ROPE Report Short - Oklahoma's Elected Officials Rarely Challenged, Not Responsive To Citizens

Ken Malloy of NorthStar Project (https://oknorthstar.org/) talked to us about how NorthStar is influencing Tulsa Public Education. 

From recruiting and helping school board candidates to run on a campaign of reforming TPS to writing White Papers (https://oknorthstar.org/whitepapers/the-responsible-educational-progress-rep-index-for-oklahoma-public-schools/) detailing TPS educational accountability, this new Think Tank formed last year is off to a running start. Ken and his wife Maria Seidler (of Legal Overwatch For Parents Rights - https://legaloverwatch.org/), both retired attorneys, moved to Oklahoma to be with their family. 

Ken talks about how different the culture in New York - where litigation against governmental entities is more commonplace - is compared to here in Oklahoma where few of our governmental officials are ever called on the carpet and therefore, are not at all responsive to the citizens they represent and who pay their salaries. 

Oklahomans need to wake up and figure out that our government does not have our best interests at heart. In fact, Ken likens Oklahoma's citizens to mushrooms that are kept in the dark and fed 'crap', by their governmental officials.

PARENTS - Be Informed About Any Sex Ed Curricula Your Child May Be Getting At School! State Laws Included For Reference.

Frequently, we receive questions from parents as to whether or not their children may be opted out of Sex Ed courses - the answer is YES.

Students As Trained Seals

I am to be on vacation right now, but I had to post about the very exciting goings on in Tulsa Public Schools. 

Nikki Jones, and her colleague  Karen Hendron - both elementary teachers in Tulsa Public Schools - recently attempted to have their class answer a survey for the TPS' Value Added teacher grading model as required by the district. It turned out to be a nightmare for them, but most of all for their students. Because the exercise was such a phenomenal strain, they wrote a letter to TPS Superintendent Keith Ballard explaining why they would never do such a thing again and why.

The letter was EXTREMELY well-written, clear and concise in their examples, complaints and desires. There was nothing unprofessional in the demeanor of the letter at all, and was, frankly, an excellent example of how to communicate issues of consequence with one's boss.

In great detail the letter describes some of the reactions of their kids to taking the survey. This was one instance reported by Andrea Eger in the Tulsa World and it would have to be one of the saddest:

Hendren said the personal questions included a detailed checklist of all of the people residing in the student’s home and how many computers are in the home.

She said one of the first-graders was devastated after they went through the family member checklist and he revealed in front of his peers that his parents had left him and moved out of state and that he was being raised by one grandparent because the other had died.

“He got really upset and put his head down. He was really sad because there were other students he had to answer that in front of,” Hendren said. “One of the most difficult things for everyone was that our kids have never filled in a bubble sheet before. In our training, we were told children had to fill in the bubble sheets.”

What do you suppose happened after the letter was sent out to the Superintendent, social media and through - not only the Tulsa World, but the Washington Post as well!?

Dr. Ballard sent someone to talk with the 'girls'. No, he didn't have time to meet with them personally, but he did send someone to speak with them about the fact that they were too young to understand the research that says how important this kind of evaluation is, so they had better research it for themselves and do what is asked of them. 

Following that 'action', Dr. Ballard sent out an email that again, condescended to the two women - this time publicly.  According to Eger:

He vowed that TPS will continue to employ “developmentally appropriate assessments in Kindergarten through 3rd grade” and seemed to question the experience level of Jones and Hendren.

“While I understand the frustration of these beginning teachers, it takes a person experienced at using data to know how to use it to guide instruction. We need this data to monitor growth and improve results for all of our students,” Ballard said.

This is offensive - not only to Hendron and Jones - but to taxpayers supporting Tulsa Public Schools and the parents who use the district to educate their children.

Did he not even read the letter? Did he not even choose to begin to understand the time out of class it took these women to administer a survey (2.5 hours!) that is not needed for these teachers to continue to keep their jobs - no matter what Ballard says - if the principal in the building is doing his/her job and observing them and overseeing their work.

Just recently, the Daily Oklahoman published an article about the fact that kids in Oklahoma City Public Schools aren't learning to read because teachers are not taking the time to teach them. So what are teachers doing instead? Hmmm....testing? Giving surveys? Filling out their infinite teacher evaluations? Performing any of the myriad 'reform' measures brought down upon them by the legislature as they continue to genuflect and kiss the ring of the federal government for a pittance?

Nikki has only been teaching in TPS three years, but has been singled out on at least three occasions for her excellence in teaching. In fact, her Facebook friends (including me) watched in awe as she spent most of her summer creating items such as shelves and curtains, to put in her classroom - out of her own pocket - on her own time. I don't see that there could be ANY argument here over whether or not Mrs. Jones is a good teacher. A crummy teacher is not going to spend her summertime hours engaged in the kind of blood, sweat and tears activities Mrs. Jones did to be ready to excite her little students come start of school - I guarantee it.

