Jonathan Small, President of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, spoke to the McGrath Breakfast Group on Saturday with a chilling message.
Nearly 75 percent of students across any grade you might pick in Oklahoma, have not achieved reading proficiency. While taxpayers spend about $15,000.00 per student per year, achievement has continued to fall.
In 1992, Oklahoma students were two grade levels ahead of Mississippi; now, Mississippi students are more than a full grade ahead of Oklahoma. Since 2015, Oklahoma's reading proficiency scores have declined by nearly a full grade (10 points).
This crisis is a non-partisan issue impacting children’s wellbeing, their lifelong ability to succeed, and Oklahoma’s workforce skill base, Small declared.
Small shared that with a fresh accounting degree, he applied and was hired as a budget analyst for the State of Oklahoma, back in the day.
“I got the job and after about two weeks [Democrats] Brad Henry and his staff realized that they had not hired the young up-and-coming Barack Obama. They asked me for my first budget recommendation and I recommended slashing the Department of Commerce's budget. I didn't understand why you would take somebody's money to give it to someone else,” Small said.
Focusing on the 75 percent of students failing reading proficiency Small said, “When I say, ‘not proficient’ that means the student cannot take a book written for their grade level, read it, comprehend it on their own and understand it,” Small emphases.
“Sometimes in government programs, the program becomes more about the adults that are employed in it than who they're supposed to serve. Coming out of the 80s and 90s, there was a group of people, one group had ulterior motives, one group just had the distraction of focusing on who's employed. So you had academics who don't live in the real world. They hear complaints from teachers’ union members. This phonics thing is old and tiring. When you teach phonics, you can't teach as many other fun things that you want to teach because when you teach phonics, that means all day long the teacher and students are individually going through phonics, learning how to sound and decode words. That's boring.
“Also, we find that if we teach students to read well early, it is much more difficult to tell them or their parents what they should be thinking. So, academics come up with a new method called 3Qing, or Whole Language,” Small said.
The Whole Language method relies on associating pictures with words instead of systematic phonics. It has been criticized for hindering children—especially those with dyslexia—from decoding unfamiliar words. Like feeding someone a fish rather than teaching them how to fish to feed themselves for a lifetime. Nevertheless, the Whole Language method was widely adopted in Oklahoma, resulting in dramatic setbacks in reading proficiency scores.
“If you started phonics at age four or five, by the time you were in third grade, you were able to read extremely well. Because you had been taught, this letter says that and it sounds like this. When those two letters are together, they sound like this. Any word could be presented to you and, most likely, you could decode it,” Small said.
Florida, around 2002 under the leadership of Jeb Bush, passed the Reading Sufficiency Act which mandated full commitment to phonics-based instruction. It required teachers to retrain exclusively in phonics and institute regular assessments and prohibited social promotion past third grade for nonproficient readers.
Oklahoma initially adopted a similar act, leading the nation in reading score gains for four years, but repealed it in 2015 under pressure from teachers’ unions Small noted.
“With our reading sufficiency act, Oklahoma leads the nation in reading score games, but a superintendent and several others, led by the teachers union, didn’t like the accountability that was coming to the employees in the system, because in Oklahoma, for a while, if you got to third grade and you couldn't read, we helped you until you learned to read.
“Unfortunately, the legislature blinks and repeals our reading sufficiency act. We did it to ourselves. We did it. We did it to ourselves. We've declined 10 full points, or almost a full grade, since 2015. What is fascinating is that the state of Mississippi [passed] their reading sufficiency act at the same time Oklahoma did, but Mississippi didn't blink. Mississippi stays the course, and now Mississippi, basically over the last decade, has had the largest reading gains out of any state in the country. What will depress you even more is that Mississippi is doing it with more than $2,000 less per pupil to spend,” Small added.
Proposed Solutions and Recommendations
Recommit Oklahoma’s K–12 system to phonics-based reading instruction.
Launch teacher retraining programs and standardized, regular phonics-focused assessments.
Implement a “gate” policy:
No student advances past third grade without grade-level reading proficiency.
Mississippi maintained this accountability and saw significant reading gains despite lower per-pupil spending, now ranking as the top state in reading sufficiency data.
