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John Thompson: The Cruelty of Doubling Down on the Big Standardized Test

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2024 //
12

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, reports on the cruelty of Oklahoma’s new crackdown on test scores.

He writes:

I wonder how most teachers responded to Nuria Martinez-Keel’s Tulsa Public Schools Ups the Intensity to Prepare for High Stakes Testing. I’m confident that few educators would be surprised by the language used by those who are implementing Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ teach-to-the-test program.  But, how many would believe that fellow educators really believe it will work? 

Martinez-Keel reports that “Angie Teas, a Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) instructional leadership director spoke positively about “a renewed focus on both academic standards and preparing students to take the standardized exams.” I was struck, however, by Teas’ words, “state tests are ‘part of our lives’ every year in public schools, but this testing season is ‘important for its own outside reasons.’” 

It seems likely that the “outside reasons” she cites are Superintendent Walters’ threats to takeover the TPS, as well as his order to immediately “elevate 12 of its schools off of the ‘F’ list.” In response to this seemingly impossible target, “the district provided high-dosage tutoring to 470 fourth and fifth graders, launched a campaign to combat chronic absenteeism and focused on credit-deficient seniors at struggling high schools to boost graduation rates, among other initiatives district leaders highlighted.” (A total of 1,125 elementary students will be served in a district with more than 33,000 enrollees.) 

I suspect that most educators would be supportive of efforts to assist small numbers of students if those policies were disconnected from test results, and they did not have the potential to undermine meaningful teaching and learning in the district as a whole. I find it hard to believe that teachers  who saw the harm inflicted by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RttT) on students would not recognize why this new, stress-driven approach is also doomed to fail.

The narrative of educators in the story about upping the intensity of high-stakes testing is interesting, and it reminds me of the scripts my administrators would use as my colleagues repeatedly shouted back when ordered to do what virtually everyone saw as educational malpractice.  As Martinez-Keel reported:

Burroughs Elementary is one of the schools identified for improvement. Principal Dee Tisdale said the school has added academic rigor, focused on testing data and added extra resources, and it “all ties back” to individualized, small-group instruction between students and their teacher.

With state testing only days away, the mentality at Burroughs is “now it’s showtime.”

“I think in terms of the big championship game,” Tisdale said. “We’re just preparing, and we’re hoping that all of our practices will give us the trophy in June or July when the results come back.”

And as the TPS instructional leadership director Angie Teas said:

It’s nerve-wracking to feel the pressure of, ‘Oh my God, it feels like the world is watching,’ yeah,” … “But it’s also exciting to recognize that we’ve had an opportunity, like with OTEP (Oklahoma Teacher Empowerment Program) to be more all-parts-equal to the entire whole. We all see our part in the district that in a way I don’t think we have in a really long time.”

Martinez-Keel also cited an elementary teacher:

She felt ‘a little bit of pressure’ to make academic gains in only six small-group sessions. [Charity] Hargrave teaches fourth grade at Skelly but, through the OTEP program, was assigned 27 fifth graders at her school for extra instruction.

She said she had a ‘very short period of time’ to review benchmark test scores for each student, group them based on their performance level and plan lessons for each session.

But the experience has been positive, she said, and she hopes it will continue in the future.

Similarly, Asriel Teegarden said “Sometimes, there’s a little bit of fear about the unknown.” After a “30-minute lesson – featuring a space-themed reading comprehension exercise,” she asks her students “how did they feel about the ‘big test’ next week?” Then, “Teegarden said there’s a ‘different intensity level’ ahead of the most important testing period of her career.” But then she concluded: 

Usually, I would be nervous for these children, but I’ve gone about it like, ‘I’m excited you’re going to take this because you’re going to all do great,’… ‘Everything has got to be positive, giving them a lot of positive feedback. I think they’re going to do excellent.’

Of course, that sounds like wishful thinking to me. But I used to engage in a forced optimism in order to remain in the classroom and serve my students. Being an award-winning, veteran teacher who was successfully engaged in meaningful, challenging instruction, I was able to negotiate compromises with my principals who knew I would not participate in teach-to-the-test. I even agreed to an experiment in teaching a class in a way that would raise test scores without undermining my students’ meaningful learning. We produced the school’s highest History test results, but despite our best efforts, the stress overtook both my students and me. I swore to never again let testing influence our lessons.

Holistic instruction became more difficult over the years when my students from the poorest elementary schools volunteered that they had been “completely robbed of an education” by test prep.

Then, I came back from retirement to teach at an alternative charter school that was like my first school which served students with felony convictions. But then the top administrator ordered the principal to order me to focus solely on the few who had a chance to pass the Common Core high stakes tests. My principal asked me to briefly comply while she tried to persuade the district administration to cancel that plan. She said that they didn’t understand that this year’s end-of-instruction-exam was just a pilot, and thus wasn’t a graduation requirement. She was confident she could persuade them to withdraw the order to just assign most students worksheets, and focus solely on 3, 4, or 5 students per class.

Of course, my students were horrified by the new system, but they trusted me to not follow those rules except for a brief time.  However, when my principal apologized and said that the new system had to become permanent, she knew I’d resign, and I did.

So, I won’t criticize the 45 teachers who are each trying to help 25 or so students in the hope that they will benefit. I also appreciate journalists who are reporting on the stress being inflicted on teachers, and whether the data-driven, rushed interventions will somehow produce more good than harm. But I hope students will be their new priority as they review the research and the history of the failure of these sorts of mandates. And above all, I hope we will listen to our kids as the stress of test-prep is added to the stress of poverty, and attending high-poverty schools that are under attack by Ryan Walters.   

Categories Cruelty, Extremism, Oklahoma, Standardized Testing

John Thompson: Reading a Classic About the Tulsa Race Massacre

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2024 //
5

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about a book that is important in Oklahoma history and American history.

He writes:

When I first read Victor Luckerson’s Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street, I was stunned by his beautiful prose. Watching Luckerson on CSPAN Book T.V., I was reminded of his eloquence. And I was even more impressed by the timeliness of the story of the communities and families who built and rebuilt Greenwood after the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, and who then had to repeatedly fight to keep their community from being erased. 

This April 2, 2024, when hearing a lawsuit on reparations, the Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice Yvonne Kauger said to the litigants, “When I went to high school, … Greenwood was never mentioned,” so “I think regardless of what happens, you’re all to be commended for making sure that that will never happen again. It will be in the history books.”  We all must also commend Luckerson’s contribution to that essential story, and help pass it down to younger generations.

As Marcia Chatelain’s New York Times review of Built from the Fire explained, “The seemingly unfettered opportunity in the new state of Oklahoma drew unabashed capitalists, confidence men, industrious wives and loyal mothers to what had formerly been known as Indian Territory…” The story of diverse Black people who built Greenwood, the “Eden of the West” is just as complex.

Similarly, Suzette Malveaux’s Washington Post review started with the lie that prompted the Massacre by claiming:

Dick Rowland, a Black teenager, had sexually assaulted a white woman in an elevator. A show of force by Greenwood men to prevent Rowland from being lynched escalated into an all-out attack on Black Tulsans by white vigilantes, who in some cases had been handed arms by the police. As Luckerson recounts, “More than 1,200 houses were leveled, nearly every business was burned to the ground and an unknown number of people — estimates reach as high as 300 — were killed.”

