000 teachers will be on the picket lines, 500,000 students will be out, and 900 schools will be shuttered.

You will see a lot about pay and benefits, but this is really about the leadership of the LAUSD wanting to starve the public schools to feed the charter school industry:


More than 30,000 Los Angeles public-school teachers began the largest school strike in the country on Monday and the first in three decades in the district. Holding plastic-covered signs on rain-drenched picket lines across the city, they demanded higher pay, smaller classes and more support staff in schools.

The strike effectively shut down learning for roughly 500,000 students at 900 schools in the district, the second-largest public school system in the nation. The schools remained open, staffed by substitutes hired by the city, but many parents chose to keep their children at home, either out of support for the strike or because they did not want them inside schools with a skeletal staff.

With negotiations apparently at a standstill, the strike could last days or even weeks.

The decision to walk off the job came after months of negotiations between the teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Unified School District. Although educators on all sides agree California should spend more money on education, the union and the district are locked in a bitter feud about how Los Angeles should use the money it already gets.

The above article only mentions charter schools by accident, but when you actually listen to the teachers, it is clears that looting by charter schools, and incessant high stakes testing, are the top of the list of grievances.

Ah, My Alma Mater………

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At UMass, a college student put a “F%$# Nazis” sign in her dorm window.

She was told to take down the sign, because, “It wasn’t inclusive.”

I can understand objecting to the word, “F%$#,” but the whole inclusion thing is a sign of deep and pervasive moral bankruptcy:

Parsons, a junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, told BuzzFeed News on Sunday that she decided to put up the sign after a swastika was drawn over a “Happy Hanukkah” sign on a resident assistant’s door the first week of December.

“I thought maybe if I hang the sign up, maybe the person who drew the swastika will see it and see someone condemning their actions, even if the administration doesn’t do it,” she said.

The university’s highly promoted initiative on campus is called “Hate Has No Home at UMass” aimed at rejecting “all forms of bigotry and hatred.” As part of its initiative, the university has documented 19 hate crime incidents on campus since September.

Parsons said she didn’t expect the university to take any issue with the sign.

But a week after posting the sign in her dorm window, she received an email from a resident director asking her to remove the sign over “issues of inclusion.”

“While Residence Education cannot force you or your roommate to take the sign down, I am asking that you or your roommate take the sign down so that all students can be a part of an inclusive residential experience, as well as having a respectful environment to be a part of here on our campus,” Eddie Papazoni, a resident director at UMass Amherst, told Parsons in the email obtained by BuzzFeed News.

Jeebus.   In the words of Bugs Bunny, “What a maroon.”

Gee, You Make Their Working Conditions Hell, and Attack Their Pay and Benefits, and They Walk Away

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After over 2 decades of a war on the teaching profession, it appears that teachers are now fleeing the professions:

Teachers and other public education employees, such as community-college faculty, school psychologists and janitors, are quitting their jobs at the fastest rate on record, government data shows.

A tight labor market with historically low unemployment has encouraged Americans in a variety of occupations to quit their jobs at elevated rates, with the expectation they can find something better. But quitting among public educators stands out because the field is one where stability is viewed as a key perk and longevity often rewarded.

The educators may be finding new jobs at other schools, or leaving education altogether: The departures come alongside protests this year in six states where teachers in some cases shut down schools over tight budgets, small raises and poor conditions.

………

The rising number of departures among public education workers is in contrast with 2009, when the economy was first emerging from a deep recession. Then, the rate was just 48 per 10,000 public education workers, a record low.

………

School districts have reported since at least 2015 having trouble finding enough qualified teachers to fill open slots, leading more states to open up temporary teaching jobs to people with no official training, according to the Learning Policy Institute, a nonpartisan education-policy research group. The rate at which qualified teachers are leaving the profession is likely to exacerbate that trend.

In the 12 months ended in October, one million workers quit public-education positions, according to the most recent Labor Department data. More than 10 million Americans work in the field.

………

In at least 12 states, public education budgets are down at least 7% from 2009 levels, adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis of census data by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Teacher pay across the country, adjusted for inflation, is now 5% lower than it was in 2009, according to data from the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.

Wages and salaries for public-education workers rose 2.2% in the third quarter from a year earlier, not adjusting for inflation. That matched the largest annual raise in nearly a decade, but was still well below the 3.1% annual increase in pay private-sector workers received in the third quarter, according to the Labor Department.

Sluggish pay gains have been tougher to swallow as more states require that teachers earn master’s degrees to work in the classroom, an expensive proposition that led more teachers to take out loans.

Tensions over inadequate pay and per-pupil funding levels came to a head in 2018 during statewide protests, in some cases shutting classrooms for as many as nine school days. The strikes produced modest gains in the states where they occurred—teachers in Arizona, West Virginia and Oklahoma all received raises—but they also popularized images of dilapidated textbooks and school rooms and portraits of teachers who took on odd jobs to make ends meet.

