If you read the articles on facilitated meetings and the delphi technique, you will see these meetings are NO WAY for the average Tulsan to get a thought across to anybody. Because you see, the outcomes of the meeting have already been decided. You can go and talk til your face turns blue, the facilitators will just nod and say "good point" but when it comes to implementing their agenda, your opinion will have no effect.
The schools should be first and formost listening to the parents, then taxpayers. When "stakeholders" who could come from anywhere, come in to a school district and start implementing policy, you will see the schools decline in the same fasion they have in California-- into agenda driven, political indoctrination camps bereft of academics.
Don't say it can't happen there, because the study circle facilitation is a tried and true technique, their teaching tolerance program is a tried and true technique and the way they steamroll over parents because they are a well funded NGO is tried and true.
The people who brought this to my attention, also showed me that the study circle group is linked to George Soros open society foundation. Remember Mr. Soros, was going to spend a milion $ of his own money to throw the presidential election? If the Mayor of Tulsa is a democrat, he may be tainted by allowing these study circle meetings to continue, because Mr. Soros is one of the heavy hitter donors to the Democratic party. Now most mayors don't run on political a political platform, so if he is following Mr. Soros, obviously he is tainting his office with his own party politics.
If Tulsans don't work to stop this, this study circles group with ties to George Soros and intnernational socliasts (the curriculum they would like used at the school comes from an Hungarian curriculum) your schools will quickly sink to the bottom and become as chaotic and terrible as the schools in California. I don't think you want that do you?
But for this to be a Delphi program the "facilitators" would have to have an agenda. Yet this is not the case, as Tulsa Talks is publicly and openly soliciting private citizens of any stripe to serve as facilitators. To my knowledge, there is no screening other than guaging one's ability to commit the time and effort through to reach an outcome.
Mayor LaFortune is a republican, as are a large majority of Tulsans. Certainly one outcome of this process is that liberal points of view regarding education will emerge. But so will conservative voices. Though conceived by liberals, I believe that this process can just as easily serve to give voice to a community that is overwhelmingy populated by persons with traditional values. Any other outcome is simply too difficult to engineer, based on the design of the program locally.
I think you have presumed too much. I think that this process was simply out there as a model and it was embraced as a method of encouraging grassroots participation in education.