As one white person recalled, white officers quickly deputized the crowd; he was told, “Get a gun and get busy, and try to get a n—–.”

But Malveaux also stresses the way that:

Luckerson shines a light on uncomfortable fissures between Oklahoma’s Black freedmen and Black migrants from the South; Native American enslavers and Black enslaved people; and the American Red Cross’s White “angels of mercy” and Tulsa’s mobsters. And he doesn’t shy away from telling the full story of Greenwood’s great leaders.

For instance, one of the fathers of Greenwood’s economic and cultural strength was J.H. Goodwin, a former railroad brakeman, who leveraged his position with the railroad (which was rare for a Black man at the time) and who was able to work with all types of people, but who passed down psychological burdens, as well as resilience to his family. His family invested in journalism, said one of their readers, so “you can have free speech and have privilege to act as a man without being molested.”

Goodwin’s stories, and those of other families in the book, include experiences gained and brought back from Fiske University, Chicago, Washington D.C., and elsewhere. The family became best known for the Oklahoma Eagle newspaper, which shared diverse perspectives and kept up the fight for justice. They also played leadership roles in desegregating Tulsa schools. And like so many Black Tulsans, in doing so, they drew on both “Booker T. Washington’s model of economic power and W.E.B. DuBois’s model of political power.”

Goodwin’s most influential recent descendent, Sen. Regina Goodwin, kicked off her political career in 2015 with the words, “Some women get lost in the fire and some … are built from the fire.”  

Luckerson explained that “residents of Greenwood bore the burden of living in two Americas at once, the idealized version imagined in the minds of white slaveholders in 1776, and the more brutal reality that black Tulsans and their ancestors bore witness to.” He balances tales of graft by both Black and much worse White entrepreneurs. Although W.E.B. DuBois correctly described the resulting community as “impudent and noisy,” those same businessmen “opposed economic injustice just as fiercely as they fought segregation.”

Immediately after the massacre, Tulsa officials used zoning ordinances to keep Black residents from rebuilding. The insurance claims of Black residents were rejected. New segregation laws were passed, and bankers used “red lining” to deny new loans to Blacks. Moreover, criminal courts failed to find whites guilty of assault, arson and murder. However, Luckerson also chronicled skillful but often unsuccessful legal battles by attorneys like B.C. Franklin.

Over the next decade, Black resilience got the business community back on track. The gains were first undermined by the Great Depression, and then recovered as WWII approached. The Roosevelt administration implemented successful economic stimulus programs, as well discriminatory and counter-productive efforts. The same occurred during the war when Greenwood leaders had some successes in creating economic opportunities with the help of the federal government, while other wartime and post-war investments were too discriminatory to be constructive. Efforts to rebuild Greenwood’s neighborhoods sometimes prompted violence like a KKK cross burning and the dynamiting of a Black family’s home.

Luckerson then describes the 1950s and 1960s when legal battles and grassroots organizing created successes, as well as mixed feelings. For instance, Greenwood’s local political efforts resulted in funding Black schools like Booker T. Washington high school. (Don Ross, a teenager who would become an influential state legislator, was a leader in the fight for educational opportunities.) Thurgood Marshall’s anti-segregation efforts contributed to his historic Brown v Board of Education victory. But some Greenwood residents mourned the loss of Booker T. Washington, saying it “ripped the heart out of a community that had once had the pride to succeed in all parts of life.”

There was unanimity, however, in rejecting the way that highway construction and Urban Renewal once again devastated Greenwood.

Luckerson then brings the narrative through tragedy to sometimes promising political efforts and the often successful, but sometimes divisive efforts to build a dynamic 21st century Greenwood. One of the leaders was Tiffany Crutcher, whose unarmed brother, Terence, was shot to death in the middle of the street by police officer. Moreover, Rep. Bob Ross and Rep. Regina Goodwin worked skillfully within the legislative system to fund studies of the 1921 Massacre and reparations. Sadly, white political leaders, who had sounded so supportive of such efforts, largely failed to follow through.

Fortunately, the HBO film, The Watchmen, brought the Massacre to the attention of millions of Americans. And the George Kaiser Family Foundation established the Greenwood Cultural Foundation.  Luckerson also provides an objective account of the fight over today’s reparations lawsuit. 

The Greenwood revival also led to President Joe Biden’s commemoration of the Massacre. Speaking in Greenwood, he didn’t use the word “reparations,” but he “discussed the devastating effect of urban renewal on Greenwood. ‘A highway was built right through the heart of the community … cutting off black families and businesses from jobs and opportunity.’” The President then “announced plans to increase federal contracts for minority-owned businesses and try to curb racist housing appraisals.”

Luckerson concludes with the words of B.C. Franklin, “Right is slow and tardy while wrong is aggressive.” He then adds, “For more than a century, Greenwood has been grappling with wrong in all its combative forms. Wickedness flamed white-hot in 1921, but the embers continued to burn long after.” This stretched “from relief aid being withheld during the Great Depression … [to] Urban Planning brochures featuring smiling black faces and words laden with double meaning – blight, renewal, progress.” He later makes one prediction, “Whether or not Tulsa does right by the people of Greenwood and North Tulsa, they will continue to do what they’ve always done: build.”

Given the pressure by State Superintendent Ryan Walters to censor books that he believes would wrongly make White kids feel uneasy, I understand why teachers would feel afraid to teach Lukerson’s book. But we owe it to students to make his masterpiece available to all.

Categories History, Literature, Oklahoma, Racism

John Thompson: Oklahoma on “the Cutting Edge of Crazy”

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2024 //
5

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, sees some hopeful signs in Oklahoma. Maybe the public is tiring of the irresponsible people it elected, given their erratic leadership.

He writes:

Good news! It’s time to once again check into the tidal wave of Oklahoma politicians’ alleged crimes and rightwing antics!

Seriously this overview (assisted by Oklahoma education advocate Greg Jennings) encourages more hope than the despair that accompanied previous bursts of local and national headlines. Even so, the magnitude of these March controversies can be overwhelming.

Oklahoma has a long history of extreme corruption. But State Auditor Cindy Byrd previously testified to the Senate budget committee that, “The investigative audit of Epic Charter Schools revealed the largest abuse of taxpayer funds in the history of the state. Yet for 11 years, Epic’s annual school audits showed no reportable findings, no abuse of funds, no missing funds and no misappropriations.” Byrd estimated that around $30 million was mishandled. 

Also, an audit by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General found questionable expenditures and processes surrounding $31 million in the Governor’s Education Emergency Relief (GEER) funds. 

Moreover, KFOR News now reports that “A U.S. Department of Education spokesperson told News 4 the agency’s Office of Special Education will reach out to OSDE’s Office of Special Education to discuss the use of IDEA funds to pay substitute teachers.” Despite the denial of the reporting by the OSDE, the Oklahoman confirmed, “Sixteen employees from the Oklahoma State Department of Education are, indeed, serving as substitute teachers in the Tulsa Public Schools district.”

And, given the last headline-grabbing event this post will discuss, it must be remembered that Gov. Stitt turned down federal funding for summer school lunch programs.

Now, Attorney General Gentner Drummond has charged Epic co-founders David Chaney and Ben Harris with “fifteen felonies, including embezzlement, money laundering, computer crimes and conspiracy to defraud the state.” Preliminary hearings have begun, and on the third day, a forensic auditor, “Chaney, Harris and their private company EYS had not reported the $144 million in student Learning Funds she said had been deposited into EYS bank accounts as income on their individual or business tax returns.” 