To think this kind of teacher is treated this way by a Superintendent is simply unbelievable. So, Dr. Ballard, you would much rather have young children crying and feeling like garbage about themselves so you can rate a teacher on a scale to determine whether or not they should have a job in your system? After they have a teaching degree? After they have been certified to teach? I wonder how much of your Bill Gates money goes for this? 

TPS has been one of the districts most vehement also about teaching Common Core - law against it or not. Apparently, Dr. Ballard has very little regard for not only his teachers, but the law as well. How much does he make again? Almost three times (nearly 300 THOUSAND dollars in salary and incentives) more than my electrical engineer husband with a Masters in EE who works Monday through Friday (and more) throughout the year. Really? But then again, the TPS school board GRANTS him this kind of salary - for a D. Why?

Don't get me wrong...I'm not a 1%'er. Professional athletes, actresses/actors, get paid millions of dollars for their vocations because the market will bear that kind of salary via their box office or ticket sales. I'm not sure how the 'market' bears the kind of salary Dr. Ballard brings down for a school that takes 500 million to run only to produce a 'D' on their grade card. 

Gosh, for that, you'd think Dr. Ballard would WANT to work to keep such great teachers - clearly caring teachers interested more in what their students learn than teaching them how to become trained seals, darkening in bubbles on answer sheet after answer sheet after answer sheet.

I'm frankly glad this has happened. I think it's done a number of very positive things:

• Hopefully parents are seeing that schools are not the places for their children they thought.
• Maybe parents will question whether administrators really care about their teachers or their students like they may have thought and really take to asking their school board members the hard questions about the salaries they assign their Superintendents.
• These two women have emboldened and empowered other teachers to stand up and do what's right for their students, themselves and their professions.

I saw the following quote on Lynn's Facebook page the other day. It is very, very, true. I am hopeful that legislators, teachers, parents and taxpayers have had a camel's nose peak under the tent and can extrapolate from there. WAKE UP PARENTS AND TEACHERS! This system is in your hands and its failing from micromanagement!

"But, even at their best, bureaucracies tend to force their definitions of ‘reality’ on people, in and out of the system; and this is pernicious in large districts where the philistine values of central administrators are allowed to defeat the educational commitments of teachers and principals. At their worst, educational bureaucracies become endlessly expanding financial sinkholes that eat up resources and create only mischief and red tape."— David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, “The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools

Education Accountability Must Originate At The Local Level

 

A number of recent Oklahoman editorials have disparaged those NOT backing  ACE tests and the A-F grading system.  Apparently, those of us begging to differ with these complicated, federally-derived, accountability systems want dumbed-down standards that will graduate scores of unemployable public school students all across Oklahoma. 

Not to dodge credit, but that trend likely began in 1965 when the first 31 page, 605 section Elementary and Secondary Education Act (now No Child Left Behind – NCLB) unleashed a tidal wave of federal regulations upon local schools and established the ‘pay for play’ scheme that keeps states towing the line (according to the feds, "Here schools, do what we tell you to do, and if you do, we'll give you back some of the money we steal from your state's taxpayers to make you do what we want you to do.")  

Today’s NCLB is 9,601 sections and an untold number of actual printed pages.   

This in stark contrast to the philosophy of America’s Founders who believed that free public grammar school should be supplied by every township containing 50 families or more to teach the fundamentals of reading, writing, ciphering, history, geography and Bible study, with control and oversight directed by local school boards – a system which by 1776 had produced a higher literacy rate than we have today.

Could unchecked growth of federal control over public education be why NAEP reading scores for 17-year-olds have increased only one point since 1971 and NAEP math scores for 17-year-olds have increased only two points – over 41 years?  Why have SAT scores in the verbal category dropped 25 points since 1972 and math scores increased by only one?

According to the American Enterprise Institute, who released a paper entitled, Federal Compliance Works Against Education Policy Goals, “…fiscal and administrative requirements often lead to expensive and time-consuming compliance processes that are not related to improving student achievement or school success.”  Lindsay Burke, writing for the Heritage Foundation in The Dead Hand of Education Reform also reports that, “…while the feds provided just 7% of education funding, they accounted for 41% of the paperwork burden imposed on the states…”

Santa Fe South High School in Oklahoma City personified this thesis recently when they submitted their NCLB waiver (A-F) paperwork to the SDE only to find out that, while their test scores were fine, they were placed on the failing school list because their paperwork wasn’t filled out properly. 

The same day the disapproval of the A-F rules passed the Administrative Rules and Government Oversight Committee, Governor Fallin issued a press release indicating her support of the rules and the SDE issued a press release touting their receipt of nearly 7 million dollars in School Improvement Grants to be used for “turning around” schools determined to be ‘failing’ under the NCLB-prescribed A-F grading system.  

