477: Getting Away With It

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life.

Ira Glass

So I'm on a flight to Minneapolis sitting next to Ken Hegan, 6'2" travel writer. And Ken is trying to pull off a scheme that is not at all friendly, though, to his credit, he feels bad about what he's doing.

Ira Glass

He'd read about these clamps on the internet and thought that is simultaneously the most inventive and the most passive aggressive gadget he'd ever heard of. It's called the Knee Defender. And as a tall guy who flies two or three times a month for his job, he decided he had to try them. Attaching the clamps to the arms of his tray table was simple, but next came the part that kept Ken awake the night before.

Ira Glass

The card says, "This is a Knee Defender courtesy card, TM--" trademark. "I am using Knee Defender, TM. Knee Defender, TM is a small plastic device that helps me protect myself by limiting how much the seat in front of me can recline. I wanted to let you know about this."

And then underneath, Ken checked the box that said that her seat would be able to recline two inches. Ken had been scared that handling this to somebody, he was going to end up in some horrible argument with a stranger on a plane. He's Canadian-- not to put too fine a point on that. He just doesn't like confrontation.

We discuss what happens next. And remember, as we discuss this, we're sitting in the row directly behind the woman that he handed the card to, hoping that she cannot hear us because of the noise of the plane, which is louder than you might think.

Ira Glass

This is not the kind of getting away with it that most of us want. Most of us want total getting away with it, which means we don't just get our way. In addition, nobody thinks badly of us. You know? Nobody judges. That's what we want. That's just as true for grown men as for little boys.

Ira Glass

I totally relate to that choice. I think lots of us are like this-- sneaks on a plane. If we can get away with something completely with no one ever knowing, nobody judging us, and-- just as important-- nobody really hurt, we give it a shot.

Today on our program, we have stories of people sneaking their way through, putting one over, getting away with it. Some people justifying it by saying they're doing it for others, for the greater good. Some not bothering with that-- they just don't care.

We have a dad hauling marijuana for the sake of his family. We have you, our listeners, setting things on fire and cheating in school. We have politicians lying in a wholesale and utterly effective way for the sake of four-year-olds. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Take Your Kid to Work Day. Of course, the most important thing, if you want to get away with some kind of wrongdoing, is that you have a plan-- a foolproof, well thought out plan, with safeguards and contingencies along the way to guard against everything you could think of that could possibly, possibly go wrong. Domingo Martinez has this story about his parents and a plan of theirs years and years ago.

Domingo Martinez

By 1986, Dad had become a truck driver with nothing left to haul but marijuana. Through his early 30s, he could do little with the trucking business he'd inherited from Grandpa except watch as it crumbled around him.

Back then, he began his days by throwing open the door to the bedroom I shared with my brother, Dan. He'd stand there in his underwear, looking like a tall diapered child, and say, you two get up. He would end the day drinking a lot of $1.50 Budweisers at the shanty bars that littered the port of Brownsville.

At home, Mom kept the bookkeeping. She watched the flow of money slow to a trickle and then stop outright when I was in middle school. My brother, sisters, and I knew things were dire when our mother stopped shopping at El Centro Supermarket-- the nice grocery store, as she'd always told us-- and started bringing home bags from Lopez Supermarket, the poor people grocery store.

One morning, Mom surprises me by showing up at my seventh grade algebra class and removing me, getting us on the road out of Brownsville, headed north. There's no explanation. "Sientáte y lla callete," she snaps at me. Sit down and shut up.

I don't know why I didn't guess what we were doing that morning-- that Mom and I were lookouts for Dad, who was on the road somewhere behind us in one of his flat-nosed tractor trailers, carrying a large load of marijuana and headed north. I had heard the stories, knew some of the tactics of smuggling by this point, but I didn't make the connection-- that Mom and I were driving ahead of Dad to make sure the customs station was closed, and if it happened to be open, we were supposed to turn back and warn him.

This was back in the 1980s before the Patriot Act, when there were two US customs checkpoints blocking the migration of drugs, fruit, people, reptiles, and parrots on the roads between the United States and Mexico, both about 100 miles north of the Mexican border at highway choke points.

