OK Gov Stitt, Sen Pugh, Rep Caldwell Serve USAID Linked Education NGO, Send OK Tax Dollars Out-of-State for DEI
16 Southern States Fund 100s of Woke PhDs Via Ed NGO Headed by RINO GA Gov Kemp
Despite Oklahoma being the reddest state, with all 77 counties delivering a win for President Trump last November, it’s state leaders regularly remove their self-applied public labels of “Conservative”, “Republican” and “MAGA” once the cameras are off.
A peek inside one highly progressive NGO reveals the real education goals of Oklahoma’s RINO ruling class. Despite his 2023 order ending DEI, CRT and infused racism in Oklahoma education, Stitt has continued to flow Oklahoma tax dollars to promote those principles nationwide.
Gov Stitt, Sen Pugh and Rep Caldwell Serve on “Board of Control” Guiding Southern US Education
The Board of Control for Southern Regional Education is a 501(c)(3) non-profit with ties to USAID funding. The organization’s board is currently chaired by RINO Governor Brian Kemp (R-GA) .
Kemp is also listed as a member-at-large of Mission Graduates, a San Francisco non-profit also linked to USAID that “helps low-income, Latinx, Black, and immigrant youth and families achieve their college dreams”. The group defends CRT within public education and laments the end of affirmative action.
What is the Board of Control for Southern Regional Education?
Started in 1948, the Board of Control for Southern Regional Education (SREB) was founded to support economic vitality by improving education in the Southern US. In more recent years, the group publicly removed “Control” and refers to itself only as the SREB (EIN 58-0566141).
The SREB says it works “From pre-K to Ph.D., education across a lifetime”. As with many NGO and agency add-ons to public education, like the US Department of Education, the SREB inserted another layer of influence over state education policy.
This non-profit, interstate compact involves 16 member states: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia.
Each state provides its governor and four (4) appointees to serve on the SREB board with two of those being state legislators who also serve on the organization’s Legislative Advisory Council.
State Rep Chad Caldwell (R-Enid) and Sen Adam Pugh (R-Edmond) currently represent Oklahoma on the SREB Legislative Advisory Council. In Oklahoma, Pugh chairs both the Senate Education and Education Sub-Committees and is also a member of the Appropriations Committee.
Pugh has been deeply involved in ongoing legislator disruptions to State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ (R) agenda and the State Board of Education under Walters’ leadership (Link to previous reporting).
Currently, Pugh is doing the work of Oklahoma’s education unions by pushing legislation that softens accountability measures for districts and makes it more difficult to remove predator teachers from the classroom. The word on the political street is Pugh’s currently planning to replace Walters with a run for State Superintendent in 2026.
Caldwell serves similar roles on education related committees within the Oklahoma State House of Representatives. In 2023, Caldwell joined Gov Stitt and twenty (20) other Oklahoma lawmakers in endorsing Florida Governor Ron Desantis (R) over Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary.
Within the current legislative session, Caldwell has proposed 16 new pieces of legislation affecting public education. His co-authored “Protect Our Kids Act” (HB1075) is a misnomer that also makes it more difficult for the State Board of Education to remove predator educators from the classroom.
Within a sketchy shell game of pending legislation orchestrated by OK House Speaker Kyle Hilbert (R) (see previous reporting), Caldwell’s HB1075 is a duplicitous reboot of what was originally HB1491. The bill appears to require school districts to report staff resignations and terminations associated with misconduct and student abuse to the OSDE. In reality, it requires only district “recommendations to terminate” be reported leaving those who quietly resign without an investigation to continue being passed to other districts.
Caldwell’s bill also continues to absolve districts from any consequences when failing to report educator abuse to the OSDE:
“Failure to forward a copy of the recommendation (to terminate) to the State Board of Education shall not be the basis for any claim or action against a public school, its board of education, employees, agents or other representatives.” - HB1075
Other Stitt appointees to the SREB board include former State House Speaker and political reporter Jennifer Monies and former Tuttle and current Yukon Public Schools Superintendent Keith Sinor.
For 70 years, the SREB Legislative Advisory Council has met several times a year to set education policy because they appear to believe national NGOs and state politicians, not local school board members elected by parents, should control education.
SREB is Funded by Tax Dollars from 16 States and Federal Grants
SREB says it is “funded by appropriations from our states, as well as by contracts and grants from foundations and from local, state and federal agencies”. SREB’s 2023 990 filing to the IRS shows annual revenue of over $26 million with $14.5 million going to salaries.
