Holiday Wish List for State Superintendent Ryan Walters

The warmth and good will of the holiday season is upon us. As I reflect on my wishes for the children of Oklahoma, who have so many needs, I will focus on things that State Superintendent Ryan Walters could start working on to improve the lives of public-school children. Here is my wish list:

Leave TPS Alone Unless You Really Want to Help.

Please stop demoralizing Tulsa teachers, students and their families with your bullying and threats of a state takeover. Is it really helpful to keep piling on more unrealistic “goals”? Are these unattainable goals setting up TPS for failure? Why not try supporting children and teachers instead?

Here are a few positive suggestions that could use your support:

• Work on increasing pay for all teachers
• Find ways to recruit, support and retain teachers with real college of education credentials (why not try talking to teachers instead of vilifying them?)
• TPS could use reading specialists, more special ed teachers, mental health services, ESL teachers, wrap-around services such as health care at school sites
• Recognize that not every student in TPS is the same and not every student comes to school well-fed and well-clothed
• Work on ways to limit class sizes so teachers have more time to work with struggling students

Get Your Eyes Off Texas.

The Houston ISD takeover that you admire, Mr. Walters, is not popular, and most likely will not be successful.

Here is what the Washington Post wrote about the Houston ISD takeover. We can learn from this. School takeovers have not been successful in other places. They have been more about politics than actually improving student outcomes. It doesn’t sound like a plan that should be implemented here, unless the plan is to destroy public schools.:

The takeover is the latest move in a long list of actions by [Gov. Greg] Abbott’s administration to attack public school districts and expand privatized alternatives, including poorly regulated charter schools and now a proposed voucher program that would use public money for private and religious education.

The article goes on to describe the failure of district takeovers: Student results in takeover districts, with only a few exceptions, have remained the same or decreased. That was the conclusion of a comprehensive cross-state study published in 2021. The study’s authors, Beth Schueler of the University of Virginia and Joshua Bleiberg of Brown University found “no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits.”  This intervention does not help students, and it mutes community voices, undermines democracy in Black and Hispanic communities, and pushes charter schools and other privatized alternatives to democratically governed schools. …

In his 2017 book, “Takeover,” New York University professor Domingo Morel concluded that, based on his extensive research, state takeovers are driven more by the desire of state actors to take political control away from Black and Hispanic communities than about school improvement. Recently in the Conversation, Morel described the seizure of the Houston school district as motivated by a need by the Republican establishment to thwart the growing empowerment of Black and Latinos as their numbers increase in Texas.

Put Your Own House in Order.

Have you given the Legislature the information they’ve been requesting regarding the money at the Department of Education? That shouldn’t be difficult. Also, have those grants been written that help fund our public schools? It’s a simple request to do your job for the children of Oklahoma.

Get Off of Social Media.

Car videos can be entertaining if you’re Jerry Seinfeld, but if you’re the Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Education and you’re ranting about indoctrination, woke ideology or China infiltrating high schools, then it’s just embarrassing. It’s a very poor way for a public official to communicate. Here’s an idea – maybe you could be an example to kids! Put the iPhone down and have real, substantive conversations with people.

Quit Promoting Questionable Curricula.

You want Oklahoma students to be “college and career ready,” whatever that means. Why would you partner with PragerU to provide curriculum for Oklahoma teachers to use? Besides being blatant propaganda, it’s full of factual errors. That doesn’t prepare our students for success.

And you’re insisting that TPS teachers be trained in the “science of reading.” That has become a buzzword that has lost its meaning, inviting unvetted, quickly produced, prepackaged, curriculum to appear that may not be the best way to improve literacy. Most qualified teachers know to use a variety of techniques to teach reading, depending on what individual students need.

A report on the science of reading from the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado warns policymakers to develop “nuanced policy” and to be “wary of simplistic claims about causes and solutions.” The researchers also say that it is important to look at socioeconomic conditions of the students’ homes and communities, the expertise of teachers, teacher autonomy, and “teaching and learning conditions” in order to implement meaningful reading instruction.

They suggest shifting “new reading policies away from prescription and mandates (one-size-fits all approaches) and toward support for individual student needs and ongoing teacher-informed reform.”

Ryan Walters has given TPS a top-down mandate and has increasingly piled on more goals that he wants to see in a matter of a few weeks. The NEPC report says that focus on such mandates has failed. They suggest, instead, to provide teachers with “the flexibility and support necessary to adapt their teaching strategies to specific students’ needs.”

What DOES NOT WORK sounds very familiar: grade retention; high stakes reading testing in grade 3; mandates and bans that require or prohibit specific instructional practices, such as systematic phonics and the three-cueing approach; a one-size-fits-all approach to dyslexia and struggling readers.

The research on effective methods of teaching reading would require that Superintendent Walters sit down with teachers, reading specialists and policymakers to come up with a real solution to helping all students.

The NEPC study outlines what DOES WORK in improving reading outcomes for students:

On a  local level, school- and district-level policymakers should do the following:
• Develop teacher-informed reading programs based on the population of students served and the expertise of faculty serving those students, avoiding lockstep implementation of commercial reading programs and ensuring that instructional materials support—rather than dictate—teacher practice.
• Provide students struggling to read and other at-risk students with certified, experienced teachers and low student-teacher ratios to support individualized and differentiated instruction.

Could Superintendent Walters and TPS Superintendent Ebony Johnson use NEPC’s well-researched methods to work together to create an effective path to improve children’s reading scores? It would take time and commitment, but wouldn’t it be worth it to find methods that actually work rather than wasting time on programs that don’t work?

Get Out of the Gutter.

Rather than terrorizing librarians as you look for porn in public schools, why not support the hard work that librarians do every day? They help students with research, and they support learning. They also help students find books that encourage a love of reading, or books that mirror them. Sometimes that means helping a young person find a book with a Black, gay protagonist. Or helping a young child find a picture book with two moms like in their house.

Recognize that You Are Superintendent for All Students.

Oklahoma’s public school students are all colors, all nationalities, all faiths, or no faith. Some are neurodiverse, some have physical or emotional or cognitive differences, some are LBGTQ+. A final wish for the holiday season would be that you would recognize that you are responsible for creating a safe, supportive environment for every teacher, every family and every child to succeed.