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Oklahoma Educators Wish They Had More Time, Money To Implement New Academic Standards

Oklahoma's new academic standards
Emily Wendler
/
Oklahoma Public Media Exchange

School starts Monday for Oklahoma City Public Schools, and many more districts across the state will begin classes in the coming weeks. With the new year comes new academic standards, but the teacher training on these new standards may be compromised by tight school budgets.

“With the current budget situation, I’m not going to lie, our professional development budget was one of the first things that they cut,” said Shannon Thompson, the Dean of Academics for Moore Public Schools.

Thompson said teaching is a complex task that requires emotional and professional support. And with the new standards hitting schools this year she would have loved to pay her teachers to come in and train over the summer. But they don’t have the money for that.

“And so teachers are going to have to come in on their own time,” Thompson said. “They’re going to be dedicating even more of their time, and they already dedicate hours and hours of overtime.”

Standards are expectations for what students should know at the end of every school year. The new ones are meant to raise the bar and strengthen kids’ understanding of math and English Language Arts, ultimately helping them perform better on tests. For educators it means finding new ways to teach, recreating lesson plans, and trying out new materials.

But they haven’t had much time to prepare. The legislature approved these new standards in March, and just four months later, teachers are using them in the classroom. Thompson said in a perfect world they would have had two years to implement the standards.

“We could have even piloted some things and brought them back to the table, but that’s just not the way it’s going to be this year,” Thompson said.

Thompson said her teachers should be fully prepared after a year of squeaking out trainings here and there.

Melissa Baughman, the principal of the small, rural Butner Public Schools in in eastern Oklahoma, said her teachers have to be very creative and resourceful because they don’t have many of the luxuries big schools have. There are no curriculum coordinators, or academic deans, which means the task of implementing new standards falls squarely on her teachers. She points to one of her high school staff —who teaches 7th through 12th grade English—as an example of someone who has a lot of work ahead of them.

“Now it wouldn’t be a big deal if she worked at a big school and taught 7th and 8th grade English all day. How hard would that be? Nah! No big deal,” Baughman said. “But she has 7th through 12th grade! She’s compiling huge notebooks worth of curriculum all year, like making her own textbook.”

Since resources are scarce at Butner, some of Baughman’s teachers will be reaching out to nearby districts for help. She says it’s going to be a tough year full of trial and error, but she thinks it’ll be worth it. Her district recently went through a big overhaul where every teacher redesigned their lesson plans—and Butner improved from an F to a C on the State School Report Card. Now, they’re going to do it all over again.

She jokes that a $10,000 grant from the state Department of Education would have been nice. But then she gets serious and says the department has actually been very helpful.

“Thank you, state Department of Education for putting all this stuff out for us. I mean we’re in the dark, but we’re not in the dark,” Baughman said.

The department created training videos, comparisons between old and new standards, and just finished a six-city tour around the state in an effort to train teachers. They knew budgets were tight, so instead of asking everyone to come to a central location—they went to them.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister said she’s optimistic about the implementation.  

“People are excited,” Hofmeister said. “And I think they do feel the support that we want to give. And support that their school leaders want to give.”

However, she doesn’t deny that more time, money, and teachers would be helpful.

“We know what to do, we just need the time and resources to be able to get the job done,” Hofmeister said.

She said they’ll know how well implementation is going after students test next spring.

In graduate school at the University of Montana, Emily Wendler focused on Environmental Science and Natural Resource reporting with an emphasis on agriculture. About halfway through her Master’s program a professor introduced her to radio and she fell in love. She has since reported for KBGA, the University of Montana’s college radio station and Montana’s PBS Newsbrief. She was a finalist in a national in-depth radio reporting competition for an investigatory piece she produced on campus rape. She also produced in-depth reports on wind energy and local food for Montana Public Radio. She is very excited to be working in Oklahoma City, and you can hear her work on all things from education to agriculture right here on KOSU.
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