Archives for category: Oklahoma

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

Ryan Walters Wants to Turn Our Schools into Religious Indoctrination Centers

By dianeravitch

May 3, 2024 //

Juan Perez Jr. of Politico painted a portrait of the State Superintendent who is leading the charge to put God into America’s classrooms. Whose God? The God of Protestants? Catholics? Jews? Muslims? Buddhists? Hindus? Or which sect of any of these religions or the scores not listed here? And what about atheists?

There is good reason that our Founding Fathers wanted to separate church and state. They were well aware of the havoc and wars that religious sectarians had inflicted on Europe for centuries. They did not want to import that religious divisiveness here. So while they were perfectly willing to praise religion in general, they wanted every sect to practice its own religion and they wanted to bar the state from imposing any religion. They made that clear in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Ryan Walters of Oklahoma is leading the charge to make America’s schools religious. He knows that the rightwing domination of the U.S. Supreme Court has taken a sledgehammer to the wall that was supposed to separate church and state in recent rulings; consequently, states may now fund religious schools. SCOTUS unleashed the recent wave of voucher legislation in red states.

TULSA, Oklahoma — “You are at Ground Zero of the left’s war on education,” Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters told the crowd inside a barbecue joint on a blazing August afternoon last year.

The day’s Tulsa County Men’s Republican Club meeting opened with a prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance and an ovation for the gathering’s featured speaker. Walters, a 38-year-old ex-teacher, was not here just to chat up a friendly audience and raffle off some Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh books. He was here to make a case that, in a country he sees as corrupted by liberal indoctrination and beset with a civil war over young minds, God has a place in public schools.

“I’m going to get to the biggest assault that you see,” Walters said to the hushed gathering of predominantly older, white voters. Something, he said, “that makes the left the most mad”: “If you say a prayer. If you mention God. If you were to even quote the Declaration of Independence and say we’re endowed — by who? — our Creator with certain inalienable rights. Folks, that is key to our young people’s understanding of what made this country great.”

Walters became superintendent, a role that oversees all public education in the state, a year ago after winning a commanding margin during 2022’s midterm elections, and he’s quickly catapulted himself to the forefront of social conservatives’ influence over education just as the 2024 presidential election promises enormous consequences for American schooling. Wielding a doctrine of brimstone-salted classroom policy, he is the incarnation of a post-pandemic GOP school takeover attempt that has boiled over from local boards to higher-profile jobs like state superintendent and beyond.

Walters has tried to use his office to back a courtroom battle over the nation’s first public religious charter school — a Catholic institution that would be financed by taxpayers but free to teach, enroll and expel students based on faith-based doctrines just like a private parochial school.

Supporters view the concept as the natural outcome of a growing school choice movement that claims legal backing from a conservative-controlled Supreme Court. Opponents say it’s the next frontier in a “full-on assault on church-state separation and public education.” Either way, Walters and his allies are advocating an enormous shift in how schools work in the United States.

But he hasn’t restricted himself to just that cause. He’s instead interjected himself into a consistent string of news cycles. He’s described teacher unions as Marxist terrorist organizations (in the same state where domestic terrorists bombed a federal building and killed 168 people three decades ago). He explored a takeover of the Tulsa Public Schools system, Oklahoma’s biggest, after a fight with the district’s former leader that ultimately led to her resignation. He appointed Chaya Raichik, the far-right social media star who runs the Libs of TikTok account, to a state library committee in January, months after her criticism of a satirical video from a Tulsa school librarian sparked bomb threats.

His staunch opposition to LGBTQ+ rights has come under increasing national focus over the past month following the death of Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old nonbinary student in Owasso who, according to a preliminary medical examiner report, died from an apparent suicide after a bathroom altercation at their high school. Last week, Benedict’s family released more detailsthat documented “numerous areas of physical trauma over Nex’s body that evidence the severity of the assault” while calling on public officials and schools to “come together to prevent any other family from having to suffer through the heartache now borne by Nex’s loved ones.”

