John Thompson laments the barrage of attacks on the public schools of Oklahoma City; over the past four decades, the assaults on teachers and public schools have only grown worse. He urges educators to resist and reclaim their profession.
He writes:
During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s deregulation and Supply Side economics wiped out high-quality blue collar jobs and prompted the collapse of banks and Savings and Loans, as the Housing and Urban Development scandal left hundreds of abandoned houses in our part of Oklahoma City. This resulted in crack houses on every block, and it looked like the world was coming to an end. I grew close to the kids growing up in drug houses and became a mentor and then a teacher.
In the early 1990s, when I started teaching in the inner city, those crises combined with the legacy of the Oklahoma City Public School System’s (OKCPS) obedience to the Reagan administration’s “A Nation at Risk” high-stakes testing, which contributed to a mass exodus of students. So many times, along with other overwhelmed teachers, we’d pause from trying to control the interlocking crises, and ask whether the chaos in the hallways was real, or whether we were just sharing a nightmare.
Today, I wonder if the OKCPS is facing even greater risks. Since No Child Left Behind, test-and-punish, competition-driven corporate reforms have undermined meaningful teaching and learning. Moreover, the lack of funding, as in many other states, made it impossible to tackle the inter-connected obstacles to improving schools that serve extreme concentrations of children from generational poverty who have endured multiple traumas.
Then came Covid. Now, rightwingers like Gov. Kevin Stitt and State Superintendent Ryan Walters are going for the kill. As Education Week reports, all of these challenges lead:
To a vicious cycle of sorts: Low pay, coupled with the heavy scrutiny of teachers and their teaching practices, [which] causes the teacher pipeline to contract. There’s a scramble to fill vacant positions. Certification standards are lowered to get more bodies into classrooms. As the new teachers come in, many others leave.
During this era, enrollment in Oklahoma’s teacher-preparation programs “plummeted” by 80 percent from 2010 to 2018. And by 2022-2023 “Oklahoma’s teacher turnover rate was 24 percent, the highest in a decade.” And today, EdWeek reports, “Even first-year teachers are often asked to mentor emergency certified teachers, teacher-educators and union leaders say.” And it quotes a teacher who dared to say the obvious, “The disrespect and the unfunded mandates just keep coming.”
As is true across the nation, our schools are facing a surge of mental health crises. As KOSU reports, Oklahoma “has had limited mental and behavioral health services available for youth for decades.” But, “Over the past five years, Oklahoma has sent a growing number of children out of state for mental or behavioral health treatment. It’s often a last resort after families have searched for months or years for effective in-state help.” So, “communities rely on public schools to provide significant on-site services to kids,” even though their “special education programs are often short-staffed and under-funded.”
Even worse, federal Covid funds that helped schools address trauma and mental illness are about to run out. As the Frontier now reports, “A crisis team that helps schools around Oklahoma address emergencies like student deaths and natural disasters lost federal funding under State Superintendent Ryan Walters.” This follows the resignation of Terri Grissom who “wrote grants that have guaranteed Oklahoma about $106 million, but only if all of the work is completed.” She protested:
Without access to department documentation, she estimated that between $35 million and $40 million of that money is unspent, and she said that if those grant programs are not fully completed, some federal agencies likely will demand repayment of the grants in full.
Now, due to Walters’ refusal to apply for “federal grants that run counter to “Oklahoma values,’” concerns are being raised that Oklahoma could lose much more of its 800 million a year federal dollars. Moreover, Gov. Stitt has pressured the State Senate to drop its modest $100 million request for additional school spending to $25 million for an education system that already underserves its 700,000 students.
And the loss of those funds is one reason why the OKCPS will have to increase class sizes. For instance, “Pre-K class sizes are projected to increase from 20 to 22 students,” while “High school teachers are projected to take on 155 students, an increase of 10.”
