Education and Ideology in Oklahoma City

A great example of the inefficiency and blindness to reality that an inflexible commitment to the mythical “separation of church and state” can entail: via Mirror of Justice, we learn that Oklahoma City is currently in the midst of a debate over whether to fund and construct an expensive new charter school in its once-blighted downtown area. The goal of the new school is, ostensibly, to create an environment in which pupils from divergent backgrounds can come together in an environment that differs significantly from your average suburban campus. As one local columnist writes:

Scarcely a month goes by without a story in the paper about the efforts of Oklahoma City’s elites to establish a new downtown public school. How wonderful it will be for our privileged children to mix with the poor and working class in a spanking new, inner city school, the high-class crowd fantasizes.

Meanwhile, in the more remote regions of the newspaper, there’s a story that some notice and fewer care about: Villa Teresa, a Catholic primary and elementary school in the reviving Midtown neighborhood just north of downtown Oklahoma City. Villa Teresa has, by all accounts, provided an excellent education to its students for almost eight decades. It is closing its doors.

As Mike Scaperlanda, linking to the article, points out, “[city] leaders dream of a opening a racially and economically diverse school in downtown Oklahoma City, [yet] they ignore the reality that the city already has such a school in Villa Teresa, which is run by the Carmelites.” But that eighty-plus-year-old institution is likely to close its doors instead, owing to the local political class’ opposition to any form of school voucher system. That, and the unspoken fact that those vouchers would go to a religiously-affiliated school.

So the city is pushing forward with a massive investment of time and resources in establishing a new school which is essentially redundant. But rather than acknowledge the actual, lived experience of a community which has been quietly educating students from all racial and economic backgrounds on virtually the same turf, there is only proceduralism. (Such religious groups, it’s worth noting, were for many American cities the only remaining anchors of inner-city communities in the decades of blight that are only now beginning to see a reversal). But all that is of little consequence—ideology shall triumph.