John Thompson, historians and retired teacher, keeps us informed about the news from Oklahoma. In this post, he looks at the blame game surrounding the Tulsa public schools.

He writes:

As the Tulsa World recently explained, State Auditor Cindy Byrd issued a “scathing new forensic audit of Tulsa Public Schools” which “laid the blame on the administration of former Superintendent Deborah Gist, who served as Tulsa superintendent for the audited time of 2015-2023.” Byrd “also said multiple school district administrators ‘created and fostered a culture’ of noncompliance and systemic lack of internal controls that ‘potentially placed millions of taxpayer dollars in jeopardy.’”

I’m not qualified to comment on the financial side of the audit, but I strongly agree with the World that Byrd has an impeccable record as a financial auditor.

And as I completed this post, another impeccable institution, The Frontier, discovered, “Deborah Gist and her deputies were quietly arranging an exit plan for the official behind it (Fletcher) — and using secret payments to a private consultant to manage the transition, according to internal district records obtained by The Frontier.” It further explained: 

The newly obtained documents — including auditors’ notes and memos, internal district emails, and procurement records — shed new light on these gaps. They show that Gist and her deputies began planning Fletcher’s departure as early as December 2021, more than six months before the district reported his scheme to the police. 

Moreover:

Gist and former assistant superintendent Paula Shannon hired a New York-based human resources consultant, Talia Shaull, to manage Fletcher’s exit, paying her $175 per hour through the Foundation for Tulsa Schools, emails and contracts show. According to the documents, the arrangement to pay her directly through the foundation was designed “to avoid Board approval, keeping the project confidential” and violated district procurement policy.

Getting back to the history I witnessed, in 2019, a comment by a Tulsa teacher was posted on the Diane Ravitch blog with the title of Tulsa: Broadie Swarm Alert. It began with the teacher’s statement, “Welcome to my Hell in Tulsa.” The introduction explained that a Broadie “is someone ‘trained’ in the top-down management philosophy of Eli Broad at the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy. They are known for setting high goals and meeting none of them.”

In other words, their methods foreshadowed those of today’s Elon Musk.

The Broad Center was a “venture philanthropy” committed to everyone being on the same page for test-driven accountability, mass firings of teachers, and charter schools. It had an extensive record of spreading disruption, imposing script-driven instruction, and driving teachers out of the profession, while failing to improve student outcomes.

Byrd’s audit found that during the Gist administration the TPS “received payments totaling $554,772 from the Broad Center.  It “utilized at least 23 different vendors with Broad Academy connections. The majority of these vendors did not have a relationship with [the] TPS prior to the hiring of the Broad related alumni.” Moreover, the “TPS retained 33% of the employees who received the recruitment or retention bonus payments, 40% of these employees did not continue their employment for more than five years, with 25% remaining for less than two years.”

The audit and reporting on the Gist administration are consistent with my experience with Broadies, and their questionable approaches to data. During the first meeting I had with a consultant hired to implement their agenda, I showed him scatter-grams from the TPS web site that showed how difficult (or completely impossible) it would be to take into account the effect of the district’s segregation when trying to measure individual secondary school teachers’ effectiveness. He replied in a scientific manner, “Oh Sh__!” I repeatedly spoke with consultants who, like him and like me, could not get Gist or her Broadies to listen to social and cognitive science, or to teachers.

Similarly, when the OKCPS hired John Q. Porter, a Broadie from an affluent district’s finance department, he would blow off concerns expressed by my students, colleagues, and researchers. He was adamant in demanding frequent surprise visits by administrators and, then, placing a camera in every classroom so he could see if each teacher was teaching the same lessons in the same way according to the same schedule. Porter was forced to resign in less than a year due to seemingly small violations of district policy, but the Washington Post later reported that he had not properly divested from “Spectrum International, the document management company he founded in 1993.”

Finally, I’m not in a position to comment on the Tulsa World’s concern that Cindy Byrd, who is running for lieutenant governor, was being political when investigating diversity, equity and inclusion efforts,  and whether its funds could be “associated with violations of House Bill 1775.” The World acknowledged that Byrd “stops short of saying any law, such as the mean-spirited House Bill 1775 or Gov. Kevin Stitt’s order to report school DEI expenses, was violated.” It properly noted that, “Classifying DEI or HB 1775 programs is subjective, but it’s already being seized upon by anti-TPS and anti-public education critics.”

And that brings me back to the real harm done to Tulsa by the ideology-driven “Billionaires Boys Club” – not DEI. Back when Deborah Gist and her funders were imposing test-and-punish on schools, I found that many or most conservative legislators who I knew were opposed to the campaign to run schools like venture capitalist institutions. I hope they will remember that the real scandals that fostered a destructive culture that the audit documented were linked to corporate school reformers, not DEI or the efforts to defend meaningful teaching and learning in public schools.