And who knows what will happen if the next stage of Ryan Walters’ assault on public education survives in court? As the Oklahoman reports:
In February, the State Board of Education passed a slew of proposed rules regarding school accreditation, prayer in schools, teacher behavior, training of local school board members, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) procedures in Oklahoma schools, among other topics.
And schools will be challenged by a new rubric for reviewing K-12 school textbooks which “asks whether learning materials ‘degrade traditional roles of men and women,’ promote ‘illegal lifestyles’ or neglect the importance of religion in preserving American liberties.”
Apparently drawing upon the tactics of the Houston Superintendent Mike Miles, Walters’ plan is to takeover districts where the number of students scoring “Basic” doesn’t quickly rise to 50%. Since 63% of OKCPS students score Below Basic, it could be facing an existential threat.
While it seems to be common sense that schools need transparent, evidence-informed public discussions, in my experience, top administrators in Oklahoma tend to keep their heads down and try to obey top-down mandates. Schools love to issue public relations statements about the endless number of “transformational” changes they are introducing, while pretending they can handle an impossibly long to-do list of projects, while focusing on accountability metrics. So, I feel bad about urging the schools I know best to adopt a new priority.
Even as educators face greater and greater assaults by rightwingers, they first need an open discussion of the 21st century paths that they must follow. Do teachers, students, or patrons want schools to continue to comply with teach-to-the-test mandates? Or do they want educators to reclaim the autonomy necessary for holistic, meaningful instruction? Do they want teachers to receive the clear message that their job is to join a team effort to teach Standards of Instruction in a culturally meaningful way, as opposed to teaching to the standardized tests? Does the public want children to be treated like numbers, future workers, or as full human beings? Should our kids be subject to worksheet-driven, skin-deep “basics,” or should they be taught how to “learn how to learn?”
I understand colleagues who will protest that their hands are already full, trying to fend off the Ryan Walters. But I’d urge a different mindset. The decline of student learning due to test-driven, charter- and voucher-driven reforms weakens our institutions, making them more vulnerable to the politics of destruction. So, if the educational culture of compliance continues, and threats to learning grow, will ideology-driven assaults on public education become more unstoppable?
I understand why many education leaders, who are intimidated by accountability-driven, competition-driven mandates, believe they are protecting children when they avoid battles with the “Billionaires Boys Club” or, worse, anti-democratic MAGAs. But they need to take inventory of the 21stcentury mandates which have undermined the joy of teaching and learning. They should openly discuss what is really needed to tackle mental health challenges and chronic absenteeism; and to build trusting, loving relationships. Unless we can reclaim those principles, how can we protect our schools from assaults that are getting crueler and crueler, and more overwhelming?
“President Ronald Reagan’s deregulation and Supply Side economics . . . resulted in crack houses on every block“
And just to ensure that this would be the case, the Reagan administration was running cocaine operations out of Panama to fund, partially, its illegal wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador and elsewhere (in addition to selling, again illegally, arms to Iran).
The “Just Say No” guy was running cocaine smuggling operations. Because, hey, it was mostly black folks who were subject to the crack epidemic. Just as it was gays dying from AIDS. Reason for Reagan, who hated blacks and gays, to ignore both (and to contribute to the former).
This is the Repugnican hero after whom they renamed our national airport. The guy they honored with a new monument on the national Mall.
The statue on the Mall should include the blood dripping from his hands.
I mean no support for the dictatorship in Nicaragua. Ortega is a horrible person, and his dictatorship is criminal.
At the time, I lived in a mostly black neighborhood in Chicago. When I first moved in, it was thriving. There were lots of small Mom and Pop shop businesses. And over the course of the eight Reagan years, I saw those, one by one, disappear until nothing was left but blight. And desperately poor people. And hookers and drug dealers. And people passed out on the sidewalk.
I believe this happened across the old industrial belt in similar cities. The remarkable thing is that the Sunbelt, which began its expansion during the Reagan years, also saw the rise of homeless people walking the streets. In the midst of that paradox, Sunbelt voters give little thought to giving a rubber stamp to the political right wing, that still thrives amid wild economic expansion juxtaposed with extreme poverty.
