commentary
September 2, 2021
Oklahoma schools cannot manage a pandemic
When state or federal entities create impossible situations due to unfunded mandates, unpredictability, or conflicting laws, public schools have always managed to figure things out. Inevitably, the central-planned solutions become politically impossible messes that school boards, parents, and educators are expected to unravel. As we have seen since this pandemic started, local control is a very convenient scapegoat when one-size-fits-all solutions hurt more than they help, but we may have finally tied ourselves up in a knot that local schools cannot untangle.