Hundreds of civil rights, education and LGBTQ+ organizations have demanded legislators remove Walters from office and investigate his department, asserting his conduct “shows a willful rejection of his duty to protect the health and welfare of the children in Oklahoma’s public schools.” In response, his office said: “Superintendent Walters will never back down to a woke mob.”

Walters has addressed lawmakers in Washington on Capitol Hill and spoken at the past year’s biggest conservative gatherings. He endorsed Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid — after, he said, receiving a call from the former president himself.

But unlike some of his ideological allies, Walters must tend to more than messaging. He is responsible for running a massive, complex government agency that oversees more than $3 billion in spending plus the education of hundreds of thousands of young people. While his hard-line politics have put him at the vanguard nationally, and often in line with the Republican base, his views have alienated an unexpected cohort of former allies and fellow conservatives in Oklahoma — and prompted a battery of unflattering coverage from a dogged corps of local journalists.

Last year state Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt removed Walters as education secretary, another role he’d been appointed to and in which he was serving simultaneously. A flood of employees has abandoned the state education agency, including high-profile departures who have publicly criticized Walters’ leadership and sued him for wrongful termination. An Oklahoma City-area school district is also suing Walters’ office, challenging orders to remove two books — including the 2003 novel The Kite Runner — from its high school libraries after the state library committee proclaimed they contained pornographic material. The superintendent’s office used state resources to hire a communications firm tasked with boosting Walters’ national profile, according to one local investigation that has raised questions about improper spending.

“What’s a shame is that he and I — we didn’t agree on a lot of things — but we agreed on public education and educating our kids,” said Republican state Rep. Mark McBride, an assistant floor leader and education appropriator who now is one of Walters’ fiercest conservative critics. “Since he got elected, he just has gone off the rails. I can’t support much of anything he does.”

Walters is also facing more potential legal trouble; the FBI and Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond have looked into questions surrounding Walters’ campaign and a prior role he held leading a prominent education nonprofit once known as Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, according to four people familiar with the probes. Democrats have sought to impeach him. Republicans have subpoenaed him.

“My speculation, and I have heard that he’s made this comment, is that he would like to run for governor,” said McBride, who proposed legislation to curb the superintendent’s power soon after Walters took office. “I’m sure that he might consider himself as a [federal] secretary of Education … or something like that if he’s crazy enough.”

Yet if Walters is chastened by his array of opponents, he does not show it publicly. In a statement to POLITICO Magazine, Dan Isett, a Walters spokesperson, said staff departures were necessary to “end a union stronghold in Oklahoma’s education,” that Walters has never been interviewed or subpoenaed by federal investigators, and that “the liberal media and jealous liberal activists” have sought to undermine the superintendent.

And after Tulsa’s GOP gathering emptied, Walters compared his work to one of his political idols. “He took some hard-line stands,” Walters told me of Winston Churchill in a slight Oklahoma drawl, between sips of sweet tea. He wore a black “W.W.J.D.” band around his wrist. Dressed in designer blue jeans, a navy sportcoat and brown roper boots, Walters seemed at ease as he deployed Fox News-ready talking points, peppered his answers with ‘Yes, sir’ and never raised his voice.

“Oklahomans see very clearly, the left are the ones who politicized the classroom,” Walters told me. “My goal is to take those politics and rid them from the classroom.”

Years before he captivated crowds at national rallies for influential conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, Walters was his hometown’s star teacher.

He grew up in McAlester, a predominantly white southeastern Oklahoma town of about 18,000 people that is home to the state’s infamous penitentiary, a major Army ammunition plant and a string of prominent state Democrats.Walters said he was enchanted as a kid by classroom lessons on American history. He credits his childhood educators, plus supportive parents who serve as a minister and elementary education director at a local church, for nurturing his interest in teaching. He left home for college, attending Harding University, a private Christian institution in Arkansas. But a year after he graduated in 2010, he was back at McAlester High as a teacher.

