Oklahoma
Oklahoma’s New State School Report Cards: 5 Takeaways
State school report cards are out, and eight Oklahoma City schools have been graded with an F for the last school year. These report cards look at how public schools are serving Oklahoma students.
1. Oklahoma struggles nationally in education
Oklahoma traditionally ranks near the bottom nationally in education. U.S. News and World Report places Oklahoma second to last in the country for education. The Oklahoma State Report card allows state leaders and educators to learn why the state struggles and potential ways to fix problems.
2. Oklahoma Schools get a C for Academic Achievement
Schools in Oklahoma improved slightly in English and math achievement, according to the State Report Card website. However, the overall grade for academic achievement stayed the same with a C from the previous school year.
3. Oklahoma City Schools had fewer “F” graded schools
An Oklahoman analysis looked at 526 campuses in 10 counties in central Oklahoma. The analysis found 12 schools in Oklahoma County with an F grade and eight of those schools within Oklahoma City Public Schools. However, their analysis found that OKCPS improved by 20 percent from the previous school year.
OKCPS released a statement that said —
“This year, eight schools across our district raised their letter grades, and several others demonstrated remarkable growth, with eight sites increasing their overall scores by more than 10 points. One standout achievement is Classen SAS at Northeast High School regaining its “A” designation, showcasing a continued tradition of academic excellence.
“These milestones highlight the tireless efforts of our educators and staff, our commitment to high-quality instruction, and our focus on leveraging data to drive impactful changes. While challenges remain, with eight schools, including three alternative education sites, receiving an F designation, this represents a reduction from last year. It is a signal that the strategic support and interventions we’ve put in place are working.
“Our dedication to lifting our most underperforming schools remains unwavering because we believe every student deserves a world-class education. At OKCPS, we are building momentum and staying true to our vision of ensuring that every student graduates ready to be employable, enrolled, or enlisted.
“This year’s progress is a testament to what’s possible when we come together with purpose and determination. To our educators, staff, and community: thank you for your partnership and belief in the success and future of our students. The future is bright, and we’re not stopping now.”
4. OKCPS is trying to improve chronic absenteeism
The pandemic changed the education landscape and contributed to more chronic absenteeism – that’s students who miss 10 percent or more of the school year. The Oklahoma State Department of Education gave the state an F grade for attendance for the 2022-2023 school year. Oklahoma City Public Schools superintendent Jamie Polk told News 9 last September they were focused on meeting students who need extra support.
“It’s a high concern I have. We would like to do better,” said Polk, during a September 2024 interview with News 9. “This is a major problem.”
Chronic Absenteeism during the 2023-2024 school year improved to a D grade.
“Each child should be guaranteed one year of growth. That’s our role,” Polk said. “I also have hope. We say we have a seat for every child. That means something to us.”
5. Chronically absent students also face economic disadvantages
Data from the Oklahoma State Report Card shows students who face economic challenges are most likely to miss class time. According to OKCPS’s Statistical Profile report, 92% of the students who attend OKCPS schools face economic disadvantages.
Polk said academic progress hinges on resources for students who don’t have the support to make it to class. Last fall, Polk announced her district is working with Oklahoma County District Attorney Vicki Behenna’s office to find more solutions to keep students in school.
Oklahoma
Retired St. Louis Cardinals Star Matt Holliday Selling Oklahoma Home With a Baseball Field and a ‘$2 Million Pool’
Retired St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Matt Holliday is selling his Oklahoma home, and fittingly, it has its very own baseball field.
The gated 136-acre estate in Stillwater—about an hour north of Oklahoma City—is asking $12 million, a price tag that makes it the most expensive single-family home on the market in the Sooner State, listing records show.
MORE: Arizona’s Most Expensive Home—With a Shark Tank, Basketball Arena and Shooting Range—Lists for $40 Million
Holliday, 46, a Stillwater native, acquired the lot for $3 million in 2018, records with PropertyShark show. He and his wife, Leslee, built the home in 2022.
“One of the things I’ve loved most about this home is the opportunity it has given us to gather people together,” Holliday said in a statement to Mansion Global. “Some of our favorite memories here revolve around hosting college students and professional athletes for meals, conversation and meaningful fellowship.”
The property is “a super unique home for Oklahoma,” said listing agent Wyatt Poindexter of the Agency, who brought the home to the market on Wednesday.
The field is a real rarity. “I’ve never seen one [before] in my life, and I’ve been in real estate for 31 years,” Poindexter said. It has professional lighting and turf, stands, and right behind home plate there’s a massive fire pit, according to Poindexter. The property also has batting cages.
Both were added “for practice for the boys, and for fun,” Poindexter said.
Two of Holliday’s sons are following in their father’s footsteps. Jackson was selected first overall in the 2022 Major League Baseball draft by the Baltimore Orioles and made his MLB debut in 2024, and Ethan went fourth overall to the Colorado Rockies in 2025.
Holliday “pretty much trained them on site,” Poindexter said.
During his 14-year career, Holliday, a seven-time All-Star, played for the Colorado Rockies along with the Oakland Athletics and the New York Yankees. But his longest and most well-known tenure was with the St. Louis Cardinals, with whom he won the World Series in 2011.
The property’s amenities extend beyond baseball, though. There’s a putting green, a gym, an indoor pickleball and basketball court, and a two-level pool with a waterfall.
“The pool is massive,” Poindexter said. “It has a swim-through grotto with seating and benches. It’s a $2 million pool.”
There’s also a hot tub, an outdoor kitchen, a pond, a guest house, a workshop and running trails.
The house itself, meanwhile, spans 7,500 square feet over a single level and was inspired by Texas Hill Country homes with their metal roofs and stone exteriors, Poindexter explained.
