Advanced School Gazintas

   House Bill 1587, co-written by Senator Gary "Stan the Man" Stanislawski (R), created a task force (kinda like Delta Force) to "study multiple facets of the State Aid Funding Formula, including formula structure, efficiencies, and cost saving measures of school districts. The bill also created the School Finance Review Commission for ongoing oversight of school finance, including the school funding formula, teacher compensation, benefits, and administration costs (emphasis mine)" (Mary Fallin Press Release, 2017).
   In the opinion of many public school experts, this piece of Oklahoma Legislation was written as a covert act to "consolidate small rural schools" and to funnel more local tax dollars to out-of-state corporate charter schools and private schools. The Commission members as well as the task force members are therefore resolved to consolidating small rural schools and overseeing their destruction, and resolved to commandeering state aid to all public schools and re-distributing such state aid to a Legislator's choice of corporate charter or private school. The appointees of the Commission and task force will be corporatists masquerading as conservative politicians. According to "Merriam-Webster", corporatism is: "The organization of a society into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation and exercising control over persons and activities within their jurisdiction". Many historians believe that Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator of Italy before and during World War II, invented "corporatism" when he said, just before being hanged, that "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state (Legislators) and corporate power". Mussolini also said that Coporationism is above socialism and above liberalism", and "Corporative solutions can be applied anywhere", again before being hanged.
   Many school finance experts believe the Commission and task force appointees, which will undoubtedly brand their corporate opinion on the public school funding formula, should be required to take a crash course in public school finance - or at the very least a crash course in school gazintas. "School gazintas" is the study of the adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing in the school funding formula, taught by Professor Jeffrey Maiden and Professor Gregg A. Garn of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, at the University of Oklahoma. The political aspect of Public School Gazintas is also taught by Keith Gaddie, Ph.D., the Political Science Department Chair at O.U.
   While there is no doubt that most Commission and task force members making recommendations for the "improvement of the state aid formula" know absolutely nothing about the formula, they will nonetheless pretend they are experts. Most have been appointed to the Commission for their expertise in corporate profits and the fact that shareholder gains is their most pressing concern, not the education of our public school students. I'm afraid that any recommendations for "updating" the school funding formula will come at a high cost for our publicly educated students and Oklahoma taxpayers.