Meanwhile, the chaos created by State Superintendent Ryan Walters has grown worse. In December of 2023, “a survey conducted by the Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration shows over 100 school districts have yet to receive final approval from the State Department of Education on federal program funding.”

Since then, the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) Chief of Staff, the OSDE’s Chief Legal Counsel, it’s Associate Legal Counsel and Executive Director of Accreditation have resigned. And the Oklahoman’s Murray Evans reported on the latest Board of Education meeting, explaining:

The Oklahoma State Department of Education’s team of attorneys apparently has no one left, which left the State Board of Education in a unique situation for its monthly meeting on Thursday.

[This seems to confirm] rumblings that the state Education Department’s three other known attorneys — deputy general counsel Andy Ferguson and assistant general counsels Erin Smith and Nathan Downey — also have left the agency. As of Thursday, there were no attorneys listed on the agency’s website on its “Office of Legal Services” page, a highly unusual situation for a major state agency.

The meeting’s other headline-making story, as reported by the Tulsa World, was Walters saying he “was ‘heartbroken’ for the loss (of a nonbinary student who was bullied and knocked unconscious before, apparently, committing suicide) and would be praying for those impacted by the death, but he did not say Nex Benedict’s name. He also said a ‘woke, left-wing mob’ used the teenager’s death to make outrageous claims.’” Walters also said, “I will never back down to a left wing mob,” … drawing derisive laughter from meeting attendees. “I will never lie to our students or allow a radical agenda to be forced on them.”

Moreover, Rep. Mark McBride, Rep. Rhonda Baker, and Speaker of the House Charles McCall, all Republicans, have “signed off on a subpoena on behalf of the Oklahoma House of Representatives to Supt. Walters” in order to investigate the mishandling of teacher bonus payments and the contradictory numbers submitted by the OSDE.

Walters has a history of spending state money on his travel to political functions, and for an anti-union video; he has also appointed “Chaya Raichik, the far-right social media influencer behind Libs of TikTok to a library advisory committee.” Now, Oklahoma Watchreports that the OSDE used state money on Vought Strategies to “write speeches and op-eds and book Walters on at least 10 national TV and radio appearances per month.” Oklahoma Watch then explains:

That has some people questioning whether Walters is boosting his national profile at the public’s expense — something Mary Vought, president and founder of the firm, made clear she is working to do.

“I will work with my network of stakeholders to obtain attendance at national events and conferences in order to increase the national exposure of the client,” she wrote in her bid for the contract, public records show.

Similarly, Fox News adds that the OSDE hiredPrecision Outreach, a Texas-based company, and “Oklahomans are also paying $50k to a Texas company to create videos that some describe as ‘propaganda.’” On another topic, Fox reporter Wendy Suares tweeted:

Some Covid-era federal funding (ESSR) ends June 30, forcing OKCPS to cut some much-needed staff at all schools. And schools in some neighborhoods with the most need will be hit hardest. A principal tells me one SW OKC elem school will lose *11* positions.

Also this week, the OSDE ramped up its resistance to citizens opposing his policies who are seeking to attend its meetings. Because the Walters administration has limited access to the office, protesters have arrived as early as 5:00 AM to get in line. Then it unexpectedly closed off the Department of Education doorway with cables, and the Highway Patrol imposed a curfew from 11:00 PM to 6:00 AM.  It claimed “that the Capitol Complex grounds are considered a state park that has a curfew.” However, Oklahoma Watchexplained that the “State Capitol Park is not among the 38 state parks listed on the state’s website. Those parks that list hours other than office hours indicate they are open 24 hours per day.”

News of the closing immediately attracted a larger crowd, legal observers, and Sean Cummins, who has been receiving national coverage for both – resisting rightwing campaigns and the cruelty which led to the death of Nex Benedict – while Cummins was mourning the death of his wife and fellow activist, Cathy Cummins.

And that leads to the best, recent news about Ryan Walters. Nondoc reported on Republican and Democratic Party polls on Walters. They found:

In a pair of polls regarding Republican House district primaries, Walters’ favorability scored 15 percent and 22 percent lower than GOP Gov. Kevin Stitt’s. Walters’ support lagged among women and younger age groups most likely to have students in Oklahoma public schools.

Separate data from a statewide survey of Republicans — which was presented to the House Republican Caucus earlier this year — show his favorability at 38.5 percent and his unfavorable score at 28.6 percent.

Nondoc then reported on an online questionnaire by a national firm hired by the Human Rights Campaign, which “featured 665 responses split among 51 percent registered Republicans, 22 percent registered Democrats and 27 percent registered independents.” Although these sorts of polls have a large margin of error, it found that “respondents largely disapproved of Walters’ job performance (55 percent) and said he is not a good role model for kids (61 percent).”

Nondoc then explained:

{Republican] Pollsters added their own summaries to the feedback they found:

Voters consider him “abrasive,” “crass,” and as coming across as too “direct” and “hard.” (…) They also think he doesn’t “respect” teachers and he does not “listen” to them. Essentially, they think he does care not one twit what anyone in the education field thinks. The way he is interacting with teachers is likely taking a toll on his image.

Nondoc then reported, “An open-ended question in the same statewide GOP poll asked respondents, “How do you feel about Ryan Walters, and why?” Those responses painted an even more negative perception of Walters, and only 0.6 percent of responses registered as “approve” or “positive.” And, “All told, the open-ended question seeking description of Walters in “as many or as few words as you’d like” yielded 72.2 percent negative opinions from the Oklahoma Republicans surveyed.”

While these poll results provide reasons for hope, because of Oklahomans’ attitudes towards primaries, they lead to questions about the all-important 2026 race for governor which will probably pit Walters against the moderate Attorney General Gentner Drummond, and Speaker of the House Charles McCall. How many Republicans will vote in their primary based on the values cited in the poll’s open-ended questions or, as has become the norm, out of loyalty to MAGA-ism?

Fortunately, another day in the life of Sean Cummins provides hope. Getting back to the sudden closure of the OSDE office the night before the Board of Education meeting, he arrived at the ODOE at 4:45 AM in order to claim a place in line for addressing the Board. Cummins couldn’t speak at that meeting because he was scheduled to deliver a check freeing students in Tuttle from their debt.  He has been leading a campaign that has freed students in 21 schools and districts of lunch debt. When writing a check to the school to clear their students debt, Cummins was filmed for a national ABC News report.

In other words, it’s great that local and national news, prosecutors, and more politicians are confronting the cruelty and corruption that has put Oklahoma on “the cutting edge of crazy.” The best reason for hope, however, is the growing resistance to Walters, school privatizers, and MAGAs. 

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Oklahoma

John Thompson: Oklahoma Explores the Zombie Policy of Merit Pay

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2024 //
14

During the past few decades, we have seen the persistence of failed policies in education. Most of them were codified by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top: give standardized tests; punish teachers and schools where scores are low or do not rise; reward teachers and schools where scores go up. Pay bonuses to teachers if their students’ scores go up. Tie teacher pay to student scores. Close schools with low scores. Turn low-scoring schools over to private management. Give vouchers to parents to send their children wherever they want.