His first year in the classroom was challenging. He later remembered that it hit him “like a ton of bricks.” But he proved popular both with students and the administration at his alma mater and soon was teaching Advanced Placement history and government courses. He was named McAlester’s teacher of the year in February 2015 and five months later was picked as one of 12 finalists for the state’s highest teaching honor. “An outstanding educator,” Walters was quoted as saying at the time, “can transcend racism, poverty, and all other barriers that stand between a child and success.”

He developed a reputation as a charismatic instructor and tennis coach with a Twitter habit and a regular classroom wardrobe of suits and skinny ties. But in the early days, he largely kept his politics to himself. His online feed was filled with posts admiring Bachelor in Paradise and Game of Thrones, and predictions that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential election. “You can hear this from my former students; they didn’t know I was conservative,” Walters said.

Walters does not offer much detail on the precise events that shaped his current politics. Former students and some of his onetime colleagues have told me and other journalists that they have trouble reconciling Walters’ political persona with the person they once knew. Walters didn’t seem keen on answering more questions about his evolution, either. He and his advisers were eager to talk when I first started reporting this story last year. But Walters canceled follow-up interviews as controversies piled up through the winter and spring.

Walters did suggest, though, that some of his political views intensified around the time he was nominated for the state’s teacher of the year award. He claims educators he encountered during that time “lashed out” at his support for school choice, though it’s not clear how stridently he made his views known publicly. He also remembered defending Thomas Jefferson during one teacher training that he said criticized the founder’s legacy as a slaveholder. His hard-right views later “crystallized” during his campaign, he said.

“I had these moments where I started to see what’s going on,” Walters said. “There was this dramatic shift, even in a state like Oklahoma, towards these associations and groups in place that are pushing a viewpoint that I just don’t see out of most Oklahomans.”

He started writing op-eds for conservative media outlets The Federalist and Daily Caller, where he suggested defying “unconstitutional court rulings” and criticized the Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage. Yet he hadn’t fully adopted his current culture warrior persona. In 2018, he served on a committee that helped write the state’s straightforward social studies curriculum — and praised the final product in 2019 without a single complaint about the type of “woke ideology” he denounces today.

Randy Hughes, McAlester’s former superintendent, would later describe Walters as “one of the most remarkable educators to have served students at McAlester Public Schools.”

And that could have been the extent of Walters’ career, if it wasn’t for a major political patron.

“This guy is nothing without the governor,” said one knowledgeable Oklahoma power broker who requested anonymity to discuss Walters because of the volatile political situation. “He is coaching tennis in McAlester without Kevin Stitt.”

The governor has said the two became friends after meeting at high school tennis tournaments during Stitt’s 2018 campaign while his daughter was competing, and Walters was coaching one of the other teams. “I just knew that his heart was all about kids, it was all about outcomes and it was all about becoming top 10 in education,” Stitt said of Walters in a 2021 Harding University video feature about Walters.

After the governor took office in 2019, Stitt appointed Walters to serve as a member of the state’s Commission for Educational Quality and Accountability. Weeks later, Walters became the executive director of Oklahoma Achieves, a nonprofit established by the state Chamber of Oklahoma in 2013 to advocate on education with the business community.

When he took the job, Walters insisted that he be allowed to continue teaching at McAlester — and start a new second teaching gig at an Oklahoma City high school — in a kind of hybrid in-person and virtual role that augured the sort of classes endured by millions beginning the following year. In the first Covid-19 summer of 2020, Oklahoma Achieves folded into a new nonprofit — with Walters still at the helm — called Every Kid Counts Oklahoma.

Stitt soon announced a $30 million federally funded school pandemic assistance program that featured private education tuition subsidies and grants for families to purchase remote learning curriculum, technology or tutoring. Every Kid Counts Oklahoma and Walters were responsible for awarding the remote learning funds.

The U.S. Education Department and local investigators later documented significant problems with how Oklahoma administered and spent school pandemic assistance funds. Authorities said Walters, in his role at Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, organized a meeting with a company known as ClassWallet before the state gave the firm a no-bid, $18 million contract to help administer Stitt’s tuition and remote learning initiatives. Those programs were also beset with improper spending and insufficient documentation, authorities said.

