John Thompson: How Billionaire “Reformers” Messed Up the Public Schools of Tulsa
John Thompson, historian and recently retired teacher in Oklahoma, assays the damage that corporate reformers and their patrons have inflicted on the public schools of Tulsa. The district is overflowing with Broadies and has Gates money. What could possibly go wrong?
The Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) offers an excellent case study in data-driven, market-driven school reform. Before No Child Left Behind, we in the Oklahoma City Public School System (OKCPS) studied Tulsa’s successes, and it quickly became clear that children entering TPS had advantages that their OKCPS counterparts didn’t have. They had lower poverty rates and, due to enlightened philanthropic leadership, they had higher reading skills. Moreover, philanthropists continued to invest in holistic social services, as well as early education.
By 2010, however, when the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) accepted a $1.5 million Gates grant, the inherent flaws of the Gates effort were obvious. Back then, I would visit and learn about great work being done on early education and by Johns Hopkins’ experts advising the TPS. I also asked how it would be possible to reconcile investments in those evidence-based efforts and their opposite – the Gates shortcuts.
When I showed a scholar a scattergram on the Tulsa website documenting the extreme gap between the CONTINUE READING: John Thompson: How Billionaire “Reformers” Messed Up the Public Schools of Tulsa | Diane Ravitch's blog
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