Tulsa Education: March 2018 Archives

A significant number of the 35% of Tulsa Public Schools who left the district in the last two years did not head to greener pastures out-of-state, but to other Oklahoma school districts with comparable pay, according to an investigation led by Tulsa World education reporter Andrea Eger. Teachers interviewed for the story cited poor leadership and lack of respect from administrators at district and school level as the main reason for seeking a new place of employment.

I encourage you to read the article at the World's website, but here's a summary to give you a sense:

Teachers mentioned overly prescriptive curricula that had them reading from a script or coordinating laptop-based instruction, reducing the teacher from a creative instructor to a mere "computer lab attendant" and making it impossible for teachers to learn and respond to the individual struggles of their students.

One veteran foreign language teacher quit to take a lower-paying gig as a freelance photographer: ""It was 100 percent the awful administration and the district showing us they didn't care."

Discipline, or the mandatory lack thereof, seems to have significantly damaged teacher morale and inspired departures and early retirements. Robert Dumas, a former Memorial Jr. High teacher criticized the all-positive, all-the-time news from district headquarters, saying, "Our suspensions are down because they stopped suspending kids for the same things." Mike McGuire, now retired from East Central High, suggested that the state aid formula, which is based on average daily attendance, might be a motivation for reducing the number of suspensions.

Mr. McGuire then dropped this bombshell, which (I hope) will get an investigation of its own (emphasis added):

McGuire said his tipping point was being formally reprimanded for how he responded to students concerned about two of their classmates being allowed to return to school after 10 days in jail on human trafficking complaints.

"I told my students, especially the girls, 'If you're concerned, you need to tell your parents so they can express their concern to their school board representative,' " McGuire said. "If my daughters were going to school in a place with pimps running around it, I would want to know."

Apparently the paramount value for Tulsa Public Schools administration is making the administration look good. It's not a problem to have pimps in school; it is a problem to let parents know so they can take action to protect their children.

(This reminds me of the time, in 2000, that I got scolded by Jeannie McDaniel, then head of the Mayor's Office for Neighborhoods for Susan Savage, for alerting Crosbie Heights neighborhood leaders to a plan to demolish half of it for an amusement park. McDaniel didn't seem to be bothered that influential people intended to destroy the neighborhood, but that neighborhood leaders were panicked because they'd been told about it.)

Hats off to the Tulsa World reporters who produced this investigation and to the editors who gave it the green light. At a time when it's common wisdom to blame every school problem on the amount of state aid (and Superintendent Deborah Gist tried that gambit in this story), it would have been easy to bury the story for the sake of maintaining that narrative or out of fear that the story would provide fodder for the "wrong" people.

Meanwhile Deborah Gist is focused like a laser on the important issue of schools wrongly named after honorable and heroic men of history like Christopher Columbus and Robert E. Lee.

Just remember, folks: The TPS preliminary expenditure budget for 2017-2018 was $561,241,887 for an average daily membership for the first nine weeks of the year of 37054.40. That's $15,146.43 per student.

MORE: One of the teachers interviewed for the story mentioned a "student behavior management system" called "No-Nonsense Nurturing," which, combined with very scripted curriculum, became "too much to bear." On Twitter, Abigail Prescott links to an essay by a teacher explaining the No-Nonsense Nurturing system, which evidently involves coaches in the back of the classroom giving commands to the teacher through an earpiece, which she is supposed to carry out in a monotone. The World story quotes Superintendent Gist as saying that "TPS is committed to the philosophy that suspending students isn't a real solution to underlying behavior issues and noted that it offered the new behavior management strategy called 'No Nonsense Nurturing' only in response to personal concerns expressed to her by teachers when she first arrived in summer 2015."