The station on Highway 77 in Sarita was the busier and the better financed. The checkpoint in Hebbronville, though, was an airstream trailer with an attached carport to protect the agents from the sun. And it would often close for breakfast or lunch.

So we were headed towards that one this morning, going north on Highway 281, driving through the scenery of asthmatic plants and stunted trees. The car is hot, no air conditioning. My mom and I are saying nothing to one another. We have each decided that the other is unworthy of conversation. We stare out the windows and think very different things.

Mom is thinking about the $100 she and Dad had spent before 6 o'clock that morning-- $100 that would help them make $2,000 if things went right, because their first stop on this felony excursion was to Dad's cúrandera whom we knew as La Señora, Dad's personal witchdoctor, for an emergency session.

They were let right through at 5:00 in the morning, and they had only one burning question-- will the checkpoint be open? After years of sitting through these sessions with my grandmother, I didn't have to be there to know exactly how it went in the cúrandera's office.

La Señora is older, matronly, dresses in a thin frock with her hair pulled back in a bun. She has my parents sit across from her desk in a black leather love seat with chrome handles. A panorama of photos hang around her office, some wallet-sized, others larger and in portrait. A pencil sketch of a Camaro by one of her grandsons hangs next to a window.

She listens closely to their question, nodding sleepily at their preoccupation, sympathizing, understanding. They've reached a decision, and they can't turn back, they tell her. They need to do it. No other choice anymore. She stands up abruptly and walks behind her desk, which is cluttered with sheets of notebook paper crawling with ink-- illegible notes, names of people, sets of cryptic numbers, home addresses of saints. She closes her eyes and scribbles something on her yellow legal pad-- nonsense to anyone else reading it.

On her desk are two cheap leaded crystal bottles, each filled with a clear liquid. She gently reaches for a matching shot glass and lifts it to the light, making it sparkle. She places the glass on the surface before her and pours from one bottle, then the other. When the two clear liquids mix, they turn a deep crimson and thicken like plasma. She nods her head as if her suspicions have been confirmed.

She produces a glass orb filled with water, sitting on a black plastic ring. She sits up straight, closes her eyes, and regulates her breathing into a loud, rhythmic inhalation, exhalation, that unconsciously forces Mom and Dad to do the same. After a few seconds, she opens her eyes suddenly and strikes the glass orb with a metal wand, making it ring in the clear morning air. Then she lifts the orb between her two pudgy hands and stares deeply into the inverted image of the room around it.

Sitting opposite this chicanery and watching everything she does, you're drawn to the ritual, and you can't help but try to figure it out, too. No, she says with certainty. The checkpoint will not be open this morning. Go in peace. God be with you.

When Mom and I reach the checkpoint at 11:45 that morning, it is very much open for business. A line of cars five deep stretches back from the underbudgeted airstream trailer. Our job now is to go through and then turn back around and report to Dad that his doom was indeed imminent.

Mom is visibly shaken. She turns off the radio with a hard click and considers this-- considers her options. From the car, we can see a skinny middle-aged white guy in green Border Patrol garb, sitting on a reclining chair in the open doorway of the Airstream trailer. He's facing the cars as they pass under the tin roof. It must have been 110 degrees inside the trailer, 100 in the shade.

From his position, never bothering to get up, the agent sits fanning himself with the newspaper and sleepily peers into the cars, asking if everyone is an American citizen, waiting for an accented answer, smiling, and then waving them through, like a sympathetic priest granting absolution.

Hi, where y'all going to today, asks the skinny little man. Mom's window is now only halfway open, and in her nervousness, she rolls it all the way up. Hi, sorry. I mean, San Antonio, as she opens the window. Y'all American citizens? Yes, she says, as she leans back so he could get a clear look at me, nodding my head. I don't say anything except the quiet yep when I nod, but he has not heard me.

There is an uncomfortable pause, I think because they're supposed to hear your accent. There is an anxious beat, and he still hasn't let us go when I say, yes, I am, a bit too enthusiastically. Mom laughs nervously. She had been hoping our light skin would exonerate us without a problem.

Y'all have a nice day, he says, like he hasn't noticed anything awkward. We drive through, and I feel her seethe for the next few miles.