People are no longer entering the profession, enrollment in education schools has fallen as well.

They have been systematically removing pay, benefits, and job security while making the working conditions more punitive, and they are surprised when less people want that life?

This is econ 101, and kindergarten labor relations.

Why Are These Folks Not in Jail?

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It appears that some schools are routinely fitting disabled students with shock belts.

This is evil beyond belief:

An international body entrusted with upholding human rights across the Americas has called for an immediate ban on the controversial use of electric shocks on severely disabled children in a school outside Boston.

The Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Massachusetts, is believed to be the only school in the world that routinely inflicts high-powered electric shocks as a form of punishment on vulnerable children and adults. About 47 of its students are currently subjected to the “treatment”, which involves individuals being zapped with electric currents far more powerful than those discharged by stun guns.

Disability rights campaigners have tried for decades to stop the practice, which the school’s administrators call “aversive therapy”. So far the institution has managed to fend off all opposition, arguing that electric shocks are an acceptable way of discouraging harmful habits.

Now the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has issued a rare formal notice known as “precautionary measures” that calls for immediate cessation of the electric shocks.

In a seven-page resolution, the Washington-based panel says that the practice poses a “serious impact on the rights” of the vulnerable children at the school, “particularly on their right to personal integrity which may be subjected to a form of torture”.

The commission cites the work in 2013 of the then UN monitor on torture, Juan Méndez, who found JRC’s electric shock technique was a potential violation of the UN convention against torture and other international laws. It also notes several federal agencies and professional groups have called for a ban on “aversive techniques” on grounds they can cause psychological trauma.

They are torturing students, and it must be stopped.

Fabulous!!!!

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Canada’s top court has ruled in favour of denying accreditation to a Christian law school that banned students from having gay sex.

Friday’s ruling against Trinity Western University in British Columbia (BC) was closely watched by both religious freedom and gay rights advocates.

The university made students promise not to have extra-marital or gay sex.

The Supreme Court found that protecting LGBT students from discrimination trumped religious freedom.

………

Ontario, British Columbia and Nova Scotia law societies denied the school accreditation, on the grounds that it required all students to sign a covenant binding them to a code of conduct which banned sex outside the confines of heterosexual marriage.

Specifically, it said that it could (would) expel students for gay sex.

Good on the court.

Your need to hate does not trump basic human rights.

More of This

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Acero, a large public school chain in the Chicago area, has the dubious distinction of being the first charter school in the nation to have its teachers strike:

Hundreds of educators at Chicago’s Acero charter schools walked off the job Tuesday morning, halting classes for 7,500 predominantly Latino students and launching the nation’s first strike over a contract at the independently operated campuses.

Backed by affiliates at the Chicago Teachers Union, the charter network’s teachers said they would not return to work after what they described as a series of fruitless negotiations with management.

“We’re going to stay on strike until we get educational justice for the people who work in Acero charter schools,” CTU President Jesse Sharkey said outside the charter network’s empty Zizumbo elementary school campus as dozens of picketers settled in. “We’re going to stay on strike until the students at Acero charter schools get the resources into their classrooms that they need to do their jobs.”

The charter network cancelled all classes, athletics and extracurricular activities. School buildings will remain open with group activities supervised by nonunion staff members, though parents were encouraged to keep children at home or at nearby parks and community facilities.

Acero’s chief executive blasted the walkout as the product of an “anti-charter political agenda.”

………

The CTU has said key issues include reduced class sizes, maternity and paternity leave, a revamped teacher evaluation system and better pay. The union said they were also unable to secure commitments on special education services and guaranteed protections for undocumented students and families.

I am surprised that this has taken so long.

The underlying business plan of most charter schools is to treat their teachers like garbage.

Another Upside to the 2018 Elections

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In New York state, with the Democrats taking decisive control of the state Senate, charter school support has been decimated:

One of the losers in Tuesday’s election is the charter school movement, which lost a big and reliable advocate when Republicans gave up control of the majority to Democrats in the State Senate, both sides said.

“There’s no question it’s going to be challenging,” said Robert Bellafiore, a consultant who works with charter schools. He also was part of the team under former Gov. George Pataki that authorized charter schools in 1998.

The strongest backer of charter schools now is Democratic Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who wields extraordinary power in crafting state budgets under New York law.

………

“This is a moment for charter schools,” said Andy Pallotta, president of New York State United Teachers, which has opposed expansion of charter schools and seeks greater transparency of their operations. “I think they lost their influence in the Capitol.”

Senate Democrats wouldn’t say what their plans are for charter schools or if the new majority would support any expansion.

