The Failure of Tulsa, Oklahoma Public High Schools

I graduated from Tulsa’s Memorial High School in 1965.  I have a number of family members who still live in the Tulsa Metro Area.  I just looked up an evaluation website to see what the Tulsa Public School system was providing as an “education” at the high school level.

Let me start with my own high school.  Memorial High School students are 10 to 14% proficient in math and 10 – 14% proficient in reading.  This is about what most of the 18 public high schools in Tulsa are accomplishing in the way of an “education.”  The best of the bunch are Tulsa Met High School (math proficiency <50%, Reading

Of the remaining public high schools in Tulsa, not one of them has a math proficiency score as high as 20%.  Two of those schools have Sciences in their name and one of those has a math proficiency of 5% or less.  Four of the high schools have math proficiencies of 5% or less.

Nine of the Tulsa high schools have reading proficiencies of less than 20%.  Five of the high schools have reading proficiency for 10% or less of their students.

Why do the people of Tulsa pay for high schools and teachers at all, if this is viewed as anything close to an acceptable educational outcome?  Is it just so they can have high school football?  Tulsans are mad about football.  I love football.  But one can have both football and an education.  In my graduating class of about 250 individuals, two of our starters on our conference-winning football team went to The U.S. Military Academy at West Point.  One of them and another starting offensive lineman became MDs.  At least another two of my classmates became MDs.  One became a professor of economics at Northwestern University.  Numerous others became engineers, dentists, and lawyers.  The Tulsa public schools system has clearly destroyed my high school, along with many others.

Or do Tulsans pay taxes for useless high schools because the politicians and the teachers unions have completely bamboozled them? 

It is morally wrong to force children to attend failing high schools.  Among those Tulsa children forced to attend a useless high school, there are many whose time is being wasted.  Some would learn useful skills if they were allowed to work.  Others would teach themselves more than these useless schools are teaching them.  Parents have an obligation to educate their children.  Others do not have an obligation to educate the children of others.  What individuals must do morally for the children of others, is to not act to prevent them from getting an education.  When voters elect government officials who force children to waste their time in useless high schools, this is a case in which those voters are acting to prevent children from learning.  The Tulsa high schools are a moral abomination.

They are not alone.  The public schools of America are generally an abomination from elementary schools through the universities.  The complete system of American education needs to be torn down and restarted on rational principles.  Few young Americans are proficient in math and reading.  Few know enough science, civics, history, and economics/business practices to function as well as they ought to in an advanced capitalist economy and civilization.

It is a sad result that AI will actually be easily able to replace many of our uneducated people before long.  This should be a much harder task for AI to accomplish, but people who know nothing have also never learned how to know much of anything.  Mankind’s primary means of survival is the mind.  If you will not train and optimize your mind, you will not thrive and you may well not survive.  Parents need to live up to their obligations and everyone else must at least not be roadblocks preventing a child who wants to learn and develop his mind from doing so.