That was about noon. Somewhere behind us, at a roadside rest stop, Dad and my older brother Dan are waiting in Dad's tractor trailer, which is attached to the trailer with the marijuana. The two center I beams that run the length of the trailer make perfect housing once you weld metal plates all along the underside and at the tail end. It creates a long rectangular box sealed at the rear end with the axle of the rig, where 20 40-pound blocks of marijuana can be hidden. This is what Dad and Dan are carrying.

I wondered dimly if Dan has figured out what he's doing out here on the road north when he should be in high school. But Dan has always been more streetwise, much savvier than me. I figure that if I figured it out, he'd have figured it out long before.

Mom and I drive on to Hebbronville. I'm dehydrated. I want to stop at a store. We can't, she says to me. We have to turn back. I think we're behind.

Still, I'm hungry and really thirsty, so I persist. Certainly we have time to go to a convenience store. They can't have scheduled this thing to hinge on a few minutes. Certainly they've devised this more cleverly than that. Please, I plead. Just stop at the 7-Eleven.

Grudgingly, she pilots the noisy car around the small town and finds a convenience store. I get out with a couple of dollars and come up short when I try paying for some donuts and a chocolate milk. I return to the car for more money. Just get in, she yells. And I do, leaving the food at the counter. Mom whips the car around, and I'm in trouble, used to it by now.

We travel like that for a few minutes. And when the checkpoint is back in sight, we hold our breath so the guy won't see us. And right then, we see Dad and Dan and the trailer heading right for the checkpoint. Dad had become nervous, or maybe brave, or maybe he was blinded by his $100 faith in his cúrandera and had charged forth without waiting for Mom's report.

Oh, god, my mother says. And all the blood drains from my face from just the tone in her voice. I had never heard her voice so charged with fear. Oh, god, she says again. With her left hand, she grabs the knob that controls the headlights and flashes at Dad, who is only a few hundred feet from the checkpoint. She flashes four times, in clear view of anyone who is paying attention.

I wonder if that is her signal that the checkpoint is open, but question the wisdom of doing it while he is next in line in full view of the guy at the checkpoint, were he to look over his shoulder and see the noisy southbound car that just drove through not 30 minutes before.

She slows down, slows terrifically down, going less than 20 miles per hour on the highway. And for a moment, I can see Dad is driving. I can see that the blood is drained from his face, too, making his eyebrows stand out a rich black on his pallid, deathly white forehead, a mask of someone pretending desperately that everything is A-OK, but doing it horrifically badly.

I see Dan in the passenger seat, holding onto the handrail above the door as a means to steady himself through this craziness, through this stupid, unnecessary risk. And he looks calm, collected, uncaring, like he isn't there.

There are no cars ahead of them now. The trailer is next in line. It slows to a crawl, and I could see Dad desperately trying to ignore the crazy, flashing, noisy Bonneville, rattling through the southbound lane, keeping his eyes fixed to the road, pretending like he isn't smuggling anything in the empty trailer behind him, this empty, useless trailer with the I beams all sealed up, with the two Mexican men driving it, with no obvious destination, no paperwork, no affiliation with any hauling or trucking company.

No, sir, not trafficking in drugs. Just driving through, to Houston probably, looking for work. Oh, yes, we're American citizens. That's not why we're nervous. We could prove that. That's nothing. We're nervous because of the pot we're hiding, and because we're only getting $2,000 for risking upwards of 10 years in prison. Isn't that funny? Isn't that just hysterical? But the skinny white guy is having lunch and can't be bothered.

In one of the weirder moments of this whole debacle, the Bonneville, the Airstream, and dad's tractor are all lined up like some cosmic event, and we see the skinny Border Patrol agent, with a white napkin tucked under his chin, and Dad's bloodless face up in the trailer through the window of the Airstream, as the agent waves him through with a fork, like he's conducting an orchestra. Go on through. Go on through.

Mom continues driving south, stunned by what has just happened. And I'm careful not to say a word. We almost reach Raymondville and stop at a Whataburger to get a quick, wordless lunch, then spend some time sitting in a parking lot, waiting. When she feels it is safe to return, she turns the car around and heads back north, back through the same checkpoint. Are you sure this is safe, I ask. She doesn't answer.