“Unless we can reclaim those principles, how can we protect our schools from assaults that are getting crueler and crueler, and more overwhelming?“
The principle is that the joy of teaching begets good instruction. Recognizing that this is a solid idea, conservative political operatives have undertaken to undermine the joy of teaching in public institutions. They use testing as the go-to tool to destroy the only thing that takes people into the classroom: the hope for a fulfilling career changing the lives of young people. They pay enormous sums of money for their children to get this type of instruction at traditional private schools. They vote to deny other children the tax revenue needed to give them the same experience. They seek to disrupt the schooling of 90% of the public by channeling the money into their own pockets.
The outlook is indeed bleak.
Thanks Roy: You’ve described to a T the world in which I live as a teacher.
Creative Competent Teachers can find no elbow room to get started in behalf of their own students. The systemic ailments have been created and perpetuated by “The Cure.” We would all absent ourselves & sink into multiple clinical depressions. In an Educational Industrial Complex that has reduced human connection to data points and Chromebook Curriculum. Way too many adults have been allowed to hire on for this empty head & heart robotic routine. So they also are now part of the problem.
Way too many adults have been allowed to hire on for this empty head & heart robotic routine.
I worked with some of these. It was frightening to watch these Stepford Teachers.
Thanks Bob and Kathy, despite the grim truths in you comments.
I don’t hold out much hope for the return of joy in teaching and learning. In the school in which I currently serve, we don’t educate students so much as train them to take tests. The irony is that our students are sufficiently aware of this that they have begun to editorialize upon it by asking “How am I ever going to use this?” in response to instruction. The bitter irony is that most teachers don’t know the answer to that question. This points to a failure in pedagogy–kids have no idea how the knowledge they are accruing applies and is used in the real world.
Our profession (and this is true at the post-secondary level, where professors have begun to comment on the plethora of administrators and adjunct faculty, and the paucity of tenured professors performing, you know, real academic research) has been hijacked by clerks. In my department, we have a new assistant principal who is real dim bulb. She knows next to nothing about sound educational theory and practice, but has, predicably, an idee fixe about testing and preparing for it as the gravamen of pedagogy.
I find all of this terribly depressing and demoralizing. And, if news reports on various surveys are to be believed, teachers are leaving the profession in droves because they to find a teaching career, sans professional judgment and autonomy, a dreary prospect.
There is nothing I would rather do than prognosticate a bright future of joy in learning. For those with the connections, political pull, or money, there will always be schools like those I attended (Malcolm Shabazz-City High School in Madison, Wisconsin, and Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts) where principled inquiry, epistemology, and intellectual autonomy inform teaching and learning. But in the communities where I tend to serve? I don’t see much on the horizon but more test and punish regimes and ignorant administrators who took a fast career path (read: taught for fewer than three years, and poorly) to their administrative sinecures, and will do anything to hang onto them–including what I would argue is educational malpractice.
This is all so sad. Breaks my heart.
My English Department Chairperson in my last school, who was perhaps 26 years old, actually said to me that she does test prep until April and then, after the tests are given, has about a month to teach English.
She was our administrators’ fav.
It is all-important to realize why this is happening. It is happening because the corporate financial sector has set its collective caps on converting education into a commercial industry on the model of all the other exploitations it loves best. That is the driving force behind the curtain. We must not let the puppets — who never get a clue how their strings are pulled — distract us from the puppet-masters and their end game.
Nailed it, Jon.