Here’s a thought for New York Democrats:  Pass a law that requires that charter schools to be subject to the state Freedom of Information Act. (FOIA)

Any time someone does a deep dive into charter school operations, corruption and malfeasance are always uncovered, so making it easier for parents, journalists, and activists to peruse their books will result in greater accountability.

Yeah, Harvard is Hiding Something

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It now appears that Harvard University has been lying about its admissions policies for decades, and colluding with the US Department of Education to do so.

I would note that the author of this article, Josh Gerstein, is a bit of a hack IMHO, (he does work for Tiger Beat on the Potomac, after all) but the underlying facts of the lies and the coverup appear to be meticulously documented.

What he documents is a pretty good case for wypepo affirmative action at the expense of east and south Asian students:

The long war over affirmative action turned hot again last week, as Harvard and lawyers for Asian-American applicants duked it out in a federal courtroom in Boston in a closely watched case that could end consideration of race in college admissions.

I’m a veteran of that war. Nearly three decades ago, as a student, I was at the vanguard of a movement that took no side in the then-intense debate over affirmative action but advocated for something more radical than it might first appear: breaking down the secrecy over how elite colleges choose whom to admit to their ranks.

My role in that crusade also led to a federal courtroom, albeit in the kind-of-grimy, dual-purpose post office building that housed Boston’s federal court through the 1990s, not the far glitzier complex that now sits on the waterfront.

The first, brief court showdown over Harvard’s admissions policies came on October 5, 1990. The hearing, before U.S. District Court Judge Douglas Woodlock, a Reagan appointee, came on a Friday afternoon as the federal government was about to head into a shutdown over a budget standoff.

The day before, the Education Department had officially completed a two-year-long investigation into Harvard’s admissions practices—essentially the same issue now the focus of the federal trial: whether the elite school’s process discriminates against Asian-Americans.

As a reporter for the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, I had twice filed Freedom of Information Act requests seeking details on the Education Department probe as it became more and more drawn out. Both times they were turned down by agency officials, citing the need to protect the ongoing investigation, although the second time a lawyer working on the case promised to “tack [the request] up on the wall” and process it when the probe concluded.

Unbeknownst to us or the public, as the investigation unfolded, the feds cut a deal with Harvard to keep its records secret. The university was reluctant to hand over a data tape that would allow investigators to easily derive and correlate almost any variables involving Harvard applicants—say, the SAT scores of admitted recruited athletes or the class rank of rejected Latinos. Harvard officials cited both privacy concerns and a worry that Education Department investigators might misunderstand the information.

The secret deal gave the Education Department access to the tape and other sensitive internal Harvard information on two conditions: that the feds fight any FOIA request for the records and that they return them to Harvard at the conclusion of the investigation. (How federal employees have any right to pledge to “resist” a law duly passed by Congress is still something I find puzzling.)

………

The records—now tattered and yellowing from several moves and basement floods and published online here for the first time—belie some of Harvard’s key claims about its admissions process.

The university had long claimed that preferences for recruited athletes and legacies served only as a tiebreaker between applicants with “substantially equal” qualifications. Officials had also claimed that applicants who are children of alumni tend, unsurprisingly, to have better test scores and other numerical ratings than others in the pool.

It should be noted that the Ivys have, with the explicit permission of the Departments of Education and Justice, have also been colluding on financial aid awards for decades as well.

It is a corrupt edifice, and it should be shut down.

Fairness and Decency — 1: Betsy DeVos — 0

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It appears that the Federal Courts do not take kindly to the conceit that it’s OK to defraud students because it’s rich people doing it:

Obama-era rules that lay out how students defrauded by colleges can erase their debt took effect Tuesday, after the Trump administration and an association of for-profit colleges lost their bids to delay them.

That means that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is now responsible for implementing a rule that she said makes it too easy for students to cancel their student loans and that she has fought to kill.

Consumer advocates back the regulations, saying the government must take a more aggressive stance against colleges that they say routinely take advantage of veterans and vulnerable students.

But conservatives worry about the hit to taxpayers if a large number of student borrowers are allowed to avoid paying off their loans. In addition, colleges, particularly for-profit ventures, opposed the Obama administration rules as harmful to their programs and students seeking loans to attend them.

The federal government has a virtual monopoly over the $100 billion-a-year student loan market, so the rules about how it will handle fraud and other issues are important.

In June 2017, DeVos put the regulations on hold and said she would replace them with her own. Two former students of a for-profit college, as well as 19 states and the District, sued to stop the delay.

Last month, a U.S. district court said that the DeVos move was “arbitrary and capricious” and that the rules should take effect. It gave the agency until last Friday to try to issue a new delay, but the Education Department said it would not try again.

“The secretary respects the role of the court and will defer to its judgment in whether parts of the 2016 rule will go into effect,” Elizabeth Hill, a DeVos spokeswoman, said Friday.