When we pull up again to the checkpoint, headed back to Hebbronville, around 3 o'clock, there was a different Border Patrol agent at the Airstream. He is a small, clean cut militant Mexican with a Southern drawl. Y'all American citizens, he demands instantly, leaning into the car through the window, clearly smelling for marijuana smoke.

Oh, yes, says my mother, who is probably quite relieved the hard part is over, and it looks like we're getting away with it. How about you, son? You American citizen? He gives me a direct glare through reflective sunglasses. There is nothing more potentially hostile than the indigenous ego interpreting the laws of his conquerer upon his own people.

Yes, sir, I say, careful not to move or fidget or look away like I've learned. He looks back at my mother, then at me, like he smells the nervousness of earlier. Something tugs at his intuition. Where are y'all headed, the sunglasses finally ask. This catches Mom off guard. Her subterfuge had ended when Dad had driven through the checkpoint. She left all her answers back in Raymondville.

We're going to Hebbronville, she says unconvincingly. Had he asked one more question, had he pressed it, we would have been in some sort of trouble. But he doesn't, and he backs off and motions us through.

Mom drives the noisy car through Hebbronville, and we are about to hit the open highway again when we noticed Dad's trailer in the parking lot of a cheap motel by the side of the road. My brother is lodged between the rearmost tires, working on the brake lights that ridiculously aren't working. Mom is as alarmed to find them there as I am. This confirms my suspicion that there had been no planning beyond the consultation at the cúrandera's. This whole debacle had been based on nothing more than $100 worth of faith.

Mom pulls up next to the trailer, and I think she expects a victorious reunion. When he sees her, Dad suddenly looks like he's about to punch her. Stupid [BLEEP] woman, he yells at her in Spanish. Mom stops cold. What the [BLEEP] were you thinking? If they would have just turned around for a moment, it would all be over, and it would all be your fault, he spits at her in Spanish. We realize what he's upset about-- the flashing headlights.

His words continue to snap and hiss around her like bullets in a firefight, and she follows him forward to the cab of the truck, kowtowing to her punishment. Lucky for us, la Senora was right, Dad says, walking back with Mom, now excited and seemingly over his anger. She made him blind, and we were let through like they were closed.

When we left them later that evening, Dan was doing the driving. They pulled out of the parking lot and headed off to Houston and their payoff, the brake lights temporarily fixed in loops of black electrical tape. I watch as the truck disappears. It looks like every other piece of now broken down equipment we've ever owned-- rusting, miserable, and totally criminal.

Mom and I turn south back to Brownsville. Mom is her usual quiet self, except this time, she plays the radio louder. This means she's thinking. It's getting dark, and I'm sleepy, so I sleep. She'll get us home. She knows the way. For that, I could trust her.

Ira Glass

Domingo Martinez reading a story from his collection, The Boy Kings of Texas, which is a memoir and a finalist for the National Book Award.

Ira Glass

Act Two, Get Away With It After the Beep. So today's show is a rerun. And a couple weeks before it originally was broadcast, we invited listeners to call into a special phone number that we set up here at the radio show and tell us what things you have gotten away with. Over 1,000 of you called.

Our intern back then, Tarek, listened to those messages, and he said that he came away from the experience seeing you all very, very differently than he had before. He said that if these messages are any indicator at all, most of you have either cheated in school or committed some small act of arson at some point in your lives.

So, good to know. I know we should try to capitalize on that during the pledge drive. I have no idea how, but anyway, here's a small selection of the messages that we received.

Ira Glass

OK, we have one final story from a listener-- kind of a long one.

Ira Glass

Thanks to everybody who took the time to call. See you all in hell.

Well, coming up, 12-year-old ballerina con artist. You know, I have one thing written here to make you want to listen to this story, but that should be enough, right? That is enough right there. I'm just going to say it again-- 12-year-old ballerina con artist. Come on. You can't turn away without hearing that. That's coming up in just a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Getting Away With It. We have stories of people doing just that and usually, not feeling so bad about it. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, Crime and Tutus.

