News
Jerry Bohnen
Oklahoma City Public Schools officials made an embarrassing admission last November when they said an audit of Frederick A. Douglass Mid-High School revealed that 81 percent of the seniors were not on track to graduate on time.

Letters to the Editor
Matthew Trimble
The larger fallacy John Thompson (Commentary, “The fallacy of test-driven school reform, Jan. 16, Oklahoma Gazette) fails to recognize is the fallacy of centrally planned and administered education. MAPS for Kids has been a total failure, as schools are not buildings. The only obvious beneficiaries are the government contractors who built the buildings.

News
Clifton Adcock
Oklahoma City Public Schools will have a new Board of Education chair, after challenger Lynne Hardin unseated incumbent Angela Monson in yesterday’s election.

CFN
Gazette staff
Pop quiz: Did the authors of a study finding significant flaws in Oklahoma’s A-F grading system for schools renounce their findings?

News
Tim Farley
Deciding what to wear to school may not be a problem for Oklahoma City Public Schools students in the not-too-distant future. The Oklahoma City Board of Education is expected to vote Monday on whether to mandate school uniforms or a stricter dress code.

News
Tim Farley
Oklahoma City’s public school leaders are looking to the future by investing in their youngest students and hiring 120 full-day pre-kindergarten teachers.

Letters to the Editor
John Thompson
President Obama did not explicitly renounce his risky, first-term, test-driven policies that have caused so much harm to poor children of color in Oklahoma City and other districts, but he did the next best thing. His new priority is a researched-based call for high-quality early education.

Letters to the Editor
Steve Kern
Regarding the Feb. 6 letter to the editor by Douglas Mock, Joseph Thai and Tom Boyd (“Same ol’, same ol’”): It’s the same ol’, same ol’ strategy by closed-minded, evolution-Kool-Aid-drinking scientists in our universities who keep out an ever-watchful eye to protect their weak theory from any scrutiny.

Commentary
State Sen. David Holt
This state legislative session, Sen. Jabar Shumate, D-Tulsa, Rep. Jason Nelson, R-Oklahoma City, and I proposed legislation to give parents a new tool to affect positive change in their student’s underperforming school. Senate Bill 1001 would create the Parent Empowerment Act, a version of a “parent trigger” that has been enacted in at least seven other states. It passed the Senate, but limited support in the House means it will be laid over until the 2014 session.

Commentary
Gene Perry
In the 2012 film Won’t Back Down, a single mother stands up to a villainous teachers’ union and school administrators to take over her child’s school. The film was produced by Walden Media, a company belonging to Oklahoman owner Philip Anschutz. It seeks to dramatize “parent trigger” laws being pushed across the country by organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council.