John Thompson is an education writer currently working on a book about his experience teaching for 18 years in the inner city of OKC. He has a doctorate from Rutgers University and is the author of  Closing the Frontier:  Radical Responses in Oklahoma Politics.

The last generation has seen the rise of education reform. This movement brought a profound sense of urgency to improving our schools, arguing that it is essential for the United States’ survival in the global marketplace. Consequently, reformers argue that data-driven accountablity, as well as an unflinching focus on classroom instruction, are more than a tough-love program for schools. They are the key to prosperity in the 21st century. Read the rest of this entry »

If Oklahoma is to have any chance of improving our students’ educational performance, we need to support excellence in our teachers and administrators. In recent years, Oklahoma has made such a commitment by investing in research-based professional development programs for teachers and school leaders. Unfortunately, three such successful programs – Literacy First, Great Expectations, and A+ Schools – have fallen victim to the  budget axe and are set to lose all state funding in the upcoming budget year.

The decision to eliminate funding for these programs must be viewed within the state Department of Education’s budget context. This year the Legislature cut appropriations to the Department of Education by $108 million, or 4.5 percent, compared to FY ’11. Within the total Common Education budget, the Legislature allocates a set amount for “the support of public school activities”, which encompasses the costs of the flexible benefit allowance for teachers and support staff, the teachers retirement credit, and all the educational programs that are funded outside the state aid formula. The FY ’12 allocation of $401.2 million is $18.7 million less than that of FY ’11 and $57.4 million, or 12.5 percent, less than FY ’10.  For the second straight year, the Legislature chose not to provide line-item allocations within the Activities Budget, leaving it in the hands of Superintendent Janet Barresi and the Board of Education to manage the shortfall. Read the rest of this entry »

Students at Kendall Whittier Elementary School

The University of Tulsa recently announced that it is changing the name of its education department to the School of Urban Education. The change reflects an increased focus on the issues confronted in low-income, urban districts. OK Policy spoke with Dr. Thomas Benediktson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at TU and interim director of the School of Urban Education, about reasons for the change and what it means for Oklahoma.

Here is the transcript of our conversation, slightly edited for length:

First can you speak a little about what is urban education and how it differs from traditional curriculum?

In an urban setting, you’re dealing with a primarily poor population of students who often don’t have a strong family structure at home. In Tulsa we have a very high rate of female incarceration, so many of the students don’t have mothers at home. From week to week, teachers may have different students in their classes because the students move from uncle to foster parent to biological parent to somewhere else. There’s just not a stable environment for the students to learn. Read the rest of this entry »

Public schools have long been clearinghouses for fitness and nutrition initiatives in the United States.  Since the 1960s, the President’s Challenge program has inspired kids to meet physical fitness benchmarks.  Schoolchildren began to learn about the basic building blocks of a nutritious diet with the introduction of the food pyramid in the 1980s.  First Lady Michelle Obama tours the nation promoting the ‘Let’s Move!’ initiative to fight childhood obesity.  State and local governments continue to incentivize a variety of public health programs aimed at school-aged children through grants for innovative projects, i.e. planting community gardens.  I interviewed Anna Eller, a fourth grade teacher at Tulsa’s Lee Elementary School, to learn about simple techniques teachers can employ at the classroom level to encourage kids to lead an active lifestyle and embrace healthy eating habits.

What made you interested in integrating fitness and nutrition education into your curriculum?

I just finished a Masters degree at OSU in Health and Human Performance, with an emphasis on Applied Exercise Science, so I’ve been exposed to the research on the childhood obesity epidemic.  Also, my school, Lee Elementary, received grants as a Healthy Lifestyles School and our principal encouraged us to come up with ways to introduce the kids to health education.  I had already observed the impact of unhealthy habits in my classroom – many of my kids were sluggish and unmotivated throughout the day. Read the rest of this entry »

Kathy McKean is the director of the Oklahoma Technical Assistance Center, which provides evaluation and professional development to Oklahoma schools.

When people think of alternative education, they may imagine “punishment schools” or the Sweathogs on Welcome Back, Kotter.  In many states, they’d be right.  But in most of Oklahoma, alternative programs are true alternatives – schools of opportunity for some of our highest-risk students.  A national study of alternative education conducted in 2010 concluded, “Only two states – Oklahoma and Minnesota – have set the policy conditions necessary to encourage the development and sustainability of innovative alternative education models.”