All of these remedies failed. They encouraged cheating and gaming the system. They encouraged educators to avoid schools that enrolled the neediest students. They demoralized teachers who were idealistic and wanted to teach the joy of learning. Test prep became far more important than intellectual curiosity.

All of these are zombie policies. No matter how consistently they fail, policymakers won’t let go of them.

Merit pay is a policy that has been tried since the 1920s. It has never accomplished anything. I summarized the research on merit pay in my last three books: The Death and Life of the great American School System; Reign of Error; and Slaying Goliath. The research is overwhelming: merit pay doesn’t improve education and doesn’t even raise test scores. Yet in true zombie style, it never dies. It should.

John Thompson writes here about the revival of the merit pay zombie in Oklahoma:

As the “mass exodus” of teachers from Oklahoma schools continues, the legislature has rejected an across-the-board pay raise for teachers. Instead, several legislators are searching for a fix for the state’s “flawed” bonus system. If that doesn’t work, maybe Walters’ use of public money to spread his attacks on “on the radical left” will bring educators back to Oklahoma …

Seriously, Walters’ push for his vision of incentive pay prompted some education advocates to ask me to research performance pay. I sure appreciated the oportunity to reread new and older research on the subject.

Twenty-five years ago, I opposed performance pay because there were better ways to improve teacher quality. But I didn’t have major concerns; although its likely benefits would be small, I thought its downsides shouldn’t be a big deal. However, starting with No Child Left Behind and taking off with Race to the Top, test scores were weaponized, and the dangers of performance pay grew dramatically. Output-driven teachers’ salaries, joined at the hip with unreliable and invalid accountability metrics, promoted educational malpractice that undermined meaningful teaching and learning, increasing in-one-ear-out-the-other, worksheet-driven instruction. Teamwork was damaged, trust was compromised, the flight of educators from classroom increased, and the joy of student learning declined significantly.

During that time, I communicated frequently with data-driven analysts working for think tanks, who almost never had experience in urban schools. Their job was to provide evidence that performance pay, and other incentives and punishments, can work. They ignored educators and social scientists who tackled the real policy question – how will those experiments work? 

Sometimes, merit pay produced modest test score gains, but there was no way of determining whether those test scores revealed an increase or a drop in meaningful learning. Neither did they address the overall learning losses due to teachers being pressured to focus on metrics, as opposed to children. In 2012, a Rand study concluded, “most studies have found no effects on student outcomes.” By 2015, the U.S. Department of Education found that large incentives, such as $15,000 per teacher, may attract talent, but:

In addition to creating an environment that lends itself to narrowed pedagogical approaches and teaching to tests (and even cheating on them), this article suggests that merit pay schemes that require teachers to compete with one another may likely undermine positive collaboration.

Around the time of the 2018 Oklahoma teacher walk-out for higher pay, Denver threatened a strike to get rid of performance pay. Chalkbeat explained the complexity of balancing for larger or smaller payments to teachers in diverse classrooms. It went into depth answering the question, “How did a pay system that once seemed to hold so much promise bring teachers to their breaking point?”  The concise conclusion was, “lack of trust.”

Education Week studied the minimal effects of performance pay in Tennessee and Texas, which implemented expensive reward-and-punish, and often short-lived programs. The negative effects of the Houston plan, which State Superintendent Ryan Walters seems to support, are especially relevant for Oklahoma. The Houston teachers’ union president explained, “Performance pay demeans students and undermines teachers, so if the focus is on pay for performance, you’re incentivizing the test-and-punishment model.” Similarly, Education Week cited comprehensive studies that concluded that the relatively more effective programs “avoided an overemphasis on test scores.” But even many or most of the more successful programs were unlikely to survive.

Finally Education Week reported how the $200 million Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation merit pay experiments “did little to boost retention of high-performing teachers,” and it “had little effect on student achievement.”

At the peak of merit pay mandates, and now, Bixby Superintendent Rob Miller explained, “Teacher merit pay is one of the more persistent and seemingly indestructible zombie ideas related to education.” Miller said, “Merit pay for teachers has been tried again and again since the 1920s.” He cited cognitive and social science that explained why performance pay experiments were doomed to fail, as well as numerous evaluations of how it failed in the 21st century.  Miller now asks, “Is it fair to place the primary responsibility on teachers and schools for outcomes strongly affected by factors outside their control?” and answers, “Doing so damages school culture and teacher morale and obstructs meaningful dialogue about school improvement.”

At a time when Ryan Walters is threatening to put the worst of the failed policies of the last twenty years on steroids, I was struck by a recent column by Thomas Dee, a fervent believer in output-driven accountability. Even though he seems to think that teachers were to blame, Dee also seems to acknowledge that performance pay had disappointing results. Now he recommends:

It may be possible to achieve durable political support for a teacher evaluation system if that system focuses narrowly on identifying master teachers and providing them with training and extra pay to coach their peers but takes a more incremental approach toward dismissing underperforming teachers.

Dee’s latest almost brings me back to 25 years ago, before NCLB, when the schools I knew were improving, and a win-win approach to performance pay didn’t seem so problematic. At the urging of the union, the Oklahoma City Public School System briefly implemented the Toledo peer review plan, which included a fair and efficient plan for removing ineffective teachers. The best evidence is that the plan was a reliable method for improving classroom instruction. But, it and so many other promising programs were undercut by corporate school reform.

Maybe I’ll once again be open to a compromise involving constructively built, non-punitive merit pay incentives, once the destructive school cultures advanced by corporate school “reform” have disappeared. But, I won’t hold my breath.  

Categories Corporate Reform, Education Reform, Failure, Merit pay, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Race to the Top, Research

John Thompson: Blood on the Hands of Oklahoma Politicians for Death of Nex Benedict

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2024 //
7

John Thompson, historian and teacher, asks who was responsible for the death of Nex Benedict. In this article in The Progressive, he blames the hateful anti-rhetoric of Oklahoma’s elected officials. The officials concluded that Nex committed suicide. Who created the environment in which this child was tormented by classmates?

He writes:

We are learning more about the death of Nex Benedict, a non-binary high school student who died on February 8, the day after they were beaten in the school bathroom in Owasso, Oklahoma. We are also learning about ourselves, as Oklahomans, as we deal with the tragedy. But we are not alone. This bitter attack is a case study in the cruelty being spread across the nation by right-wing extremists. 

Vigils were held across the nation in honor of Nex, who has a Choctaw heritage. The diverse crowd I witnessed at the Oklahoma City vigil was so large that I could barely hear the speakers. We still don’t fully know everything about Nex’s death, but it is clear that it must be viewed within the context of vicious attacks on LGBTQ+ youth by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters and Governor Kevin Stitt as well as the fifty-plus Republican legislative bills attacking LBGTQ+ rights across the country.

Since he was elected in 2019, Governor Stitt has signed laws that restrict access to public school bathrooms; ban health care for transgender people under eighteen; ban transgender girls and women from school sports; and prohibit Oklahomans from obtaining nonbinary gender markers on official documents. He also signed, as the LGTBQ+ rights group GLAAD reported, “an executive order that defunds diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and programs in state agencies, including public colleges.”