Back in 2020, though, those issues weren’t yet public knowledge. That September, Stitt cited Walters’ pandemic spending leadership when the governor appointed him as the state’s education secretary. Less than a year later, Walters launched his campaign for state superintendent.

Walters’ entry into electoral politics came at a time when Covid-19 and the country’s racial reckoning had Oklahoma primed to fight over education. Two months before Walters officially launched his campaign in July 2021, Stitt signed state laws that curtailed school mask mandatesand barred educators from requiring courses or teaching concepts that cause individuals to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress” due to their race or gender.

During the campaign, Walters praised H.B. 1775, the state’s race and gender teaching requirement, when the American Civil Liberties Union launched a still-ongoing lawsuit to overturn the law. He said the Biden administration was “way out of line” after a state mask mandate ban sparked a fight with the White House. “Only a parent should be able to make the decision if their child receives the vaccines or wears a mask to school,” Walters said while hundreds of mask and vaccine opponents rallied at the state capitol.

By early 2022, Walters’ campaign was defined by taking stances on everyday education issues — such as early childhood reading, school choice, and private sector-friendly school reform — and weaponizing them with a culture war message that resonated with social conservatives. Republican Govs. Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis had already pioneered similar models in Virginia and Florida, noted Matt Langston, Walters’ main campaign aide who would eventually become his chief policy adviser after he took office.

“You can take education and put it into a much broader worldview,” Langston told me. “And that becomes a way of building a very credible base of individuals who may not be ‘education voters,’ but they are looking at it and saying ‘We’re very frustrated. We are very disenchanted with a lot of things that are happening within the country and the state.’”

Social media became a focal point for the campaign’s strategy. That left Walters facing a choice between positive messages that garnered a handful of retweets and impressions, or something darker.

“To be clear, in Oklahoma, our schools are not going to go woke,” Walters said in a widely shared March 2022 video that praised the country’s Christian roots after a religious group criticized his embrace of the state race and gender law. He then wrote in a Fox News op-edthat “the far-left’s attempts to destroy our nation’s history and indoctrinate our children must be stopped.”

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The next month Walters attacked a Stillwater Public Schools policy that had allowed students to use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, a policy that had been in place for years without incident, according to the district. “You have chosen radicals over your students, ideology over biology, and ‘wokeness’ over safety,” Walters told the board. The firestorm garnered more media coverage and culminated later in the year with a state law that restricted transgender students’ restroom use.

“When you start looking at those comparisons,” Langston said, “whether he weighs in on ‘We need more teacher pay’ or ‘Our teachers are the greatest here in the state and this is why’ versus rolling out a position on ‘We have to stop porn in schools,’ or ‘We have to stop liberal indoctrination’ — it’s not even close to the amount of attention either one of those gets.”

The strategy paid off. Walters won 41 percent of the vote in a four-way GOP primary, then 53 percent in a party runoff. During the general election, he didn’t stray from appealing to the conservative base. He called to revoke the licenseof a high school teacher who resigned in opposition to Oklahoma’s banned-concepts law and accused his opponents of supporting “radical gender theory.” Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her spouse each donated to Walters. Americans for Prosperity and other national conservative groups sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to support Walters. Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz was another backer, and Walters posed for selfies with Youngkin ahead of the election.

Walters won with nearly 57 percent of the general election vote — putting him at the forefront of a new wave of Republican state school chiefs in Arizona, Idaho, Georgia, South Carolina and Wyoming.

The protesters crowded against the barricades outside Moms for Liberty’s summit in Philadelphia last summer may not have known about the teacher from McAlester. But one of the country’s most influential conservative education groups offered an ideal venue to build Walters’ national profile.

“The reality is the forces that you all are fighting — these are folks that want to destroy our society,” Walters told the gathering’s Republican audience during a panel with education chiefs from South Carolina, Arkansas and Florida.

