Don’t politicize Oklahoma schools
School districts should not close schools on Election Day for the express purpose of increasing their employees’ political clout. It would not just inconvenience parents and thus make it harder, not easier, for everyone else to vote. It also would politicize and polarize public schools even worse than they already are.
The Oklahoma City School Board voted unanimously to close on Election Day, so their employees can “engage in continued advocacy.” Tulsa Public Schools and Yukon
Public Schools are also closing. Yukon Superintendent Jason Simeroth said, “Now we will make it much easier for our advocates to express their concerns.”
Empowering greater civic involvement for everyone across the board is a fine idea. Empowering greater civic involvement for one selected group alone, expressly so it can advocate more effectively for bigger budgets and less accountability for itself at everyone else’s expense, may sound noble to those in that group. However, the rest of us may be forgiven if we see it as more self-interested than noble.
That’s doubly true when a group increases its own power to vote at the expense of everyone else’s power to vote. Parents who don’t work for schools don’t have the luxury of getting the day off work. Now they will have to find child care. Voting on top of that? Good luck. You’re on your own.
The more long-term danger is that educational special interests are crossing an important line. School employees organizing outside of school to advocate their own interests is just ordinary politics in a democracy. It’s not pretty, but in the rough and tumble of democracy, not much is.
Running the schools themselves with institutional policies designed — explicitly — to maximize school employees’ political power at everyone else’s expense is another matter. Now they’re using our tax dollars to create a political machine designed to extract ever-more tax dollars for themselves. The rest of us are allowed to notice this. If you want to create a big and vicious political backlash in an already polarized environment, this is one way to do it.
The danger this day would come was always inherent in creating a government school monopoly. As Tulsa teacher Stephanie Jones, credited in news accounts with initiating the idea of closing schools on Election Day, said: “Teaching is a political job. Our boss is the Legislature. That’s who sets our revenues. That’s who controls our curriculum. Ultimately, we have to be politically active because so much of our job is determined in the Capitol.”
As long as government has a monopoly on schooling, that logic will be powerful. But it may not end where Jones thinks it will. In a democracy, every political action creates an equal and opposite reaction.
The only serious long-term strategy to get politics out of the classroom is school choice. When parents are in charge of education, the political interests of parents and their schools will be aligned rather than opposed. And it will no longer be true that teachers “have to be politically active because so much of our job is determined in the Capitol.”
Teachers could get back to teaching. Even on Election Day.
Forster is a Friedman fellow at EdChoice.