Walters has a similar record: He has depicted transgender students as a threat in schools, and approved a permanent rule change that requires schools to get state approval before altering gender markers in a student’s records. Walters has advocated for book bans and described LGBTQ+-themed books as “pornographic material.” He also appointed Chaya Raichik, the founder of anti-LGBTQ+ social media account Libs of TikTok, to the education department’s Library Media Advisory Committee.

Beyond Walters and Stitt, state representatives have also spread hateful rhetoric in recent months. State Senator Tom Woods, for example, called LGBTQ+ Oklahomans “filth” during a panel. Days later, Woods chose to stand by his statement, saying:   

We are a religious state and we are going to fight it to keep that filth out of the state of Oklahoma because we are a Christian state—we are a moral state . . . . We want to lower taxes and let people be able to live and work and go to the faith they choose. We are a Republican state and I’m going to vote my district, and I’m going to vote my values, and we don’t want that in the state of Oklahoma.

Categories Education Reform

John Thompson: The Failure of “Fixing” Schools by Closing Them

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2024 //
10

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, explains what happened when “reformers,” led by Secretary of Educatuon Arne Duncan, advocated for school closures.

He writes:

When non-educators watch Abbott Elementary, the television comedy, they are likely to find it hilarious, but I suspect it takes a teacher to fully understand the accuracy of its portrayal of the weird corporate reforms imposed on Philadelphia schools. But, recent research helps explain why many of even the most fervent advocates for test-driven, competition-driven school turnarounds now acknowledge their failures (even though they don’t apologize for them.).

The third-year premiere of Abbott gave a shout out to the respected journal, Chalkbeat. And, Chalkbeat is again reporting on failed turnarounds in Philadelphia, Tennessee, and elsewhere, as well as why former supporters of school takeovers are repudiating the reward-and-punish method for rapid, transformative change.

Chalkbeat analyzed the Philadelphia mandate, the 2010 Renaissance Initiative. It “strove to turn around about 10% of Philadelphia’s low-performing district schools by ceding them to charter organizations that promised to do better.” By 2023, however, “the Renaissance charter schools as a group mostly performed worse in standardized tests for elementary and middle schoolers than the district averages.”

Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First explained, “The goal was to prove that charters would work with any kid, not just about parents who were highly motivated to enter a lottery, and to show that a neighborhood school turned over to a charter organization would do better than if run by the school district.” But, “As far as I can tell, the data didn’t result in that.”

Similarly, “Chris McGinley, who served on both the School Reform Commission that oversaw the district while it was under state control and the Board of Education,” said “‘It was a bad idea poorly implemented.’”

Chalkbeat quoted a second-grade teacher who said, “All the disruption was even more unsettling for her students, … many of whom have already had to deal with trauma in their lives. The staff turnover, she feared, reinforced feelings that adults weren’t there for them.” And a Renaissance principal now says, “He is not a fan of charter conversion as a school reform strategy.” “‘I think it’s offensive … ‘A lot of these measures were experimenting with communities of color.”’

According to the Chalkbeat analysis, “these schools started out well below district and state averages in English Language Arts and math performance,” but “none of the schools are performing particularly well today. For instance, one charter school’s “achievement scores have remained persistently low;” its “math proficiency is at 1%.” 

Next, Chalkbeat told the story of the “high hopes, hard lessons” of Tennessee’s winning federal Race to the Top grant application.” It recalled:

Unlike incremental academic gains associated with school improvement, school turnaround calls for dramatic gains in a short period of time.

But overall, the district has not improved student outcomes, has struggled to retain teachers, and failed to catapult schools out of Tennessee’s bottom 5% as promised. 

It explained “Other takeaways include the importance of giving families an early seat at the table when making changes and seeking more collaboration among state and local officials throughout the process.” And, because of “its heavy-handed takeover of neighborhood schools and broken promises on performance, the ASD also hasn’t endeared itself to a city with a highly charged racial history.”

The quotes from Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD) superintendent Chris Barbic were especially important. I’ve long been frustrated by the refusal of true-believers like Barbic who ignored the research which explained why those turnarounds were likely to fail. But Barbic says that “18 months in as he sat in a classroom and [he] saw the ASD’s systems weren’t working.”

Barbic told Chalkbeat, “’The way the ASD was set up, it had a lot more sticks than carrots.’” Moreover, “while the state-run district was positioned to act quickly, Barbic acknowledged ‘we were probably too aggressive on the sticks and not thinking about what other options there were besides doing nothing, using charters, or running the schools ourselves.’” He then “acknowledged that, ‘building grassroots support and collaborating with partners over time is ultimately more effective,’” and “’We’re in a world today where top-down just doesn’t work.’”

These massively funded bets on rapid turnarounds were based on the corporate reform hypothesis that creative destruction would lead to transformational improvements that could be scaled up. It earned the ridicule of Abbott Elementary, students, educators, and researchers. It’s good that more corporate reform advocates are admitting that their experiment failed. But that doesn’t undo the chaos which resulted in serious harm to the students it sought to help.

Today, however, the MAGA crowd is sowing discord and mistrust for political reasons. Extremists like Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Ryan Walters are using the worst of their punitive tactics to spread hatred. They are disrupting schools and other institutions in order to reelect Donald Trump. The rightwing seeks to burn down the barn without having any interest in rebuilding it. Their assault on public education is just one of their weapons for undermining democracy.

So, the history documented by Chalkbeat and satirized by Abbott Elementary is especially important today. It’s time to clearly spread the word about the inherent dangers of massive school closures and other punitive measures regardless of whether its goal is creative disruption, or disruption as a tool for destruction.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Tennessee

John Thompson: How Should the Press Cover Extremism?

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2024 //
8

John Thompson, historian in Oklahoma, chronicles the always interesting events in the Sooner State. He asks in this post about the role of the media in covering extremism and gross stupidity.

Since I wrote about the “Strange Irresponsible Behavior” of Oklahoma’s Republican extremists, I’ve been conversing with neighbors, reporters, and politicians, wrestling with the ways the press should be handling this issue. Will we look back on such weird stories as just “wacky” distractions from the legislative issues that reporters should be covering in a conventional manner? Or will these seemingly nutty narratives come to dwarf in terms of historical significance the narratives that the press typically focuses on? When, for instance, Gov. Kevin Stitt speaks out of both sides of his mouth about “a potential ‘force-on-force’ conflict between the South and the Biden Administration,” and joining other governors to “send our National Guard to help and to support the efforts of Governor Abbott,” was he implicitly supporting those who are calling for a civil war? 

Shouldn’t the press follow the lead of The Independent and ask Stitt what he meant when he called “the clash between Texas authorities and the federal government a ‘powder keg of tension?’” So, should Stitt reveal what he meant when saying, “We certainly stand with Texas on the right to defend themselves.” And, surely the press should seek clarification as to what Stitt meant regarding the National Guard when saying, “I think they would be in a difficult situation: to protect their homeland or to follow what Biden’s saying,” and then promising that Oklahoma, along with other states, “would send our National Guard to help and to support the efforts of Governor Abbott.” 

Fortunately, the rally for supporting Abbott didn’t attract the 700,000 or more persons that were sought, and didn’t respond to the Texas Proud Boys’ call for followers to “grab your guns” to stop “brown immigrant invaders.” But, the Washington Post explains, “Whether the rallies erupt or fizzle, extremism researchers say, the consequences will outlast the weekend.” Shouldn’t Stitt be pressured to comment on that appraisal? I certainly believe reporters need to explicitly ask whether saving our democracy must be our top priority. 