OK, parents, I would actually warn you not to let your kids hear this next story, except the thing that the children in this next story accomplish would be impossible for any kids to do today. Basically, they go to the airport, and they try to hop on a plane to go to another city. The comedian Molly Shannon told what happened to Marc Maron on his podcast, WTF, which is a great podcast. They did this in front of a live audience in November 2011.

Ira Glass

Molly Shannon talking to Marc Maron on the WTF podcast, which I recommend and which you can find on iTunes or through an internet search. We spoke with the other girl in that story who has not talked with Molly Shannon in a while-- didn't know that she was telling that story publicly-- who confirmed all the crazy details in the story. She says they held hands and prayed while the plane took off.

[MUSIC - NIRVANA, "ON A PLAIN"]

Ira Glass

Act Four, Pre K-O. To understand this next story, which is definitely a story about getting away with it in a big, big way, I first need to give you some background about preschool. In recent years, there've been more and more studies showing that preschool is one of the best investments a country can make in children's education.

Probably the most famous piece of research on this is an old one called the Perry Preschool Project. This study began in the 1960s. They took a bunch of poor kids from Ypsilanti, Michigan, put half of them into a preschool program and then the other half just led their normal lives. And then after a year of that, both of those groups went back into the same public school system.

And then every so often, researchers would follow up with these kids to see how they were doing from the two groups. They're following them still even now, and the results have been amazing. At age 27, the kids who got preschool were half as likely to have gotten arrested. They earned an average of 50% more per month. They were 50% more likely to have a savings account, 20% more likely to have a car. Preschool kids got sick less often, were unemployed less often, sentenced to incarceration less often.

Other studies show similar results, not just for poor kids, but for other kids, too. They do better if they have preschool.

And the very first state to choose to make free, high quality preschool available to almost every four-year-old in the state and then actually delivered on that promise turns out to be a surprising one. In fact, only a handful of states have joined it. Alex Blumberg reports that the story of how the state came to lead the nation in preschool access is all about getting away with it.

Quick reminder before we start-- today's show is a rerun from a few years ago. Since we did this story, some details of Oklahoma's political landscape have changed. Here's Alex.

Alex Blumberg

The state is Oklahoma. And to show you just how surprising that is, consider what happened to a guy named Ron Peters. Peters was a freshman legislator in the Oklahoma State House of Representatives, a Republican.

One of his party leaders, a veteran legislator, came up to him one day and said, the governor, also a Republican, appointed this task force to look into the issue of early childhood education. They came up with some recommendations. The recommendations were put into this bill. The governor wants us to pass it. Will you be in charge of making that happen?

Alex Blumberg

Ron Peters said sure. The bill seemed easy to pass and pretty non-controversial. There were no state funds involved. It was all private money. The idea was simply to set up a nonprofit to publicize the value of early childhood education, so more parents would consider it. So he introduced the bill on the House floor.

Alex Blumberg

Actually, the governor only threatened a veto, but it was enough to kill Peter's bill that time around. And that is how unlikely it is to pass universal public preschool in Oklahoma. A bill that simply suggests that the state might think it's a good idea for kids to go to preschool-- a bill, remember, that doesn't involve any state money and doesn't actually set up any new government programs-- that bill gets attacked as socialism and scuttled.

Oklahoma is arguably the most conservative state in the country. It's got a Republican House, a Republican Senate, a Republican governor. Four out of its five representatives to Congress are Republicans, as are both its senators. One of those senators, Tom Coburn, was named the most conservative senator in Congress by National Review magazine. And if you need more proof, consider this-- Oklahoma was the only state in the entire country in 2008 where not one single county voted for Barack Obama.

So how in the world did anyone get the conservative state of Oklahoma to agree to a dramatic expansion of the state's public education system in preschool, something that many conservatives would oppose? How did anyone get away with that? The answer-- universal public preschool came to Oklahoma not as part of a bold evidence based campaign, it was snuck in, in the dark.

And to give you a sense of just how secretly it happened, consider this rather amazing fact. At the time Ron Peters was getting his little bill squashed by his own party in the legislature, universal preschool was already in place in Oklahoma. It had been voted into law three years earlier, voted into law by many of the same people who were accusing Ron Peters of socialism. And what's more, they had probably voted for that law without even realizing it, which is exactly the way that people who brought public preschool to Oklahoma wanted it.

