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 21^st 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 21^stcentury 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?  

Carol Burris former teacher, former principal, now executive director of The Network for Public Education, writes in The Progressive about the segregative effects of charter schools.

Burris writes:

As we approach the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, a crucial question arises: Why are our nation’s schools experiencing increased segregation despite progress in neighborhood integration? A new study by Sean Reardon of Stanford University and Ann Owens of the University of Southern California provides a startling answer—more than half of the blame is due to the expansion of charter schools.

While the courts’ lifting of desegregation orders played a role, the researchers’ analysis reveals that segregation would be approximately 14 percent lower if not for the expansion of charter schools. 

In an article on the report, Laura Meckler of The Washington Post provided the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina as an example. Researchers scored segregation on a scale of 0 (matching district demographics) to 1.0 (complete segregation). In 1971, following a court-ordered desegregation plan, the district’s segregation score fell to 0.03. In 1991, it remained low at 0.10. Today, there are more than 30 charter schools in the district, and the district’s 2022 segregation score has risen to a whopping 0.44.

As the Network for Public Education, of which I’m the executive director, and dozens of national and local organizations reported to the U.S. Department of Education in 2021, North Carolina’s education department aided and abetted the expansion of “white-flight” charter schools using money it received from a grant program. One of the schools that received funding was a former white-flight private academy, Hobgood Academy, which is now a charter. Other grants went to North Carolina charters in disproportionately white suburbs of Charlotte that were attempting to self-segregate their schools from the more racially diverse Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district. 

And, as we demonstrated in our recent report, the expansion of right-wing charter schools like the Cincinnati Classical Academy, which received a federal grant to expand, increases segregation with website messaging that encourages the enrollment of white children from conservative families, resulting in racially imbalanced student demographics.

Do we see the same increases in segregation resulting from public school choice? Although the Reardon and Owens study did not explore that specific question, a separate study recently released by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA indicates that public magnet schools are far less segregated than charter schools.

The report, written by Ryan Pfleger and Gary Orfield, examined more than 100 districts and compared the student demographics of their charter and magnet schools. The findings were clear: The charter sector has a higher proportion of intensely segregated schools than the public magnet sector, and this gap is widening over time.

According to the study, “the proportion of intensely segregated charter schools, with less than 10 percent white students, increased from 45 percent to 59 percent from 2000 to 2021. A different trend was observed for magnets. The share of magnets that were intensely segregated was nearly the same in 2000 and 2021: 34 percent and 36 percent.”

If we hope to heal the racial, socio-economic, and political divides in our nation, public schools in districts with policies designed to increase integration among schools and within schools offer our best hope.

Unfortunately, charter schools, whether by chance or, in some cases, by design, are erasing the gains made by those who bravely fought for integration seventy years ago.