Who knows? Had those questions been asked, maybe the press could have followed up by asking Stitt which side he would support if Vladimir Putin accepts Trump’s invitation to attack NATO?

A first step toward that goal would be to read Jill Lepore’s The Deadline, and wrestle with what would have happened if Dorothy Thompson hadn’t started the originally atypical coverage of Adolf Hitler, or if Edward R. Murrow hadn’t challenged Joe McCarthy. Lepore, the historian who writes for the New Yorker, further cited the “Golden Age” of the press in the 1960s and 70s which was started when David Halberstam ignored charges of liberal bias and reached “the high mark” of journalism when “interpretation replaced transmission, and adversarialism replaced deference,” even though it meant a writer could no longer “shake hands the next day with the man whom he had just written about.” 

Led by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a few other institutions, the national press now focuses more on the interpretation of MAGA antics. It would be more risky for local journalists to place  irrational assertions and legislative actions into a broader context, but since our democracy is in jeopardy, its time to move beyond coverage of routine bills as they move out of committee.  

After a conversation on that subject, I got into my car and listened to NPR’s coverage of the Taylor Swift Super Bowl stories – which seemed to be the model for how reporters should cover rightwing absurdities.  It began, “Swift’s popularity is being twisted into a threat by a contingent of far-right, Donald Trump-supporting conservatives who have started circulating conspiracy theories about the singer, the Super Bowl, and the 2024 election.” Supposedly, “the NFL had ‘RIGGED’ a Chiefs victory” so “Swift comes out at the halftime show and ‘endorses’ Joe Biden with Kelce at midfield.”

NPR then placed this obviously false narrative in the context of Fox news, and “Jack Posobiec, who pushed the baseless Pizzagate conspiracy theory.” It further explained how such memes can endanger women’s health. 

On the other hand, who knows? Maybe Swift would have led a halftime coup for Biden if the press hadn’t blown the whistle?

Seriously, why can’t all types of news outlets routinely interrogate legislative sponsors about such lies, pushing them to go on record or publicly refuse to answer questions about where did they learn about furries and the reason for wanting to use animal control to keep them out of school. Or, why the “Common Sense Freedom of Press Control Act” should “require criminal background checks of every member of the news media;” the “licensing of journalists through the Oklahoma Corporation Commission;” the completion of a “propaganda free” training course by PragerU; and a $1 million liability insurance policy; and quarterly drug tests.

When legislators defend corporal punishment of disabled students because it’s the will of God, and requiring the teaching of creationism in classes where evolution is taught, they should have to explain the sources of their legislation, and why they think they are constitutional. Similarly, why would a legislator seek to ban “no-fault divorce,” even though the vast majority of the state’s divorces are based on that law. If every such bill would receive such scrutiny, wouldn’t the public become better prepared to vote for or against political leaders who won’t take a stand opposing the MAGA-driven divisiveness?

Or, conversely, if these bills are dismissed as merely “wacky” and allowed to spread, what will happen to the trust required for a democracy to function?    

Categories Democracy, Elections, Extremism, History, Media, Oklahoma, Stupid

John Thompson: Oklahoma’s Leaders Engage in Strange, Irresponsible Behavior

By dianeravitch
January 30, 2024 //
16

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, keeps a close watch on state government and the state legislature. He has friends in both parties, so he is diplomatic. But since I don’t live in Oklahoma, I read what he reports in this post with a mixture of amazement and amusement. I can’t believe these people think they will improve education by their shenanigans. There are serious and reasonable people in Oklahoma. Unfortunately, they do not run the state.

John also forwarded to me a critique of pending legislation in the State Senate that would require every science teacher to give equal time to evolution and “intelligent design,” i.e. creationism. The critique came from the National Center for Science Education. I repeat: Where are the sane people? The grown-ups?

He writes:

Our Internet and phone went out for five days as the legislature’s bill filing period closed, so I was limited to learning the latest craziness of the national MAGA campaign, and national coverage of Oklahoma news. For example, State Superintendent Ryan Walters selected “Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the ‘Libs of TikTok’ social media account,” as member of the Oklahoma library media advisory committee. She has no background in education and does not live in Oklahoma. And the governor has already “banned the use of TikTok by any executive branch agency or employee and blacklisted the software from all state networks and state managed devices.”

But, the Oklahoman reported, “Walters said he put Raichik on the advisory committee because she was on the front lines showing the world exactly what the radical left is all about — lowering standards, porn in schools and pushing ‘woke indoctrination’ on kids.”

The Oklahoman also explained, “Last year, a ‘Libs of TikTok’ post drew attention to a video posted by an elementary school librarian in Tulsa.” The Libs of TikTok version “had been edited from her original TikTok” and identified the teacher and the school. The Oklahoman explained:

After the post was made, the Ellen Ochoa Elementary School in Tulsa received a bomb threat on Aug. 22. That day Ryan Walters had also retweeted the “Libs of TikTok” post.

The threat appeared to have been made in retaliation for a librarian’s public post on TikTok.

Also leading the recent news, Republican Senator Nathan Dahm’s Senate Bill 1837 sought to:

Create the “Common Sense Freedom of Press Control Act.” The measure requires criminal background checks of every member of the news media, licensing of journalists through the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the completion of a “propaganda free” training course through the Oklahoma State Department of Education, a $1 million liability insurance policy and quarterly drug tests.

KOSU reported that they would also have to “attend an eight-hour ‘propaganda-free’ safety training developed by PragerU.”

Not to be outdone, Republican Rep. Juston Humphrey’s House Bill 3084, sought to ban:

“Students who purport to be an imaginary animal or animal species, or who engage in anthropomorphic behavior commonly referred to as furries at school” from participating in class and school activities.

Humphrey would “require parents or guardians to pick the student up from school. … But, if parents are unable to pick the student up, the bill says ‘animal control services shall be contacted to remove the student.’”

Humphrey also filed:

House Bill 3133, as it is currently worded, states that any person who is of Hispanic descent living within the state of Oklahoma; is a member of a criminal street gang as such term is defined in state statutes; and has been convicted of a gang-related offense enumerated in state statute shall be deemed to have committed an act of terrorism and will be subject to property forfeiture.

Humphrey had previously said “he intends to file legislation that will require any Oklahoma elected official known to be in support of a terrorist organization to be removed from their seat.” He did so to stop “Hollywood’s fake agenda.”

Other Republicans contributed bills such as Sen. Dusty Deevers’ Senate Bill 1958 “that would no longer allow Oklahomans to file for divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, also known as no-fault divorce.”

And Rep. Jim Olsen:

Filed legislation to require the Ten Commandments be displayed in all public school classrooms.” It “would require each classroom to clearly display a poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments, measuring at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall, beginning in the 2024-2025 school year. The bill also outlines the specific text to be used for the display.

He did so because “The Ten Commandments is one of the foundations of our nation,” and “Publicly and proudly displaying them in public school classrooms will serve as a reminder of the ethics of our state and country as students and teachers go about their day.”

Olsen also “pointed to numerous passages in the Bible he said clearly endorsed corporal punishment as a part of proper child training, including Hebrews 12:11, which states, ‘Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterword it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby.’”