Beyond $10,000 for “subscriptions” paid through the Office of Education Quality and Accountability to SREB and the Education Commission of the States (ECS), another USAID linked NGO based in Colorado, Oklahoma’s annual education budget obscures all other funds sent to the SREB within larger collective allotments. It is unknown how much SREB actually receives from Oklahoma taxpayers.
Primarily, SREB revenue comes from member states through contract revenue, state appropriations, membership dues and registration fees.
The SREB has a full staff, and current president Stephen Pruitt, a high school chemistry teacher turned politician, is compensated more than $350,000 annual for 36.25 hours of work per week.
Pruitt also serves on the boards of four other education related entities including BSCS Science Learning, which like SREB, has ties to USAID funding.
SREB Shapes OK Ed Policy Behind Scenes
For decades, the SREB has been paid tax dollars to affect Oklahoma education policy from afar. In 2015-2016, the SREB performed a contracted study concerning professional development for Oklahoma teachers.
By 2017-2018, the OSDE under then State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister (R then D) shifted the focus of educator training to trauma, not reading or math teaching strategies. Both teacher professional development and Oklahoma’s cost per student significantly increased ($7,761 in 2017-2018; $9,039 in 2019-2020) as student assessment scores decreased.
From 2022 through this year, SREB collected $4.5 million from the federal government (US Dept of Ed) to facilitate roundtables and advise Oklahoma on teacher recruitment.
In 2018, SREB was paid through the State Regents for Higher Education to make recommendations about the Oklahoma Promise college scholarship program for low-income students.
Oddly, SREB lists Oklahoma City Public Schools (OKCPS) as its second largest independent contractor. SREB paid OKCPS $267,800 for services “Inspiring STEM Educators”. Currently, only 16% of OKCPS students are proficient in science.
SREB Pushes DEI on States Through “Research”, Racist Flagship Event and Funding Highly Progressive PhDs
At the SREB’s 2022 annual board meeting with Oklahoma delegates included, participating states were informed a lack of diversity and equity within the teacher workforce was holding students back because “research” said so.
In December of 2023, while on the SREB board, Gov Stitt publicly signed an anti-DEI order stating “State agencies and institutions for higher education shall not utilize state funds, property, or resources to grant or support diversity, equity, and inclusion positions, departments, activities, procedures, or programs to the extent they grant preferential treatment based on one person’s particular race, color, sex, ethnicity, or national origin over another’s.”
Stitt continued to allow funds to flow out of Oklahoma to the SREB in support of programs that directly undermine his own order. Within 2023 IRS filings, SREB states it spent $1,323,258 on its annual flagship event, the Annual Institute on Teaching and Mentoring which it describes as “the nation’s largest gathering of underrepresented scholars of color”. Since 1994, “more than 22,000 doctoral scholars and faculty have attended the institute.”
You Paid for it, Oklahoma: 100 DEI Driven PhDs a Year from SREB’s Doctoral Scholarship
Oklahoma tax dollars also go to the SREB to support their State Doctoral Scholars Program which finances 100 candidates in earning a PhD each year. The scholarship is for “people of color” with a goal of “more underrepresented PhD students who seek careers as faculty on college campuses”.
These ‘Funded Fellows’ are described by SREB as being “at the forefront of groundbreaking research and innovation in their pursued Ph.D. concentrations” but a review of just ten (10) recipients from the program's 2023-2024 cohort reveals a national pipeline for pushing progressive candidates into leadership roles within education.
1 - Ava Hanson - As the only recipient studying in Oklahoma, Hanson is from Michigan, uses she/her pronouns, has been working on her PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Tulsa since 2021, and received the psychology department’s social justice award for her passion in studying health disparities based on race.
2 - Tomiko T. Smalls - Smalls’ PhD from Clemson University is in Educational Leadership. Her dissertation focused on the “Persistence Experiences of Former Division II Black Women Basketball Players Who Graduated from Predominantly White Institutions”. There’s a great deal of talk about Predominantly White Institutions, or PWIs, among SREB’s Funded Fellows.
3 - Ravea Rodriguez - Rodriguez earned a PhD in School Psychology from Georgia State University. She recently spoke about “Caring for Queer Youth: How Trauma-Informed Care Supports LGBTQ+ Students” at the National Association of School Psychology conference in New Orleans.