“They want to destroy your family,” Walters said. “And they want to destroy America as we know it. This is the fight that we’re in, folks. The stakes couldn’t be higher.”

Walters has asserted that his political opponents are waging “civil war” against children and conspiring to topple religion, and he’s defended a highly disputed conservative philosophy that rejects the separation of church and state. “There’s no basis for it in the Constitution,” Walters told me. “This was not something the Founders talked about. This wasn’t a core fundamental principle. And what we’ve seen is the left weaponize this term to actually mean the state will promote atheism and target any other faiths.”

Instead, Walters wants to inject religion into public schooling. Last year, he called to enforce an Oklahoma law that requires a daily minute of silence at schools — and said students must be told they can pray during that time. He seized onto a dispute over a graduation ceremony prayer delivered by a Tulsa Public Schools board member amid a broader clash with former district chief Deborah Gist over academics and financial controls. (Walters even floated a state takeover of the district before Stitt downplayedthe idea and Gist stepped down amid pressure from the superintendent and his allies.)

But most significantly, Walters has used his megaphone to support Oklahoma’s campaign to open explicitly religious public charter schools.

Religious liberty and public schools have tangled in the Supreme Court for decades. Yet church leaders and conservative advocates say Oklahoma’s campaign for religious public schools promises a monumental leap for school choice and religious liberty. Instead of simply giving families subsidies they can use on private school tuition — as other states have implemented — this new model promises a direct injection of taxpayer funds into religious schools that can hire educators, enroll students and teach classes based on church doctrine.

“We’re all looking at the same end in mind,” said Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, “which is ultimately breaking the monopoly of public schools on education so that parents have real, universal choice. That’s the end goal.”

A series of conservative arguments lie at the center of this campaign: Judeo-Christian beliefs are historically bound with education in the United States. Government has improperly imposed secular standards on public schools in an infringement on religious liberty. And public funding must support religious schools if the public is going to pay for education at all.

Some of those views got a boost from three Supreme Court cases that expanded faith-based institutions’ access to public funds — Carson v. Makin in 2022, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue in 2020, and Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer in 2017.

Former Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor, while leaving office after losing his primary to now-AG Drummond, cited those cases when he declared in 2022 that the state could not block churches from using taxpayer dollars to create public schools that teach religion like private schools.

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Catholic authorities used O’Connor’s nonbinding opinion to justify their attempt to open the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would be the country’s first public charter to function as a religious institution. Groups aligned with the conservative legal movement and its financial architect, Leonard Leo, have promoted the publicly funded Christian school in the hopes of creating a test case that would change the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state.

“The Supreme Court has been wrong. There is no separation of church and state in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. It doesn’t exist,” Walters told a convening of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., last fall. “So we will bring God back to schools and prayer back in schools in Oklahoma, and we will fight back against that radical myth.”

The idea has divided even conservatives. Drummond withdrew O’Connor’s opinion under the argument that it misused “the concept of religious liberty by employing it as a means to justify state-funded religion” and he is suing to stop the school from opening. An array of civil rights groups, faith leaders and secular organizations have also sued to block the school and excoriated the embrace of religious orthodoxy in public education.

“What’s happening with Ryan Walters and his cabal is happening all around the country, as part of this emboldened Christian nationalist movement,” said Rachel Laser, who leads Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “And one of their key frontiers for making America a Christian nation and retaining their power and privilege in America is a takeover of public schools.”

Walters had weathered a bumpy start in office. Stitt reappointed him to continue serving as education secretary in January 2023, which would have granted Walters sweeping authority in an unusual double-barreled state role if lawmakers approved. But Drummond, the new Republican AG, soon opined that Walters could not legally hold two state offices, and later said the superintendent’s unilateral attempt to require schools to notify parents if their child changed their gender identity and ban “pornographic” library content should be voided. Just months into the job, Walters’ new employees told journalists the education department had become “toxic” after he took office.

