John Thompson, retired teacher and historian in Oklahoma, considers ideas about how to improve Oklahoma’s schools, but insists that one overlooked cause of lower academic progress, was the torrent of misguided mandates written in Washington, D.C., such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

Thompson writes:

Despite our disagreements on some policies and research methodologies, I have respect for Adam Tyner, the executive director of the Oklahoma Center for Education Policy  He earned a doctorate in Political Science, and was the National Research Director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.Tyner is the author of The Fall to 48th: Documenting Oklahoma’s Educational Decline, which draws upon NAEP scores, and cites Diane Ravitch as to their reliablity. While I agree that Oklahoma schools can come back, I’m troubled by the title of his NonDoc piece, “The ‘Southern Surge’ suggests Oklahoma’s education system can bounce back.” 

Being a retired inner-city teacher, I am pleased by Tyner’s rejection of cheap, quick, and simple solutions. But, as a historian, I would focus on different NAEP test scores, and the way that No Child Left Behind (NCLB); Race to the Top (RttT); and budget cuts undermined teaching and learning.

To his credit, Tyner linked to Matt Barnum’s analysis of both the potential benefits and harms of the “Southern Surge,” and the “Mississippi Miracle.” Barnum acknowledged the gains in 4^th grade test scores by states that drew upon the “Science of Reading.” But, he concluded:

Eighth graders’ results “have been less impressive for these Southern exemplars.” Alabama’s eighth grade reading scores have been falling and are among the lowest in the country. Louisiana’s eight grade reading scores remain at the 2002 level. And, Mississippi’s eighth grade reading scores are about the same as they were in 1998.

I believe that Tyner’s history of the last three decades should be read in conjunction of his recent commentary in the Oklahoman. 
He starts it with Phonics instruction being “a first step towards teaching literacy.” But, he adds, “Background knowledge is key to reading comprehension.”

Tyner then explains:

To become a strong reader in middle school and beyond, students need a firm foundation of core knowledge, and that comes not just from practicing reading, but from developing a broad vocabulary and an understanding of a large range of topics — from geography and history to literature and science.

He then critiques many Oklahoma schools for efforts to improve comprehension by mainly:

Having students practice so-called “comprehension skills and strategies,” such as finding the main idea in a passage and making inferences. These Chromebook-based exercises often resemble test prep. Although some of this practice is fine, hours spent on it crowd out history, geography, science and literature.

This is very consistent with a scholarly paper by the SRI, Report: Beyond the Surface: Leveraging High-Quality Instructional Materials for Robust Reading Comprehension Learning brief, funded by Tulsa’s Schusterman Family Foundation. As reported by the 74, Katrina Woodworth, the director at SRI’s Center for Education Research & Improvement, explained. “The point is to both teach reading and to build students’ knowledge base so that they have more scaffolding for future learning of both content and meaning.” But even the most promising Science of Reading programs they studied, may be “unintentionally encouraging teachers to focus on surface-level goals.”

One of the lead authors, Dan Reynolds, asked, “Are we teaching our K-4 kids that reading is just tasks? Are we teaching them that they just need to label stuff and fill out graphic organizers?”

Reynolds said the “Surface-level” instruction they discovered, “weakens instruction for students and can later manifest as a skills disadvantage.” 

And, getting back to Tyner, he wrote that an “important caveat to the undeniable successes of Mississippi and Louisiana in raising fourth-grade reading is that those states have seen little improvement in eighth-grade reading.”

While I very much agree with his position on the harm done by the failure to focus on background information, educators didn’t voluntarily undermine the teaching of history, the arts, and critical thinking. After all, the SRI study finds hope in the evidence that students and teachers prefer deep reading instruction.

But, I wish he had explained how the decline of holistic instruction was the predictable result of the NCLB’s and RttT’s test-driven mandates. During that time, for example, I served on a team assembled by our outstanding State Superintendent Sandy Garrett, in order to minimize the harm we knew was coming with NCLB.

Due to the demand that schools meet impossible testing goals, schools were forced to cut back on social studies, history, science, and the arts, as well as critical thinking. They inflicted the worst harm on schools serving the poorest children of color. Being a history teacher in extremely high-challenge high schools, I was horrified by the hundreds of stories I was told by students who said they were “robbed of an education.”

And those experiences explain why I’m worried by Tyner’s call for “deliberate efforts to improve instruction and accountability.” I would communicate with many thousands of teachers, and students, and I can’t remember anyone who lived through those “reforms” and didn’t see test-driven, accountability-driven instruction as a failure.

Moreover, while Tyner calls for solid funding of the infrastructure necessary to implement the Southern Strategy, he is less clear about the harms that retaining students can have. Given the lies perpetrated by rightwingers who claimed Oklahoma failed to improve reading because Joy Hofmeister quickly ended retentions, I wish he would be more explicit in fact-checking them.  

A history of 21^st century education in Oklahoma should also explicitly include the reasons why Oklahoma backed off from passing four End of Instruction tests. Rep. Joe Eddins explained in 2005, “Based on test data, the House of Representatives staff estimates 89,000 failed tests each year.”

So, Oklahomans focused on win-win policies, and NAEP 8^th grade test scores, stopped declining in 2005, and went up from 2009 to 2013.  (2013 was the year when national 8^th grade reading and math scores also peaked.) 

I taught in an alternative school, in 2012, when new End-of-Instruction tests were being piloted. I resigned after being required to give the vast majority of my students’ worksheets, and focus on tutoring a few students who had a chance of passing the test, and graduate. Fortunately, under the leadership of Superintendent Joy Hofmeister, that law was repealed in 2016.

A history of what went wrong in Oklahoma schools should also address the budget cuts that killed those successes.

As the Oklahoma Policy Institute reported in 2016:

Oklahoma’s per pupil funding of the state aid formula for public schools has fallen 26.9 percent after inflation between FY 2008 and FY 2017. These continue to be the deepest cuts in the nation, and Oklahoma’s lead is growing. On a percentage basis, we’ve cut nearly twice as much as the next worst state, Alabama.

Moreover, Mississippi’s cuts ( -9.2) were about a third of Oklahoma’s, and Florida’s and Louisiana’s cuts were a little less than 20% and about 10%. Tennessee increased its funding by 9.8%.

After Nearly a Decade, School Investments Still Way Down in Some StatesPublic investment in K-12 schools — crucial for communities to thrive and the U.S. economy to offer broad opport…

Although I would have written a different history on Oklahoma education’s decline, I do believe we can rebuild our education systems.

But, I would have liked to read more of Tyner’s thoughts about the damage teachers witnessed by accountability-driven reforms that were imposed on Oklahoma schools, and huge funding cuts. My main response to his history, however, is that this is the time to be more blunt in terms of what it would  really take to achieve equitable levels of reading for comprehension.  

Given the lack of evidence that the “Southern Surge” is improving reading comprehension, providing long-term benefits, and doing more good than harm, we should find a more holistic way to reverse the harm inflicted on our schools by top-down mandates of the last quarter of a century.