The house is being sold furnished, with the exception of the MLB memorabilia. It has oversized windows; an open-plan main living space with a lounge, kitchen and dining area; a butler’s pantry; two offices; and five bedrooms, including a primary suite with dual closets.
“There’s something special about a home that naturally invites community, and this one has been the backdrop for so many unforgettable evenings, shared stories and lasting relationships,” Holliday said.
Oklahoma
Chemical engineering researchers earn first publication for Oklahoma in top AI conference – Oklahoma State University
Thursday, February 19, 2026
Media Contact:
Desa James | Communications Coordinator | 405-744-2669 | desa.james@okstate.edu
Dr. Zeyuan Song, a recent Ph.D. graduate of the School of Chemical Engineering at
Oklahoma State University, and Dr. Zheyu Jiang, assistant professor for CHE, have achieved
a milestone rarely seen in Oklahoma’s research landscape: acceptance into the International
Conference on Learning Representations 2026, one of the world’s most competitive and
influential academic conferences in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
ICLR ranks among the top AI venues globally – second in the field by h-index – and
is known for debuting many of the breakthroughs that have shaped modern AI, including
the variational autoencoder and the graph attention network. Each submission undergoes
a monthslong, double-blind review and rebuttal process, making acceptance highly selective.
“I am proud of the research excellence Zeyuan achieved during his Ph.D. study in my research
lab,” Jinag said. “I have been impressed by his ability to bring in new ideas from
diverse fields in mathematics, engineering, and AI. This, when combined with a deep
understanding of the cutting-edge breakthroughs in the field, leads to this outstanding
work published in ICLR.”
Song’s paper, titled Adaptive Fourier Mamba Operators, introduces a powerful new machine
learning framework for modeling complex natural and engineering phenomena described
by partial differential equations.
“Imagine you are baking a cake,” Jiang said. “The temperature of the cake isn’t determined by
time alone. The outside heats faster than the inside, and the top browns more quickly
than the bottom. Partial differential equations describe changes that happen simultaneously
in space and time, like how heat moves through a cake as it bakes.”
These types of equations govern real-world phenomena such as fluid dynamics, heat
transfer, quantum mechanics and even the financial market.
Unlike traditional numerical solvers, which can become extremely time-consuming to solve,
Song’s AFMO method uses a mathematically grounded neural operator framework to learn
how these systems behave, often with greater efficiency and generalizability.
According to the paper, AFMO integrates two computational frameworks, Adaptive Fourier
decomposition, a novel signal processing technique that builds orthogonal spectral
bases tailored to the problem, and state-space models, an emerging neural network
architecture that can efficiently handle long-range dependencies, to solve general nonlinear partial
differential equations.
“Imagine you are playing piano,” Jiang said. “Standard Fourier neural operator plays every
song on a standard piano. The piano keys are fixed, and you play by mixing those fixed
notes. It works great when the song fits that instrument well, but it can struggle
if the ‘song’ has unusual rhythms. Adaptive Fourier decomposition, on the other hand,
is like a custom keyboard tailored to the particular song one wants to play.
“Meanwhile, a state-space model is like a super-fast musician who reads the music
left-to-right and keeps a small memory of what happened so far, so they can play very
long songs efficiently. Therefore, AFMO builds a custom instrument for each song first,
and then has the super-fast musician to play it, so it has the right instrument and
efficient playing.”
By uniting these in a novel way, AFMO can solve PDEs on irregular shapes and complex
geometries, capture sharp features and singularities, and produce results that are
both highly accurate and computationally efficient.
“These are especially challenging problems to solve due to the intricacies of the systems
involved,” Jiang said. “They require us to think out of the box and develop truly innovative solutions.”
In extensive testing, the method consistently outperformed leading neural operator
models across diverse benchmark problems, ranging from modeling fluid flow in airfoils
and pipes to predicting European option prices in financial mathematics.
Song’s accomplishment represents more than an individual’s success.
This publication is the first ICLR paper from the state of Oklahoma. Notably, this work comes from
a chemical engineering department, rather than a traditional computer science or electrical
engineering program.
“As AI continuously transforms the world, we are in an exciting era for interdisciplinary
research,” Jiang said. “We are thrilled to see the broader impacts and implications
of this work in helping OSU recruit talented students, forming cross-department collaborations,
and competing for more federal and industry funding to support AI for Science research that pushes
toward AI capacity and workforce development in Oklahoma.”
Oklahoma
How earmarked funds help upgrade Oklahoma communities
Earmark is the term many know, but technically it’s congressionally directed spending in the Senate, community project funding in the House, which is exactly what earmarks are: funding directed by members of Congress for projects in their community.
Fifth District Congresswoman Stephanie Bice visited the Edmond Water Treatment Plant on Tuesday to present city leaders with a symbolic check for $4 million.
The money is part of the Housing and Urban Development budget and is to be used to update the electrical grid in a city that, like all municipalities in Oklahoma, is funded predominantly through sales tax.
“Sometimes the revenue doesn’t meet the need, and this is one way that I can actually bring federal dollars back home to Oklahoma to help my communities across the 5th district,” said Bice.
Federal dollars like this have helped upgrade the 911 center in Logan County, the airport in Chandler, and the Forensic Science Institute at UCO.
Bice facilitated funding for 15 projects this way, and she’s certainly not alone. According to the nonpartisan National Taxpayers Union Foundation, Fiscal Year 26 appropriations contained just over 7600 earmarks, totaling about $14.3 billion, less than 1% of all discretionary. The Oklahoma delegation accounted for 66 of those earmarks, worth about $314 million.
“These are dollars that would have been spent by agencies, by federal agencies, and I think it’s incumbent upon me as an elected official representing this community to be able to secure those dollars and bring them back home for projects that are really vital,” said Bice.
By law, the projects are listed on each member’s website.
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