The story begins in the late 1990s, and it begins with a seemingly unrelated issue. School superintendents around Oklahoma had discovered a loophole in the state's school funding formula and were using that loophole to run a little scheme that involved kindergarten classes and huge amounts of money.

So the scheme was it was legal in Oklahoma for schools to have either a full day or a half-day kindergarten program. The loophole was that the schools got paid the same amount from the state either way. And so what school districts began doing was running two half-day programs and collecting twice as much money. And if they couldn't find enough five-year-olds to fill two kindergarten classes, they would pad their numbers with four-year-olds.

Alex Blumberg

Lloyd Snow was a school superintendent at this time who took advantage of this loophole-- ran two half-day kindergartens, enrolled a bunch of four-year-olds, and got paid double from the state.

Alex Blumberg

All around the state, the scheme spread. Four-year-olds were like gold, and the extra money they brought in went to everything from football programs to new school equipment, even new buildings. That's what happened in the district of Joe Eddins, a state legislator around this time.

Alex Blumberg

That might sound like Joe was happy about this, but he wasn't. This seemed like a loophole that people were abusing. And so for two years, he tried to close it, to keep four-year-olds out of kindergarten. But he got nowhere. And Joe Eddins, he becomes central to the story of universal preschool in Oklahoma. You'll hear a lot more from him later after he meets this next guy, another main character in the saga, a guy named Bob Harbison.

Bob Harbison is a self-described corporate guy-- conservative suits, tortoiseshell glasses. He was for many years a senior manager at TWA, and after that, an executive in the oil and gas industry. He was also friends with people on the board of the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce. And one day--

Alex Blumberg

The banker friend explained that local businesses in Tulsa had a problem. They were finding it harder and harder to hire employees with enough skills and abilities to do the job. The Chamber had been looking into the reasons for this. Was it colleges and universities not training people properly? High schools?

Alex Blumberg

This banker friend handed Bob a cardboard box filled with research and reports on early childhood education and said, here, look this over and see what you think we should do.

Alex Blumberg

Harbison said he thought back to his career in the airline industry, where one of the worst things you can do is fly a plane with an empty seat. But a kid who comes to kindergarten too far behind, statistically, that kid might never catch up. He's occupying that seat in first, second, third grade, in middle school and high school. But the seat might as well be empty for all the good it's doing the kid sitting in it.

And also, he thought when you look at the statistics of what happens to a lot of at-risk kids when they get out of school, they end up costing the government a lot of money. They end up incarcerated or on public assistance-- bad outcomes for them and for society.

Alex Blumberg

This cardboard box made a big impression on Bob Harbison, who, in his quiet way, became something of a crusader for early childhood education, making the case for it to anyone who would listen, including, sometime in the late 1990s, Joe Eddins.

Now, remember, Joe was this legislator. He had this bill trying to close that loophole and keep four-year-olds out of kindergarten. Bob Harbison started making the case that we don't want fewer four-year-olds in public school-- we want more of them. Here's Joe.

Alex Blumberg

Over the course of several meetings, Bob shared with Joe the contents of that cardboard box-- all those studies and research projects demonstrating the importance of early childhood education. And Joe gradually decided that he needed to change his law and make it much bigger.

He would still eliminate that four-year-olds in kindergarten for cash scheme, sure. No longer could schools pack their kindergartens with four-year-olds to get extra money from the state. But alongside that, he would provide for an actual program for four-year-olds-- an entirely new grade fully paid for by the state-- public preschool.

And it turned out Oklahoma had a very good pilot preschool program with guidelines for choosing the appropriate curriculum and hiring qualified teachers. But this program only existed in a few districts because, according to Eddins, the state didn't provide enough money to pay for it. Eddins estimates the state provided only a third of the money that was actually needed to run one of these programs. Joe Eddins' plan was to take that pilot program and fully fund it, so that any district that wanted it could actually get paid enough to put it in place.

Now there was only one problem with this plan. There was probably no way it could pass-- no way the state legislature would ever agree to pay for a program like this. And so Joe Eddins essentially hid it. He simply offered his amendment again, the one closing the four-year-olds in kindergarten for cash loophole, only with some new language.