My son, in first grade at our local public elementary, doesn’t know his basic math facts or parts of speech, but has had week long units on Global Warming and Rainforest Ecology between his 2 days a week of Art (his is an Arts Integration school).  Recently, his teacher told me she just “doesn’t have time to teach [math facts] to mastery” because she has to teach to the test – the results of which will soon determine whether she keeps her job.

Not only are regulations and/or mandates confusing and generally counterproductive, they are expensive.  In a paper just released by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the authors show how regulations drive up costs and reduce competition.  In public education, the case can be made that mandates and regulations force money to be spent OUTSIDE the classroom on administrative and compliance processes that do not affect student learning, making it impossible for actual school choice to occur by reducing competition.  Why take your child to another public school when that school will be subjected to all the same federal mandates and regulations as all other public schools?  The authors also discuss the adverse incentives rife at the federal level to continue this trend ad infinitum. 

In the Competitive Enterprise Institute's yearly publication, "Ten Thousand Commandments 2012", the authors put an actual number to the cost of overall federal regulation.  They report, "Regulatory compliance costs dwarf corporate income taxes of $198 billion, and exceed individual income taxes and even pre-tax corporate profits."  We should absolutely take umbrage with this notion - especially when it applies to those institutions supposedly teaching our children the basic skills needed to succeed in life.

Vilifying those of us who believe education is a local issue best dealt with by parents, district school boards and education officials rather than nameless faceless bureaucrats at the federal – or even state level – will not change the fact that a layered, top-down bureaucracy will never solve governance problems like a locality.  Government closest to the people (parents) is always best because it is nearest the needs of the people being served (students/parents) and paying for the services (parents/taxpayers).  

Janet Barresi Channels Scarlett O'Hara

Capitol Beat OK just released a great article, "State Education department spokesman Barresi anticipates low costs for implementing "Common Core".

Since ROPE's interim study for the House in October, ROPE, and others, have asked over and over again about the costs of implementing Common Core in Oklahoma. Thank goodness we now know what they are! They are "anticipated" to be low! As a taxpayer, I feel a great sigh of relief, since big government programs tend to cause tax increases for poor little taxpayers like me.

According to Mirriam-Webster, the definition for "anticipate" (verbatim) is; to speak or write in knowledge or expectation of later matter such as "The cost turned out to be higher than anticipated."

Is Janet Barresi channeling Scarlett O'Hara through her Communications Director? I can't help but see a parallel between his comments on the topic here and Scarlett's famous line, "I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow." Is the OSDE 'anticipating' in order to avoid 'thinking'?

Though I could counter Gardenhire in Capitol Beat OK's article point by point, I will simply ask the reader to acknowledge the fact that there are absolutely no solid figures even alluded to by the Department of Education in answer to the question posed by McGuigan. None. According to Mr. Gardenhire, everything's cool - they've got it covered and we shouldn't worry our pretty little heads about the cost of the Common Core to the state.

Awe inspiring. Did the OSDE let all their number crunchers go with their first round of firings? Even the Federal Government has the GAO. Why are no concrete numbers available? Other states have them.

After reading “TPS: New teacher-evaluation system cost estimates misrepresented”, in the Tulsa World this morning, Gardenhire’s pat answers to McGuigan are off-putting.

The article addresses concerns by the Tulsa Public Schools that Dr. Barresi and the OSDE misrepresented the amount of money it would take to implement Tulsa's teacher evaluation system. In fact, Jana Burk of TPS has this to say,

"We are willing to give them everything we have free of charge, and Marzano (the company the Superintendent favors) has all kinds of things that would need to be developed, which would cost something. That's the way they make money is that they give away their evaluation framework but then they sell the professional development services, video libraries, on-demand technical assistance, software and hand-held devices for principals to use."

Well, that doesn't sound good. Did Dr. Barresi inflate the cost of the TPS system in order to make the system she preferred to use seem less expensive? Who knows, but the article didn’t particularly inspire confidence in Dr. Barresi's ability to ride the Common Core horse through the gate of "anticipated low" costs (or effectively evaluate programming).

Adding to our concern is an incident that occurred after Dr. Barresi publicly called into question our research at the Common Core Interim study. Frustrated by several of Dr. Barresi's remarks following the study, Representative Kern asked the Superintendent to specifically inform her as to which of our facts were incorrect.

Several weeks later, the department provided a paper critiquing our slide presentation, not the 21 page research paper with 9 pages of citations, given to herself and members at the study.

Consequently, not only had the OSDE questioned issues answered in our paper, but they provided absolutely zero references as documentation of their 'critiques', outside those to the Common Core website or Common Core-associated organizations such as Achieve.

This lack of academic rigor in the OSDE (does this fall under the category of supreme irony?) could end up costing tax payers millions of dollars. As with Marzano, the Superintendent favors Common Core. It certainly makes one wonder if she might then underplay Common Core's costs...

Although I'd rather she didn't, Dr. Barresi and company can continue to parrot the contents of the Common Core website until the budgetary cows come home, but by then, Oklahoma's taxpayers will be gone with the wind.