Quotes of the Day

“One of the big blind spots on the political right is not recognizing that the people on the bottom have been excluded. We have an exclusionary system, and the solution to that is not simply adhering more to markets; it’s remembering our morals. Part of being a conservative is remembering that morals come before markets.”

– Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, who spoke at Oklahoma Council for Public Affairs Liberty Gala on Wednesday (Source)

“Out of our 17 state correctional institutions, 15 work centers and six community corrections centers, only a small number of them were built as correctional facilities. The others are retrofitted boys’ homes, mental health facilities, motels or some other facility. Those that were built as correctional facilities weren’t meant to hold the volume that we’re housing. This places a strain on infrastructure and is posing a major concern.”

– Marilyn Davidson, a legislative liaison for the Department of Corrections. The state’s prisons house over 28,000 inmates and are currently operating at 112 percent capacity (Source)

“I think the state thought, ‘If we just pass all these things, we’re going to reform education.’ Well, reform doesn’t happen just because you pass a law or adopt a policy. It happens when you do something at the right pace where people can be a part of it and give input and make it something that works … Sometimes I think we pass things before we even know what they are. And that’s not the way. That’s a way to waste money.”

-State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister (Source)

“My eyes were opened to the clear path for these women to be incarcerated. In a week I would see the cycle of a young girl: she’s low performing at school, comes from a low-income household, she’s a parent by her teenage years, and then she’s in the justice system. And that’s what made me want to run for office. I knew that if we didn’t have policy makers in our state that understood the issues around incarceration and education, my job was going to be this ongoing cycle that would never end.”

-Newly elected Oklahoma Representative Cyndi Munson, speaking about her time at the Girl Scouts Council working with girls who were at risk to enter the juvenile justice system (Source)

“For most of the period that is the subject of this report, DHS did not have a thoughtful, data-informed plan to reduce child maltreatment in care and, in fact, child maltreatment increased.”

-A report by court-ordered expert monitors of Oklahoma’s child welfare reform efforts. Oklahoma’s failure to meet reform targets likely means that the state will now have to remain under court-ordered supervision for at least an extra year (Source).

“I think we need to think about what do we have the capacity to do within our state and to do well.”

– State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister, speaking about scheduled recommendations for changes to the state’s Teacher and Leader Effectiveness law, pointing out that implementing changes could be expensive and upend the success of the statewide system for qualitative measures of public school educators (Source)

“The central problem here is that we’re not expecting enough of our institutions. We’re not expecting enough of our government and we’re not expecting enough of ourselves. We’re not going to get better if we don’t start expecting it.”

– State Secretary of Education and Workforce Development and Oklahoma State University-Oklahoma City President Natalie Shirley, on new numbers showing that the state has nearly 85,000 job openings, in part because the state’s workforce isn’t adequately trained to fill them (Source)

“In short, our state faces one of its greatest crises. Our failure to invest in education will inevitably lead to economic decline. Businesses demand a skilled and educated workforce. Business leaders insist on good public schools for their own children to attend. Entrepreneurs need an expanding research base at comprehensive universities as a springboard for growth. We now rank 49th in the nation in funding per student.”

-University of Oklahoma President David Boren, writing about why he is pushing a ballot initiative for a 1 percent statewide sales tax increase to fund education (Source)

“The more you walk downstairs, definitely, we work on the third floor so it wasn’t as bad. But when you go downstairs, it was horrible. It looks like a mass exodus right now. I’m surprised they are not sprinting!”

-Oklahoma Tax Commission Employee Renee Lowe. Lower floors at the Tax Commission had to be evacuated and all public bathrooms in the building were out of order after a raw sewage leak (Source).

“Machinists need to know trigonometry, advanced math — they’re running automated computerized equipment and they do the programming for the machines. Even welders are calculating angles and degrees to do cuts and welds.”

-Chuck Mills, President of Mills Machine Co. in Shawnee,  who said Oklahoma needs to do a better job of preparing kids for entering the workforce by teaching math skills (Source)