We are in a political environment where one party wants an uneducated, thus powerless, populous. Although the Democratic Party certainly supports public school, it is not a whole hearted effort to back teachers and school resources. In fact, too many Democrats, rising star Josh Shapiro among them, are more than willing to back privatization schemes that are defunding public schools in underprivileged communities. President Biden has twice called for increased teacher pay during his State of the Union addresses, but we hear nothing about this legislatively otherwise. Full throated support of public education could be a winner for the Democratic Party, but too few are willing to put in the effort. Therefore, anyone who is teaching or interested in teaching sees a political environment that really doesn’t care about them. The one draw for teaching through the decades has been job security with decent benefits. Pay has never been adequate, but most of my colleagues in the school house figured out how to live solidly in the middle class. Now financial security is in doubt while negative reporting on test scores and impoverished schools dominates the headlines. Yes, life long learning should be crown jewel of the good produced by the common school. However, all policy makers and politicians seem concerned with is sound bites and looking tough.
In this era of extreme micromanagement, test prep, and censorship, I am hard pressed to recommend to young people becoming a teacher. But we need people who are willing to go in and fight from within. Those who will close their doors and actually teach DESPITE the mandates and minimize the use of the canned curricula. Teaching and nursing are the two most noble callings, IMNSHO. (The n and the s are for not so.) Teaching is the profession of Yeshua of Nazareth and the Buddha and Lao Tze and Rumi and Mullah Nasreddin and the Bal Shem Tov.
The politicians and the deformers (looking at you, Gates) and their Vichy collaborators among administrators and district bureaucrats and even union leaders have debased the profession for long enough. Time to turn teaching back over to teachers!
HMMMM…finally changed your tune, Bob? I’ve posted here NUMEROUS times that teachers should just shut their doors and actually teach and do what’s right for students. You have always come back bloviating about how those teachers would be fired and that they need their income to feed their own families. You’re a little late to the frustration that parents feel.
With the current state of public education the way that it is, is it any wonder why middle class parents want vouchers to help offset the cost of private education? The privates in my area are filled…mostly with former public school students and many former public school teachers. My own sister, a 30 yr+ public school teacher, doesn’t want her own grandchild in the public system.
I have always held that that’s what teachers should do. It’s WHAT I DID, and I have posted about that many times. That said, there are limits to what teachers can do if they depend on the job to feed their families. I didn’t.
Depends on where you are. Anything, almost, is preferable to those school systems that have gone full bore Deformy. One cannot get an education in those places where the Gates/Coleman Deform has taken total control.
I have written here, many times, Lisa, about how I was expected to follow the Deformy state curriculum, teach to the test, do data chats and prepare data walls, use a moronic Common Cored literature textbook series, etc., and HOW I DID NONE OF THAT. My consistent advice has been, give lip service to the Core and the testing as you have to, then close your door and actually teach DESPITE the Deforms. This is what I have said from the first day the Common Core was published.
When “the disconnect between the legitimate needs of the people and the practice of the state have diverged so that the endpoints are not on the same map.” speaking in terms of what was is as effective as staring in the rear view mirror to change where you are. Staying busy denouncing the deplorables doesn’t make the economy for the people, or the government for the people. “Unless we can reclaim those principles…” all but ignores the role of a “State Actor”. Simply put, if the State had intended for you to be in charge, you would be. Back in the day I was, remember when, look what they’ve done to my song, If only they could read, damn deplorables…
You keep harping on this “saying stuff doesn’t change anything theme,” but that is demonstrably FALSE. There are enormous amounts of sociological and psychological literature showing that social sanction–which can take the form of speech and writing–are THE major instruments of social change. IT MATTERS A LOT WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING, WHAT MESSAGES THEY HEAR, AND ESPECIALLY IN AN IMPORTANT ELECTION YEAR.
And where are the NEA and AFT on all this?
I can’t post the comment with charts from NAEP because the WordPress Block Editor will not let me.
We need to do what George W Bush said to do when he twisted the meaning to peddle the NCLB: shine a light on the problem. Or maybe it was Obama who said it peddling Race to the Top. I can’t recall which. Regardless, we need a top bestseller about teaching. We need an Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We need a The Jungle. Shine a light on the problem. Describe the guts. (It would also help to have an Abraham Lincoln to follow after the Uncle Tom’s Cabin or an FDR to follow after the The Jungle.)