Others continued the filing of bills to support Ryan Walters’ agenda. For instance, Rep. Tom Gann:

Said he is taking a proactive step toward safeguarding Oklahoma’s public school students with the introduction of House Bill 3112. The bill would prohibit schools and school districts from accepting financial donations or gifts from countries (meaning China) designated as “hostile” or “Countries of Particular Concern (CPC)” by the United States Secretary of State.

And Chris Banning “released a statement applauding State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters for working to eliminate all references to American Library Association guidelines in Oklahoma’s Information Literacy Standards and proposing new standards that are aligned with Oklahoma values.”

I kept scrolling back from December and January filings until I got to two other types of statements For example Oklahoma House Speaker Charles McCall’s, praised:

The conservative rating for the Oklahoma Legislature after the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Foundation’s Center for Legislative Accountability (CLA) released its 2023 ratings of the voting records of state legislators in all fifty states. Oklahoma was ranked as the second.  

But also I read a number of Republican statements condemning the bomb threats directed at the Tulsa Union Public Schools after the Libs of TikTok’s false post which likely prompted the threats. For example. “Rep. Ross Ford, R-Broken Arrow, vowed to help track down those who have made recent bomb threats made against several schools in the Union Public Schools district.”

So, what has the rightwing done in terms of policy when they could have been protecting children and educators? Gov. Stitt appointed Nellie Tayloe Sanders, “who last year helped advance a controversial Catholic charter school proposal (the St. Isidore religious school)” as his new secretary of education.

Worse, on Newsmax, Stitt seemed to warn of a civil war prompted by a confrontation between the Texas National Guard and President Biden. He certainly seemed to say that Oklahoma and our National Guard would side with Texas against the U.S..

And Ryan Walter’s confusing and flawed $16 million teacher bonus program is now clawing back $50,000 incentives they gave to teachers who were doing their best to follow the confusing application rules that Walters’ staff mismanaged.

That’s just the latest batch of the rightwing’s frightening behavior. Some serious reporters dismiss “headline-grabbing proposals such as prohibiting so-called furry costumes in public schools and the licensing and drug testing of journalists [that] have little chance of passage,” arguing that “scores of other bills, if passed, could mean big changes for Oklahomans in everything from land sales and medical marijuana to prescription drugs and state pension system investments.”

But, reading the proposed legislation, it seems overwhelmingly impossible that more good than harm could come out of the 2024 session. And, the historian in me worries that these irrational, but not passable, bills could do even more harm than the legislation that could come out of the Republican-controlled legislature. After all, they are parts of a continuing barrage against trust in government and democratic principles.

So, what can be done to curb the stress the MAGAs are imposing?

We can hope that more adult Republicans will push back against their extremist colleagues. Or, I guess we could wish for more ice storms that will shut down the Internet so we don’t need to dwell on their threats to democracy.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Freedom of the Press, Ignorance, Oklahoma

John Thompson: Oklahoma’s State Chief Clings to Failed Reforms

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2024 //
8

John Thompson, a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reviews the stalemate in education in the Sooner State. The cause: a state superintendent who will not abandon failed reforms.

He writes:

As School Superintendent Ryan Walters ramps up his attacks on public education, resisting his false, rightwing agenda has become Oklahoma educators’ top priority. While we need to unite and put the school reform wars of the last two decades behind us, the lessons of corporate reforms must be remembered. As Walters puts the doomed-to-fail, test-to-punish No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) “accountability” mandates on steroids, I’ve tried to be as diplomatic as possible in reminding educators how and why data-driven, competition-driven “reforms” did so much damage. Reading the Tulsa World editorial, “Current Public Accountability Systems Always Leaving Kids Behind” by Bixby Superintendent Rob Miller, brought me back to a time when I was one of many educators trying to reason with corporate school reformers. Then I read Peter Greene’s “VAM: Why Is This Zombie Policy Still Around?, and I was reminded of the history of so many Oklahoma administrators failing to push back against the Billionaires Boys Club.

My favorite memories of Rob Miller was when he pulled no punches in telling legislators the hard truths about NCLB. Miller is still candid about it, illustrating education’s “gap between those who make policy and those who suffer the consequences.” Research made it clear that “standardized tests are unreliable indicators of school quality,” and “nothing more than an elaborate sorting and labeling system.” Non-educators dismissed the experience of teachers, concluding they were “just falling back on excuses about student poverty, adverse childhood experiences, teacher shortages and unstable families.”

Miller recounts the loss of “recess, music and arts, field trips, class discussions and reading books for pleasure when we need to get these kids proficient at bubbling correct answers on multiple-choice tests.” He then writes:

Who cares if a 10-year-old learns to hate school because he’s been retained in third grade and his days are now filled with worksheets, practice tests and repetitive drill-and-kill curriculum in place of projects, puzzles and hands-on activities which nurture his natural curiosity and develop thinking skills? Suck it up, kid!

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of education leaders knew that test-driven accountability would inevitably lead to “tedious, time-wasting, high-pressure, spirit-killing, highly scripted instructional programs.” But few would go on the record about the harm done by focusing on test scores, as opposed to improving learning. And few of them were as eloquent as Miller when standing up for students.

Then, I read Peter Greene’s summary of what I believe was the worst of the worst corporate reform mandate, Value Added Models (VAMS). When the Billionaires Boys Club” saw the way that NCLB wasn’t working, they blamed Baby Boomers for accepting “Excuses!” and targeted individual educators, using invalid and unreliable algorithms to punish and replace veteran teachers with 23-year-olds they could train. I will always love President Obama, but his Race to the Top was even more destructive than NCLB. Virtually every educator and student above 2ndgrade were held accountable for increased “outputs.”

Greene first explained the inherent flaws in VAMS, doing an intensive analysis of the model’s flaws for teacher evaluation, and surveys documenting teachers rejecting them. He also wrote:

We used to talk about this a lot. A. Lot. But VAM … has departed the general education discussion even though it has not departed the actual world of education. Administrators still brag about, or bemoan, their VAM scores. VAM scores still affect teacher evaluation. And VAM scores are still bunk.

And that leads to what may be the most disturbing aspect of Greene’s piece for states like Oklahoma. He reviewed a range of studies around 2014 and 2015 that made the overwhelming case for abandoning the use of VAMs for accountability purposes. Since Ryan Walters has said he’s been consulting with the architects of the Houston IDS regarding a plan for taking over the Tulsa Public Schools, the most relevant and frightening research Greene cites for Oklahoma document the destructive role that VAMs played in Houston.

Reading Superintendent Miller’s and Greene’s work makes me, once again, rethink my efforts to persuade administrators and politicians to reject test-driven accountability. I worry that education leaders will revert back to the “culture of compliance,” and obey Walters’ demands. I keep remembering the time when one of the nation’s top experts, John Q. Easton of the Chicago Consortium on School Research, came to Oklahoma City and explained why it is impossible to improve schools without first building trusting relationships, and warning about untrustworthy accountability metrics. Afterwards, in the parking lot where administrators were more likely to feel free to speak their minds, the OKCPS’s top researchers agreed, but warned that the new types of tests resulting from NCLB (with Criterion Based Tests replacing Norm Referenced Tests) would completely corrupt our data.