In a morass of incompetence, corruption, and soulless evil at the Trump Administration, Betsy DeVoss is truly in a class of her own.

It’s good to see her lose.

Tweet of the Day

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This is priority 1 of the power elite, to shame debtors, to humiliate debtors, to create a moral opprobrium against debt for the lower classes. Meanwhile the rich can use bankruptcy and strategic default all they want. https://t.co/Koi1BcaEqs

— David Dayen (@ddayen) September 12, 2018

Why some sensible people are getting to the point where they just want to see the world burn.

Capitalism increasingly resembles the fever dreams of Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker.

How It’s Supposed to be Done

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Following their successful strike, Oklahoma Teachers have decimated their opponents in the state legislature:

For nearly a decade, Republican officials have been treating ordinary Oklahomans like the colonial subjects of an extractive empire. On Governor Mary Fallin’s watch, fracking companies have turned the Sooner State into the earthquake capital of the world; (literally) dictated policy to her attorney general; and strong-armed legislators into giving them a $470 million tax break — in a year when Oklahoma faced a $1.3 billion budget shortfall.

To protect Harold Hamm’s god-given right to pay infinitesimal tax rates on his gas profits (while externalizing the environmental costs of fracking onto Oklahoma taxpayers), tea party Republicans raided the state’s rainy-day funds, and strip-mined its public-school system.

………

Mary Fallin rode a wave of fracking dollars to reelection in 2014, while her GOP allies retained large majorities in both chambers of the legislature. With no organized opposition to counter the deep pockets of extractive industry, Republican officials could reasonably conclude that working-class Sooners had no material interests that their party was bound to respect.

But then, Oklahoma teachers decided to give their state a civics lesson. Inspired by their counterparts in West Virginia, Oklahoma teachers went on strike to demand long-overdue raises for themselves, more education funding for their students, and much higher taxes on the wealthy and energy companies — to ensure that those first two demands would be honored indefinitely.

They won one out of three. Despite the fact the teachers had no legal right to strike — and that the Oklahoma state legislature requires a three-fourths majority to pass tax increases of any kind — the teachers galvanized enough public support to force Fallin to give an inch. As energy billionaire (and GOP mega-donor) Harold Hamm glowered from the gallery, Oklahoma state lawmakers passed a tiny increase in the tax on fracking production (one small enough to leave Oklahoma with the lowest such tax rate in the nation), so as to fund $6,100 raises for the state’s teachers.

The strikers were pleased, but unappeased. They promised to make lawmakers pay for refusing to finance broader investments in education with larger tax hikes. “We got here by electing the wrong people to office,” Alicia Priest, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, told the New York Times in April. “We have the opportunity to make our voices heard at the ballot box.” Hamm and his fellow gas giants (almost certainly) made an equal and opposite vow — that those few Republicans who held the line against tax hikes of any kind would not regret their bravery.

Last night, Oklahoma’s GOP primary season came to an end — and the teachers beat the billionaires in a rout. Nineteen Republicans voted against raising taxes to increase teacher pay last spring; only four will be on the ballot this November. As Tulsa World reports:
Republican voters handed out more pink slips to House members Tuesday.

Six of 10 GOP incumbents involved in runoffs were turned out and a seventh narrowly survived, as perhaps the most extraordinary primary season in state history drew to a riotous conclusion.

Between the first round on June 26 and Tuesday’s final results, a dozen incumbents — all Republicans, and all but one of them House members — lost primary or runoff races.

Such turnover is unprecedented for any recent decade, let alone year, and seemed to mark a dramatic shift in the Oklahoma Republican Party.

Each of those defeated Tuesday had, in some manner, earned the wrath of public education supporters during last spring’s occupation of the state Capitol.

………

Oklahoma’s historic primary season was no aberration. Last year, Democrats in the Sooner State won a series of special election upsets by speaking to popular outrage over disinvestment in education. In Kentucky this past May, a public school teacher defeated the state’s Republican House Majority Leader Jonathan Snell in a GOP primary. Snell had been considered a rising star in his party, and a protegé of Mitch McConnell. But he decided to spearhead a push to slash teachers’ pensions. So Kentucky teachers expelled him from office.

In Wisconsin, Scott Walker is facing the toughest challenge of his tenure — from the Democratic superintendent of the state’s schools. As the Koch brothers’ favorite governor falls behind in the polls, Walker has rebranded himself as “the pro-education” candidate. Meanwhile, back in Oklahoma, Mary Fallin’s 19 percent approval rating is giving Democrats a serious chance of reclaiming the Sooner State’s governor’s mansion this fall.

………

And last night in Oklahoma, teachers left the GOP’s House caucus covered in debris.

The lesson to be learned here is that it is better to be feared than it is to be liked.