A kind of PS in which he proposed a tweak to the state's school funding formula-- made it so that schools got the same amount of funding for preschool that they got for other grades. This was, in fact, a massive overhaul of Oklahoma's public school system, but the actual text of Eddins' amendment looked like nothing special.

Alex Blumberg

Still, there were the traditional and powerful enemies to something like this-- budget hawks and limited government folks, which, as I said, Oklahoma might lead the nation in. Eddins' strategy here-- political sleight of hand. He drew their attention to the stuff in the bill he thought they would like and didn't mention the stuff they wouldn't.

Alex Blumberg

Now everything he said was true. Eddins' bill did allow state money to go to private daycare centers to teach preschool. Also, his plan was voluntary. School districts didn't have to offer pre-K programs, and parents didn't have to send their kids to one. So it was entirely reasonable to expect that in the beginning, at least, not too many school districts would even take advantage of Eddins' tweak to the funding formula and offer a pre-K program.

And one other thing Eddins had going for him, this four-year-olds in kindergarten for cash scheme, it was growing. And it was feared that the two biggest districts in the state-- Oklahoma City and Tulsa-- were about to get in on it. Eddins says that compared to the sure financial Armageddon that would be, his bill was the cheaper alternative.

Alex Blumberg

Probably because in almost all his discussions with lawmakers about his bill, Eddins left out the main part. You know, the part about how he'd put the state on the hook to pay for an entirely new grade level. He knew almost nobody in any legislature actually reads all the bills, and the number of people who actually understood Oklahoma's school funding formula you could probably count on one hand.

And his strategy worked. It was a huge and costly expansion of the government's role in public education in a state more opposed to costly expansions of government than perhaps any other in the country.

Steven Dow is the director of an anti-poverty agency and a longtime early childhood education advocate in Oklahoma. He worked very closely with Joe Eddins to get this law written and passed.

Alex Blumberg

The irony is now that the law is in place in Oklahoma, it just adds evidence to the case for preschool. Researchers who studied Tulsa's preschool kids say they enter kindergarten an average of five months ahead in math, seven months ahead in writing, and nine months ahead in reading. And the gains are even more pronounced for at-risk kids who get preschool.

Lloyd Snow, the Oklahoma school superintendent, says he didn't need a study to show him that. He could see it the very next year, after his district started offering preschool.

Alex Blumberg

A game changer that, according to Joe Eddins, the legislator who arguably did more to change the game than anyone else, would not have been possible without the strange four-year-olds in kindergarten for cash scheme, the scheme that Eddins used as a smokescreen to sneak universal pre-K through a skeptical legislature.

Alex Blumberg

Not everyone would agree with Eddins on this. In fact, if you talk to experts, the trend around the country is for more and more kids to be enrolled in state-funded preschool programs. States as diverse as Georgia, Iowa, Vermont, and West Virginia are all hard on the heels of Oklahoma, with preschool programs of their own.

And as for Oklahoma, parents, says Lloyd Snow, the school superintendent, they love this program. And statistics across the state bear that out. Remember, parents don't have to send their kids to preschool. It's voluntary. But almost 75% of the state's four-year-olds are now enrolled in public preschool. However it arrived, it seems that universal pre-K is here to stay in Oklahoma.

Ira Glass

Alex Blumberg, he's the founder of Gimlet Media and the host of the podcast, Without Fail. We originally aired this story back when he was on our staff in 2012. Oklahoma's universal preschool program is still going strong.

[MUSIC - GENE CHANDLER, "I FOOLED YOU THIS TIME"]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and Robyn Semien with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Jonathan Menjivar, Lisa Pollak, Brian Reid, and Alissa Shipp. Senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Additional production on the rerun of our show from Jessica Lussenhop, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney. Special thanks today to Jim Nayder, Michelle Harris, Bianca Giaever, and Brendan McDonald.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who lists his personal vices this way-- he has five vices. Five-- exactly five.

Domingo Martinez

Drugs, fruit, people, reptiles, and parrots.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - GENE CHANDLER, "I FOOLED YOU THIS TIME"]