“The culture changed within a matter of weeks,” said one of Walters’ former colleagues, who requested anonymity to discuss the superintendent’s tenure. “The real fear that people felt across the agency was not only that they might be fired but that they would be caught up in something illegal and they would be responsible for it. I had never seen a culture like that.”

In response to written questions about the staffing turmoil, Dan Isett, the department’s director of communications, said: “Many of the staff departures have been necessary and long needed to end a union stronghold in Oklahoma’s education. Change is sometimes difficult and necessary.”

In April 2023, Stitt replaced Walters as education secretary with an Oklahoma State University professor. People close to the situation told me Walters was furious to be cut from a second role.

His replacement, Katherine Curry, then resigned just months after taking office citing the “complexity and political environment” surrounding the secretary job. Curry later told The Oklahoman that the state superintendent’s office would not turn over information on how the agency budgeted and spent money. Another department grant official, Pamela Smith-Gordon, abruptly left her office in the fall citing similar concerns. She also told the Tulsa Worldthat she never saw Walters in the office.

“I don’t know if he doesn’t know what the job is that he ran for, or if he’s scared to do the job that he ran for, or he doesn’t know how to do the job that he ran for. What I do know is that he isn’t doing it,” Gist, the former head of Tulsa schools, told me a few days before she resigned. “The superintendent’s actions have made it clear that he’s focusing on political talking points rather than the real work of serving the community.”

‘We’re being overshadowed by the antics of our state superintendent’

New controversies continue to blossom. Walters pushed out an Oklahoma City-area principal who moonlights as a drag queen. Walters reposted an altered version of a librarian’s satirical video that spurred school bomb threats when it was amplified by the Libs of TikTok account. Benedict’s death is now the subject of a federal Education Department civil rights investigation. Hostile onlookers are not an unusual presence at state board meetings.

And questions swirl about the superintendent’s potential legal entanglements and ability to work with policymakers. The FBI and state attorney general have investigated Walters’ stewardship of federal pandemic relief funds and activities related to campaign and nonprofit roles he held before winning office, according to four people with knowledge of the investigations who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. (Walters resigned his nonprofit job upon taking the superintendent position last year.) The Oklahoman first reported the existence of the FBI’s investigation.

Walters has not been formally accused of criminal wrongdoing. Drummond’s office declined to comment, saying it does not speak on the existence or nonexistence of any investigation. FBI policy prohibits confirming or denying the existence of an investigation, a bureau spokesperson said. Allegations of criminal conduct are reviewed by the FBI for their merit, the spokesperson added, but such reviews do not necessarily result in a full investigation.

Walters told me in August that he was not aware of whether he was a target of any state or federal investigation. “Ryan Walters has never been subpoenaed or questioned by federal law enforcement,” the superintendent’s spokesman said this month in a statement. “This has been an active lie promoted by the liberal media and jealous liberal activists. Superintendent Walters is transparent with taxpayer dollars and every program that he’s involved in.”

People with knowledge of the matter said federal agents have asked some of Walters’ former colleagues and supporters about the superintendent’s campaign fundraising and reporting practices. Former colleagues told me they witnessed the superintendent’s executive assistant at Every Kid Counts Oklahoma collecting campaign donations for Walters at fundraisers, raising questions about whether firewalls were in place to isolate Walters’ government work from the nonprofit and his political campaign. Authorities have also sought information on lax controls related to the millions of federal pandemic relief dollars that Walters helped oversee in his former nonprofit role.

Oklahoma State Auditor Cindy Byrd’s office is in the final stages of conducting a forensic audit of the state education department, a highly detailed investigation that often helps prosecutors investigate criminal allegations. The U.S. Education Department also conducted a routine review of the state’s implementation of federal programs earlier this year and is finalizing a report that will be shared with Walters’ office.

