Guest: Why we must push back against Ryan Walters' agenda

As state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters ramps up his attacks on the Tulsa Public Schools, and implicit threats against other urban and suburban districts, there are some lessons of history that must be considered. I worry that Walters will mandate a combination of the most destructive policies of the last 20 years, threatening the survival of school systems that have suffered through both reward-and-punish school reform mandates and COVID.

After the Nov. 28 state Board of Education meeting, Walters was reported as saying that all options would remain on the table should Tulsa Public Schools not hit all of the benchmarks listed in the order. "I’ve said I’m willing to do everything to get that district back on track and that failure is not an option,” Walters said. "That is still 100% the mentality."

The board had just approved “new minimum improvements for TPS to achieve before July” which included:

A minimum of 50% of students scoring at least in the “basic” range on the 2024 state test in English/language arts for public school students or increase the number of students who score basic or above by at least 5%.

This impossible timetable should be a reminder of one of No Child Left Behind’s greatest lessons ― the imposition of impossible goals, especially when they are incredibly rushed, is a recipe for failure. As the New York Times explained, No Child Left Behind mandated “that all students must reach 'proficient' on state tests by 2014, a goal never reached by any nation or state. Any school that cannot reach that utopian goal will eventually be declared ‘failing,’ with dire consequences, including firing the staff and closing the school.” And that failure was blamed on teachers. Moreover, The Atlantic reported how that hurried schedule actually increased the number of schools that failed to meet No Child Left Behind goals from 29% in 2006 to 48% in 2011.

Walters also pushes for merit-based pay raises. Peter Greene, with 39 years of teaching experience, is an education writer who explains why “judging teacher merit based on test scores is only slightly more reliable than having a horned toad toss dice under a full moon.” It sends the message, “‘You will be judged on how well you teach to the test.’" Even then, “Merit pay based on test scores does not incentivize better teaching.”

Tulsans should be especially aware of the damage done by imposing an output-driven, test-driven teacher training and evaluation system. In the 1990s when we in the MAPS for Kids planning process visited Tulsa for guidance, Tulsa Public Schools was clearly a better system than Oklahoma City Public Schools. But, in 2010, Tulsa received a $1.5 million Gates Foundation teacher performance pay grant, implementing “value-added” evaluations, using test scores, and unreliable and invalid algorithms.

The Gates dollars almost certainly drove down the quality of instruction, as it did elsewhere across the country. (I must admit to helping Oklahoma City Public Schools apply for the grant; we were so lucky to not receive it.) Tulsa then found itself in a situation where 30% of teachers, including 388 emergency certified teachers, had less than two years of experience in Tulsa Public Schools. Worse, according to a massive Stanford study of student growth from 2009 to 2015, Tulsa students lost more ground from third to eighth grade than those in all but six of the nation’s school systems. Tulsa Public Schools' students gained only 3.8 years of learning over those five years; that was .6 of a year worse than Oklahoma City Public Schools.

Also, Walters demands that Tulsa remove at least 12 of the district’s 18 school sites from the state’s comprehensive support and improvement list. And he’s explicitly pushing for school closures. As the Voice reports, “Such a move would not be unprecedented. Oklahoma City Public Schools closed 15 schools and reconfigured 17 others in 2019.” So, I urge a study of the lessons of that “transformative” approach.

Research from the National Education Policy Center indicates that closing low-performing schools is a failing reform strategy.

"School closure as a strategy for remedying student achievement in low-performing schools is at best a high-risk/low-gain strategy that fails to hold promise with respect to either increasing student achievement or promoting the noncognitive well-being of students. The strategy invites political conflict and incurs hidden costs for both districts and local communities, especially low-income communities and communities of color," according to the research.

Oklahoma City Public Schools correctly recognized that the district faced a demographic challenge that would require some school closures in 2019. But, its Pathways to Greatness quickly implemented dramatic changes, including an unanticipated number of closures and reconfigurations at a time when the district was tackling other challenges, including mental health and trauma-informed instruction, chronic absenteeism, implementing STEM, dealing with the violence which was in the news, responding to angry parents, and implementing its “Vision of Equity.”

My worry was that such a hurried, daunting project would drive many students out of the district, meaning that it would cost more than it saved, and the resulting confusion could undermine teaching and learning.

Since Pathways to Greatness began seven months before the COVID epidemic hit, it is impossible to say how much of the following results were due to the program or COVID, but we know that the district’s peak enrollment for that school year, not counting charters that were not affected by Pathways to Greatness, occurred on Sept. 24, 2019, with 36,006 students enrolled. In March, when COVID began in OKC, enrollment was down to 35,143, and remained flat after COVID hit.

According to news reports, Oklahoma City only enrolled 31,026 in the fall of 2020 and was third in the nation in enrollment loss. It rebounded only to 32,086 in the fall of 2021, while the neighboring Mid-Del and Edmond districts were in the top 15 for growth after COVID. This further supports the hypothesis that Oklahoma City Public Schools’ disturbing loss of students was due to the shutting down and reorganizing of schools, as well as COVID.

The reasons for the school district’s decline likely include the decrease in student populations since 2014 when corporate reforms started with No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top were fully implemented, and demographics. Moreover, the damage done across the nation by setting impossible goals, mandating rushed timelines, merit pay, and reward and punish policies must be remembered.

And all of these failed mandates were followed by the harm inflicted on families and schools by COVID. So, blaming districts for complying with 20 years of destructive, top-down demands should be avoided. Also, we must remember how vulnerable urban schools are today, and persuade patrons, educators, legislators and voters to push back against the Walters agenda.

John Thompson is a former Oklahoma City Public Schools teacher.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Why we must push back against Ryan Walters' agenda