In the late 1980s, a handful of pilot projects were funded and the most cost-effective proved to be an academy model that grew out of the alternative school research of the 1970s. Pilot projects were initiated in 1989. By 1993, because the program had established a strong record of success, the Oklahoma Legislature expanded the initiative statewide.  Every high school in the state was required to operate an academy or to join an academy cooperative. Alternative education now receives $17 million in annual funding and serves more than 10,000 students every year. Read the rest of this entry »

In the spring of 2003, Saul Munoz* was a Tulsa high school senior thinking seriously about his future.  Saul’s parents had moved the family to Oklahoma years earlier, leaving Mexico at a time of increasing violence and instability, and he was not a legal U.S. resident.  A member of the National Honor Society, ranked in the top ten in his class, and enrolling in extra math and science classes to graduate with a Certificate of Distinction, Saul worried constantly about what would happen after graduation.  He couldn’t enroll in college and even if he were allowed to enroll he knew his family would struggle with the tuition payments.  His teachers, unaware of his immigration status, peppered him with questions about his plans and couldn’t understand why a student so smart and so clearly driven was not more proactive about applying for admission and scholarships. In February, a few months before graduation, Saul heard about a bill making its way through the state legislature. Read the rest of this entry »

High on this year’s agenda for Governor Fallin and education reform groups is to put more money into Oklahoma classrooms by reducing administrative costs. Two bills filed for the upcoming session seek to accomplish this by mandate — HB 1493 by Rep. Brumbaugh and HB 1746 by Rep. Nelson would respectively require 70 percent and 65 percent of education funds to go towards direct instruction by 2014.

Critics often point to the large number of Oklahoma school districts. Oklahoma has nearly half as many school districts as Texas with only about 15 percent of the population. District consolidation is a perennial controversy in Oklahoma, especially for rural areas that depend on their local school as a community center.  While the drawbacks are clear, consolidation could still be worthwhile if it freed up resources for the classroom.

But would it?  While sending more money to classrooms is a laudable goal, it’s unlikely that this can be accomplished solely by taking from administrative costs. To understand why, we can compare how education spending is divided up in Oklahoma, the region, and nationally: Read the rest of this entry »

John Thompson is an Oklahoma City teacher with 18 years of urban high school experience and an education blogger at thisweekineducation.com. He contributes regularly to our blog on education issues.

The Oklahoma City Public Schools faced breathtaking educational changes in 2010.  The OKCPS adopted a year-round calender, as it lengthened the school day for several middle schools.  It was required by federal regulations to restructure three schools, while state law forced it to revamp teacher and administrator evaluations.  The district experimented with performance pay, peer review and mentoring of new teachers, incentives for middle school students, and contracting with Teach for America.  It finally committed to the expansion of all-day prekindergarten.

Implementing this slew of policy initiatives would be more than enough of a challenge for 2011.  The previous year’s best ideas - especially peer review, expanding the school day, and implementing early education - have been shown to be effective in increasing student performance, but only with high-quality implementation.  The district’s turnaround efforts, and incorporating test score growth into teacher and principal evaluations, could be beneficial or they could be disastrous.  The prudent policy would be to place a moratorium on new reforms, and concentrate on making these experiments work. Read the rest of this entry »

John Thompson is an Oklahoma City teacher with 18 years of urban high school experience and an education blogger at thisweekineducation.com. He contributes regularly to our blog on education issues.

The Oklahoma City Public Schools has launched a campaign to close the “achievement gap.” To their credit, the school system acknowledges that our gap between Black and White student performance has grown since the federal No Child Left Behind law increased investments for schools serving poor children of color. The problem is that the OKCPS, like most school systems, has focused on instructional reforms, despite the social science and cognitive science explaining why those efforts are doomed without first addressing deeper issues. As was recently explained by Jonathan Zimmerman in the New York Review of Books, if we believe in the social science that was a foundation of the Brown v. Topeka desegregation case, we must admit that NCLB-driven policies are “doomed.” Read the rest of this entry »

In the spirit of full and vigorous debate on state policy issues, OK Policy is pleased to post this guest blog by Michelle Cantrell challenging our position on State Question 744.  Michelle is the mother of three boys in the public school system, and a frequent volunteer at school.  She also volunteers for various other organizations, including the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission.