At the same time his national profile has increased, Walters has at times been sidelined on education policy at home. Oklahoma lawmakers have approved a massive tax credit program for private school tuition, teacher pay raises worth thousands of dollars, a $150 million school safety program, literacy programs and hundreds of millions of dollars in new education funding. “We did every bit of that without our state superintendent,” Republican state Rep. Rhonda Baker told me. “Because we knew that he could not be part of it or the whole thing would blow up.”

“In Oklahoma, the legislature is really trying to move the needle in education,” said Baker, a veteran educator and chair of key education committees in her chamber. “And frustratingly enough, we’re being overshadowed by the antics of our state superintendent.”

McBride, Baker and state House Speaker Charles McCall subpoenaed Walters for a series of records in late December, including his emails from his tenure at Every Kid Counts Oklahoma. Walters responded to most of their inquiries but said he couldn’t provide any emails. Lawmakers have managed to obtain a trove of his messages anyway, McBride told me. Ongoing controversy over Walters’ national media campaign has prompted notable criticism from Stitt and McCall. Walters’ office did not respond to questions about whether the superintendent believes he still has the governor’s support.

But even as he faces dissent from sectors of his party at home, his meteoric rise in the national spotlight hasn’t slowed down. Walters demurs when asked about his political ambitions, including a gubernatorial run. His spokesman added: “While he has many options for the future, those choices are for a later date.”

Even some of Walters’ detractors agree that he’s tapped into deep-seated anger over a changing country. “He has become a lightning rod for decades of frustration,” Robert Franklin, a former Democrat who switched parties and leads the state’s virtual charter school board, told me.

You can hear that from the voters at the Tulsa County Men’s Republican Club, or the Christian radio personalities who urge followers to take back their schools on long stretches of interstate that span between Oklahoma City, Tulsa, McAlester and beyond. A new generation is now in power.

“Folks are sick and tired of people that say one thing to get elected and go in and do the exact opposite once elected,” Walters told me last summer. “I looked every voter in the eye throughout the entire campaign and I told them what I was going to do.”

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Bigotry, Education Reform, Freedom, Oklahoma, Religion, Separation of church and state

John Thompson: Reading a Classic About the Tulsa Race Massacre

By dianeravitch

April 23, 2024 //

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 21^st 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 //

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

Oklahoma: EPIC Theft of Public Dollars by For-Profit Online Charter School

By dianeravitch

March 29, 2024 //

Jennifer Palmer of Oklahoma Watch lays out the details of Oklahoma’s biggest charter scandal. The owners of the for-profit online charter school Epic have been charged with embezzling millions of taxpayer dollars.

The size of the scandal alleged at the state’s largest online school befits the school’s name: epic.

Investigators say two men at the helm of Epic Charter Schools defrauded taxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars over a decade. Details of the scheme, which the state auditor called the largest abuse of taxpayer dollars in Oklahoma history, will be unveiled in court this week.

A hearing in the embezzlement case against David Chaney and Ben Harris begins Monday. Oklahoma County District Special Judge Jason Glidewell allotted five days for the preliminary hearing, which is like a mini-trial, with witnesses and evidence and cross-examination. The purpose is for the judge to determine whether there’s enough probable cause to proceed to trial.

Chaney and Harris are each charged with fifteen felonies, including embezzlement, money laundering, computer crimes and conspiracy to defraud the state. They have denied wrongdoing.

Epic’s former chief financial officer, Josh Brock, faces the same felony charges but waived his preliminary hearing. He is expected to be one of several witnesses this week and will likely take a plea deal…

Prosecutors’ review of Epic Youth Services’ bank accounts revealed the company collected more than $69.3 million in management fees between 2013 and 2021, court records show. Of that, the trio split $55 million: Harris received $25 million, Chaney received $23 million and Brock received more than $7 million.

Categories Corruption, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Oklahoma, Virtual Charter Schools

John Thompson: Oklahoma Explores the Zombie Policy of Merit Pay

By dianeravitch

March 28, 2024 //

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 21^st 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: The Failure of “Fixing” Schools by Closing Them

By dianeravitch

March 12, 2024 //

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 //

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

Oklahoma: This Is What Public Schools Do!