Then, we had an agreement with MAPS for Kids volunteers that the OKCPS would be clear in telling teachers that their job was teaching to state standards, not standardized tests. When NCLB was implemented, however, I was in the meeting where top administrators recalled years of ridiculous mandates and then jolted us all by saying the district had no choice but to expand high-stakes testing. I was the only one who pushed back. A smart, sincere, veteran administrator replied, “John, I always say you don’t make a hog bigger by weighing it. But this is politics. We have no choice.”

On the state level, I joined an informal committee with superintendents trying to draft NCLB policies that would be less destructive. I was tasked with studying the Ohio standards. Because it was then a swing state, Ohio was granted the most freedom to get around the most destructive accountability mandates. The thought was that NCLB’s worst aspects would not survive the 2004 elections, so we sought to kick the ball down the field until evidence-based policies returned!?!?

So, I kept trying to be diplomatic, bridging differences with both – corporate reformers who would not reconsider their ideology-driven mandates and educators who felt they had to comply with those mandates. On one hand, unity is more important when our democracy – not just public education – faces existential threats. On the other hand, discussing these historic facts could be a unifying force. After all, so many of today’s teachers and parents have experienced the damage done by test-driven, competition-driven schooling. I suspect that many of them would appreciate a discussion of the history of those failures.

The 21st century is full of hard truths about the way that the holistic instruction students need for a better future was undermined. And then came Covid, and then came the Moms for Liberty. Reading Rob Miller and Peter Greene, and the science they present, is convincing me that I also must learn from failures to openly oppose corporate school reforms, in addition to fighting back against fanatics like Ryan Walters.

By the way, Walters just announced his plan to create a “one-stop shop” for teacher training, development and financial services. He unexpectedly ended the state’s relationship with:

The three organizations, which have wide membership throughout the state are the Oklahoma State School Boards Association (OSSBA), the Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration (CCOSA) and the Oklahoma Public School Resource Center (OPSRC). In a news release, Walters said without providing examples that the three organizations “work in tandem with national extremist groups that seek to undermine parents, force failed policies into the schools, and work against a quality education in Oklahoma.”

The Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration responded, “Last year, over 5,400 educators attended CCOSA’s professional development events to serve those members, focusing on topics such as school finance, special education law and teacher evaluations.” The OPSRC did not reply, but apparently, Walters broke ties with them because they hired a former district superintendent, April Grace, who was his Republican opponent for state superintendent. Before education leaders try to cooperate with Walters in order to avoid his full fury, they should remember that the OPSRC is funded by the Walton Family Foundation and other philanthropies that support corporate school reforms! That’s one more reminder that revenge, not school improvement, is his focus.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Race to the Top, Teachers, VAM (value-added modeling)

John Thompson: Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Wants to Destroy Tulsa Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2024 //
9

Ryan Walters of Oklahoma may be the worst state superintendent in the nation. Read John Thompson’s latest report on Walters’s plans for the Tulsa public schools and see if you agree.

Thompson writes:

The Tulsa World reported that the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) “is zeroing in on 6,200 students in grades four to eight who must improve on state tests to help the district avoid a state takeover.” Given the threats State Superintendent Ryan Walters has thrown at the district, I understand why the TPS is undertaking a probably doomed-to-fail intervention. By appeasing Walters (who now supports the Tulsa plan), they might save the school system from Walter’s most destructive attacks. But that shouldn’t be the issue.

The question we should be asking is: Will their rushed effort to increase test scores help the 18% of the district’s students who are targeted or will it do them more harm? This experiment will inevitably teach students a lot of things – including destructive lessons rooted in worksheet-driven malpractice. The question should be: Would the supposed gains justify the likely damage that will be done to those students? If history is the guide, it seems inevitable that the tragedies of No Child Left Behind and ESSA will be repeated, especially for the most-disadvantaged students. For instance: What are the chances that the $360,000 spent on state test-aligned test preparation materials will result in a drill-and-kill mindset which is antithetical to the meaningful learning students need?

One of many examples of research on why programs like Walters’ demands have failed is National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2011 study, Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. It found:

Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries. When evaluated using relevant low-stakes tests, which are less likely to be inflated by the incentives themselves, the overall effects on achievement tend to be small and are effectively zero for a number.

I was attending a rally of teachers when Walters announced his latest assaults on Tulsa schools, and the district’s response was outlined. On one hand, the conversations with Tulsa and Oklahoma City teachers were stimulating. I was impressed by their emphasis on trusting and loving relationships, and supporting students who face so many obstacles. I was inspired by the embraces of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), and how overworked and stressed out teachers remained devoted to their kids. I was told about successful efforts in some schools to restore holistic and meaningful learning, as well as other schools where test prep was still dominant.

Moreover, I was consistently told about the exhaustion and anxiety the educators face, and how Walters’ attacks will force schools to ramp up test prep. These conversations brought me back to the first decade of the 21st century when low-performing schools were the primary focus of drill-and-kill, and where recess, field trips, arts, and music were taken away.

Then, I was brought back to the second decade when almost every student and educator was targeted for reward-and-punish accountability. Just as the Race-to-the Top (RttT) was doubly devastating because NCLB had already broken the resistance to test-driven accountability, today’s mandates are likely to be doubly dangerous because they follow Walters’ and the Moms for Liberty’s campaigns for Prager’s false, rightwing curriculum, attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), LGBTQ and trans students, and public education’s principles.

By the way, who are the students TPS needs to immediately move up at least one achievement level from “below basic” on state tests? The World reports they are 92% are economically disadvantaged, 20% require special education services, 43% are multilingual learners. They will be the ones who will likely suffer the stress, the drill-and-kill instructional malpractice, and lower graduation rates that typically result from Walters-styled mandates. This raises the question: Wouldn’t they benefit more from properly funded social and emotional supports, equitable spending on holistic instruction, diversity, and inclusiveness?

Instead of asking those questions, as the Voice reports, Walters said he will be proposing a rule which says “sexual activity in public targeted towards kids” is inappropriate. He said “the rule is a direct result of a district hiring an administrator who dresses as a drag queen during non-work hours.” Walters said he would respond to out-of-state groups that oppose prayer in school by introducing “a rule that protects prayer in schools.”

Moreover, the TPS will be required to make “midyear changes in principal assignments and reassigning central office staff to support the Tulsa schools needing Most Rigorous Intervention, or MRI, based on federal education standards.” It will also need to restructure “the district’s leadership team, and aligning leadership priorities and strategic planning to the state’s demands.”

Even if Walters’ priorities and plans made sense, how could the TPS effectively implement them is such a rushed manner? While I’m not optimistic that the TPS will dare to heed research on why the federal School Improvement Grants largely failed, I hope it will not ignore (like many reformers have) the reasons why the billions of dollars invested in turnaround and transformation schools didn’t improve student outcomes.

I must emphasize a key difference, however, between the hurried transformations that backfired so badly over the last two decades, and those that Walters is coercing Tulsa into adopting. I spent hundreds of hours trying to explain to researchers and funders who hurriedly devised the previous turnaround attempts. Even though they were extremely smart, they didn’t know what they didn’t know about public schools. These venture philanthropists and their staff sought to “blow up” the status quo so that innovators could reinvent schools.

Walters is even more aggressive in trying to blow up public education, and he’s shown no interest in improving schools. He might be able to intimidate Tulsa into “knocking down the barn” but, even if he was interested in the welfare of students, there’s no way he would be interested in rebuilding public schools.

Categories Cruelty, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Oklahoma
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