As a strong supporter of State Question 744, I would like to respond to the Oklahoma Policy Institute’s arguments against, and argue for, the proposal.

• State Question 744 will improve the overall economic health of the state, resulting in more revenue for all budget areas.

Increasingly, when looking to relocate, companies consider quality of life issues, including the public education system. When Oklahoma is competing with surrounding states to attract businesses, ranking dead last in school expenditures is a huge strike against us.  According to the Economic Policy Institute, there is a direct correlation between spending on primary and secondary schools and the business climate, and increased spending can increase property values.  Investing in education “is the best way to achieve faster growth, more jobs, greater productivity, and more widely shared prosperity.”

Failing to provide appropriate spending for education can cost our state more in other areas.  An OECD report summarizing studies of non-economic benefits of education states that education results in better overall health and greater life expectancy.  Further, parents with more education have children with higher cognitive development and higher future earnings.  People with more education are more likely to save money and make better consumer choices, and are less likely to rely on public assistance even when they are entitled to that assistance.  They also are less likely to engage in criminal activity.   Increased spending can lead to reduced student drop out rates, which ultimately increases lifetime wages.  The amount of lost income from a student who drops out is staggering—the loss of lifetime earnings from students who dropped out in just one year in Oklahoma was almost 4 billion dollars. Thus, inadequately funding schools could ultimately result in higher costs for healthcare, public benefits, law-enforcement, and prisons.  Short-changing schools is penny-wise and pound-foolish. Read the rest of this entry »

John Thompson is an Oklahoma City teacher with 18 years of urban high school experience and an education blogger at thisweekineducation.com. He contributes regularly to our blog on education issues.

In 2000, when serving on the Steering Committee for MAPS for KIDS, I grinned as arch-conservative Leland Gourley demanded a “warranty” that Oklahoma City Public School students would be reading at grade level by 3^rd grade. Little did I know that cognitive and social science research would soon show that Gourley had identified the key to closing the achievement gap.

I recalled Gourley’s prescience recently when the liberal Schott Foundation for Public Education announced that New Jersey has the nation’s highest graduation rate for Black males. In contrast to the national rate of 47 percent, or Oklahoma with a rate of 52 percent, in New Jersey 69 percent of  Black males graduate from high school. The Schott Foundation also reported 4^th grade NAEP Reading test results showing 66 percent of Oklahoma Black males score Below Basic, as do 58 percent of Black Males nationally. In New Jersey, 45 percent of Black males score Below Basic, 40 percent score Basic, and 15 percent score Proficient or Advanced.  Better still, in contrast with the normative trend where Black NAEP scores drop by the 8th grade, there was no fall-off in New Jersey.  This is crucial because social scientists have long used New Jersey as evidence that the best way to help poor children is to invest whatever is necessary so that elementary children read for comprehension. Read the rest of this entry »

John Thompson is an Oklahoma City teacher with 18 years of urban high school experience and an education blogger at thisweekineducation.com. He contributes regularly to our blog on education issues.

A large body of social science has demonstrated the long-term effectiveness of high-quality early education and teaching children to read for comprehension by 3^rd grade. New research and cognitive science is now explaining why investments in the early years are far more cost effective than trying to turnaround struggling schools.

In the classic Perry Preschool Experiment, 123 low-income, three year old, African-American children were randomly assigned to either a treatment group, and given a high-quality pre-school education, or to a control group. While kids exposed to preschool got an initial bump in general intelligence, those gains dissipated by second grade. That result has been used by both the political left and right to challenge the effectiveness of early education. However, after tracking the Perry Preschool subjects for nearly 40 years,  the research found that adults assigned to the preschool program were 20 percentage points more likely to have graduated from high school and 19 percentage points less likely to have been arrested more than five times. They earned much better grades, were more likely to remain married and were less dependent on welfare programs. Other scientific studies have shown that improvements in test scores due to early interventions often dissipate in subsequent grades. But when adult outcomes are considered, a dollar invested in high-quality early education can result in $8.70 savings to society. Read the rest of this entry »