Address economic impact by promoting the “success sequence”—completing high school or GED, securing a job, and establishing a stable family—as a pathway out of poverty, noting that 97% of those who follow these steps are not low-income.
Jonathan Small
Impact of Technology and Other Educational Concerns
Technology Policy:
A recent bill to ban cell phone use in schools, though simple and effective in private schools, faced significant opposition from teachers' unions and school associations, passing only for a one-year ban.
Private schools maintain strict technology policies and traditional teaching methods (e.g., cursive writing).
Economic and Political Context:
Concerns about proposed out-of-state ballot measures in June 2026:
One could raise Oklahoma’s minimum wage from about $10 to over $35 per hour, threatening small businesses and job creation.
Another would introduce a California-style top-two election system, potentially eradicating the primary party system and affecting political representation.
Influence of Educators and Unions:
Teachers’ focus has shifted from core academic skills to political objectives, contributing to reading challenges.
Other states (e.g., Utah, Mississippi) have succeeded with reforms, such as banning collective bargaining in the teaching profession (Utah).
Strategies for Engaging Future Political Leaders
Require every candidate for governor, state superintendent, and other key roles to prioritize reversing the reading decline.
Promote the narrative:
Pre-K to third grade: focus on mastering reading (via phonics).
Fourth grade onward: students “read to learn.”
Highlight successful models from Florida, Mississippi, and private schools to guide reforms.
Encourage constituent and community engagement with lawmakers to ensure accountability and effective school policies.
Next Steps
Amend Oklahoma’s Reading Sufficiency Act to include enforceable gatekeeping measures, ensuring students are not promoted past third grade unless reading proficiently.
Eliminate whole language/3Qing methods in K-12 public schools and ensure comprehensive teacher retraining in phonics.
Implement standardized assessments and monitoring protocols to evaluate early reading outcomes.
Advocate for and hold accountable candidates for governor, state superintendent, and relevant offices, requiring them to prioritize the reading proficiency crisis.
Strengthening technology restrictions in public schools by passing legislation to ban cell phones and similar technology usage.
Monitor and counter potential ballot measures in June 2026 regarding drastic minimum wage increases and election model reforms.
“What's exciting is we're not asking the State of Oklahoma to do something that's unproven. We're literally just asking Oklahoma to recommit,” Small declared.
OCPA’s Role and Activities
Organizational Principles:
Committed to free markets, limited government, individual initiative, personal responsibility, and strong families.
Activities:
OCPA, with its 15 full-time employees, actively engages at the Capitol daily to ensure public policy aligns with these principles.
Regularly engages in state policymaking through legislative and judicial scorecards, scoring approximately 100 bills per year and providing information on state Supreme Court judges.
Focuses on improving public policy outcomes, including advocating for school choice and educational effectiveness.
Runs the J Rufus Fears fellowship program, which retrains citizens (ages 18–40) in OCPA's core principles for policy and government roles. To date, over 380 individuals have graduated, with 50 now employed in government and five elected to public office.
“As Oklahoma moves back to what is proven, repeatedly, to work in education, we must be ready for what my family calls weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. When the K-12 school system starts to complain about that first group of third graders that is held back, we need to stay the course just like Mississippi did to go from the bottom to the top in education,” Small concluded.
For more information on OCPA, click here.
About the speaker: Jonathan Small, C.P.A., serves as President of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs and joined the staff in December of 2010. Previously, Jonathan served as a budget analyst for the Oklahoma Office of State Finance, as a fiscal policy analyst and research analyst for the Oklahoma House of Representatives, and as director of government affairs for the Oklahoma Insurance Department. Small’s work includes co-authoring “Economics 101” with Dr. Arthur Laffer and Dr. Wayne Winegarden, and his policy expertise has been referenced by The Oklahoman, the Tulsa World, National Review, the L.A. Times, The Hill, the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post. His weekly column “Free Market Friday” is published by the Journal Record and syndicated in 27 markets. A recipient of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s prestigious Private Sector Member of the Year award, Small is nationally recognized for his work to promote free markets, limited government and innovative public policy reforms. Jonathan holds a B.A. in Accounting from the University of Central Oklahoma and is a Certified Public Accountant.
Amen!
Ok education at bottom since 2009.