By dianeravitch

February 3, 2024 //

This story from Oklahoma went viral. It is a powerful counterpoint to the nonstop negativity that deformers spew to the media about public schools. It is also a rebuke to the nonsense that Oklahoma legislators spout about the state’s public schools.

It is a story of caring, concern and dedication to the students. It stands in sharp contrast to the charter schools built on the “no-excuses” model of iron discipline and conformity. What can charter schools learn from public schools like Bizby North Intermediate?

If only Oklahoma’s Governor, its State Superintendent, and its legislators cared as much about the state’s children as its dedicated educators!

BIXBY, Okla. (KFOR) – Out at a school in Bixby, Oklahoma is a principal whose hug was caught on camera and passed around online last week spreading what’s said to be some much-needed positivity.

“We do this all the time and tomorrow my team will do it all over again,” said Bixby North Intermediate Principal Libby VanDolah.

She was captured on camera taking care of one of her many students.

VanDolah said that while speaking with other members of her staff she noticed a student with their face in their hands sitting on the ground.

“At first I thought they were tying their shoes but then when I looked again they were still on the ground,” said VanDolah. “I don’t even know if I even finished what I was saying, I just walked off because I knew this student was needing some assistance.”

VanDolah got down on the ground and that’s when she noticed the student was crying.

“My team went into action. I got down and hugged that student, and my counselor went and got that student breakfast,” said VanDolah. “We sat there and hugged and it was a few minutes before we were ready to move. It was just a moment.”

That hug was captured on camera and posted online by Jessica Jernegan, Bixby Public Schools Director of Community Engagement. And that’s what the picture did, it engaged the Oklahoma community.

“That picture encapsulates what public school is about,” said VanDolah. “We meet the kids where they are and we give them what they need. All educators do it. It happened to me yesterday (Thursday) but it could have been my assistant principal or it could have been someone in another district.”

The student had walked into school without a backpack or a coat and was stressed VanDolah said.

The post by Jernegan was shared by Representatives, online influencers, and by many teachers. Jernegan posted:

“Not one question from the principal about being tardy or where’s your backpack or where are you supposed to be?!

A moment. A hug. And breakfast.

In case you’re still with me on this post and wondering if all the rhetoric you’re hearing about public schools is true…let this be a small but very real and tangible reminder that it is most definitely not.

We’re just over here meeting kids where they are and giving them what they need.”Jessica Jernegan, Bixby Public Schools

“I think the reason why it went so viral is that people are hungry for positive things, especially centered around education,” said VanDolah. “We do it every day because we care so deeply about our kids. Yes, I have the honor of being 475 different moms. I think the reason so many people connect with it is because they have an educator in their life that they’ve seen this happen with.”

The student had walked into school without a backpack or a coat and was stressed VanDolah said.

The post by Jernegan was shared by Representatives, online influencers, and by many teachers. Jernegan posted:

“Not one question from the principal about being tardy or where’s your backpack or where are you supposed to be?!

A moment. A hug. And breakfast.

In case you’re still with me on this post and wondering if all the rhetoric you’re hearing about public schools is true…let this be a small but very real and tangible reminder that it is most definitely not.

We’re just over here meeting kids where they are and giving them what they need.”Jessica Jernegan, Bixby Public Schools

To see the photograph, open the link.

Categories Childhood, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act, Joy, Love, Oklahoma, Principals

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

By dianeravitch

January 30, 2024 //

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: The Cruelty of Doubling Down on the Big Standardized Test

Ryan Walters Wants to Turn Our Schools into Religious Indoctrination Centers

‘We’re being overshadowed by the antics of our state superintendent’

John Thompson: Reading a Classic About the Tulsa Race Massacre

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

Oklahoma: EPIC Theft of Public Dollars by For-Profit Online Charter School

John Thompson: Oklahoma Explores the Zombie Policy of Merit Pay

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

John Thompson: How Should the Press Cover Extremism?

Oklahoma: This Is What Public Schools Do!

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

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