4 - Lydia Meredith - Meredith studied Rhetoric and Composition at Georgia State University. Her dissertation “investigates the relationship between sexual minority discriminatory sentiment and Christian rhetoric, specifically biblical sermons, speeches, discourse, words declaring LGBTQ+ identities are immoral and condemned by God”.
5 - Makeba Lindsay-D’Abreu - While working on her SREB funded PhD in Urban Education and Leadership from Virginia Commonwealth University, Lindsay-D’Abreu started a GoFundMe to finance her trip to the Pan-African Pentecostal Symposium in Ghana to speak about how African American educators are “Decolonizing Adult Education”.
6 - Qunishia Carter - To complete her PhD in Educational Psychology at Ball State University, Carter’s dissertation “focuses on the experiences of Black women in PWIs”.
7 - Brian Wesley Harrington - Harrington studied counseling within education at the University of Mississippi. He promotes himself as a researcher in “liberation psychology and school counseling”. According to Psychology, liberation psychology “emphasizes social justice, collective empowerment, and the liberation of marginalized individuals and communities” while aiming “to challenge and transform oppressive systems and structures while promoting equality”.
8 - Ganiyu Jimoh - According to his University of Virginia bio, Jimoh oddly came to the US on a student visa from Africa to study “Africa’s modern and contemporary visual culture”. He is also a political cartoonist (www.jimgatoons.com).
9 - Angel Houts - Houts studied Cognitive Psychology and Psycholinguistics at the University of Arkansas. His dissertation is entitled “Strategies for Misinformation Correction: Evidence for the Power of Negation”. Participants in his research read “Twitter-like statements” which were negated to determine how best to control mass thinking.
“Negation can be used as a tactic to counter false claims such as “vaccines cause autism” with a factual rebuttal such as “No, vaccines have never been clearly linked to autism.” - from Angel Houts’ dissertation
10 - Kamia Slaughter - Slaughter was funded by SREB to study Higher Education Administration at Auburn. Her college lecture tour is entitled “The Drawl, Y’all, and the Downfall of College Access Discourses Concerning Black Rural Students and Communities”. Her research focus involved “race, place and discourse within rural communities”.
Oklahomans helped pay for these progressive PhDs. Given the racially based nature of the scholarship, tax payers from all member states have been undermining their own values while unknowingly paying reparations through tuition for decades.
Within the first sixty (60) days of his current term, President Trump ordered an end to race-based college admissions and scholarships. For six (6) years, Governor Stitt has been on the SREB board promoting and funding just such programs and policies. Oklahomans have also been paying for Sen Pugh and Rep Caldwell to regularly travel to attend SREB events and the Legislative Advisory Council where politicians, not parents, plan public education policy behind the scenes.
Stitt In-State Appointees Reveal Progressive Ties & Further Links to USAID Funds
Exceptional X researcher @Snarkio recently posted further revelations concerning Gov Stitt’s state level appointments of three (3) top executives from the highly progressive George Kaiser Family Foundation.
In May of 2024, the foundation’s Executive Director Ken Levit was appointed to the State Regents for Higher Education. A last minute Senate Education Committee agenda change by Sen Pugh ensured Levit’s swift confirmation by denying any time for public scrutiny or feedback. According to DataRepublican, Levit is connected to four (4) NGOs linked to USAID funding.
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SEL methods are to engineer people’s values, beliefs and behaviors. Think about The Special Olympics. Tim Shiver uses phraseology to tie people’s emotions of joy and happiness seeing disabled athletes experience joy by competing in the Special Olympic Games. The phraseology of ‘Inclusion Revolution’ along with many other phrases found on Special Olympics FB/X pgs. is to engineer behavior of All people including conservatives to practice Inclusion. And to not just practice Inclusion in the Special Olympics but in all spheres of society. The UN wants Inclusion to be practiced at minimum, using others preferred pronouns.
All that to say, I feel Stitt and Lankford also use SEL by saying things they know conservatives want to hear. At times they’ll uphold conservative values. Lankford posts constantly about being pro life and Stitt posts about having Oklahoma be a top 10 state. This is to engineer our behavior to accept all the horrific UN policies they’re in fact implementing that are anti US Constitution. It’s no wonder SEL has been implemented in schools to brainwash kids!!
Who’s going to primary Sen. Pugh?