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[upbeat music] You're listening to the Oklahoma Memo podcast, the fastest way to get smart on Oklahoma news, politics, business, and sports. Welcome to the Oklahoma Memo podcast.

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My name is Ryan Welton, the founder and curator of your daily local news recap, Oklahoma Memo, and I am delighted to be joined today by John Thompson, and this is a unique circumstance.

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Uh, John is a subscriber who reached out to me via email because of the important topic about the Mississippi Miracle.

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It's about reading and education, and John is a lifelong educator, but first he was an award-winning historian.

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And John, as we get started talking, you and I were talking pre-record about the 1980s and how it was doom and gloom. We thought the world was coming to an end. I remember watching the movie The Day After.

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I, I was a news geek even back then. So how did you... What kind of history did you research, and how did you transition into education?

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Well, of course, my f- first, my academic book was the rise and fall of the largest socialist movement in America, the Oklahoma Socialist Movement, and I got started on that because I had a mentor from the League of Women Voters who was the co-founder of that movement.

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And so I've always, you know, my generation, you walk down the streets as a little kid, and you find, and you got mentors there all the time. Uh, in the '80s, it...

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W- my wife and I live in Central Park near Harding, near, uh, Paseo, near what's now the Commonwealth, uh, Community Garden, and it really looked like the world was coming to an end.

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What we had was because of Reagan's supply side economics, the, uh, good blue collar j- uh, jobs mostly disappeared overnight.

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Uh, people who had saved up money, especially Black people who saved up money to move over into the, uh, neighborhood, they couldn't pay off their mortgages.

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Um, because of the, uh, HUD scandal, we had hundreds of abandoned, um, uh, buildings, houses in the area. We had, uh, Penn Square Bank, and we had the savings and loan scandal, and we had, uh, the banking collapse.

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So we had hundreds of abandoned houses, and a head of the Hoover said the Crips in, uh, in California was visiting relatives and saw all those empty houses and said, "Well, [chuckles] we're coming here." And that...

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So they just took over the area. You w- you had a crack house, at least one on every block, and some a whole lot more. Now, some neighborhoods, what they would do is they would get deputized and strap u- strap on guns.

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What we would do is we would take the kids from the crack houses and teach them to garden. We'd take them sailing.

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I'd, I, um, uh, followed the advice of friends who had, uh- who had been, uh, Freedom Riders and sit-in people, and took kids to the, um, uh, Arbuckle Mountains.

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And bringing inner city kids into the mountains like that, uh, and the hiking and the swimming and the sailing and all that was just transformative.

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And so I sh- made the, uh, shift from being an academic historian to, um, a teacher.

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Mostly I taught at the old John Marshall, but I also taught at Grant, Star Spencer, and finished up my career at Centennial when we became the lowest performing mid-high in Oklahoma. And what did you teach?

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I taught history and all the social studies.

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There's no f- m- nothing more fun than teaching history in a h- high poverty, multicultural school if you're allowed to really do it, and back then, we were allowed to really do it. And it was...

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But we also taught civics, economics, um, multiculturalism, Black history, uh, uh, Oklahoma history, world history. So let's bridge that gap into our topic du jour, which is reading.

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There's been a lot of talk about the Mississippi Miracle, and I've talked on other podcasts. Well, it's a disparate budget situation.

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Mississippi's given five point two billion dollars, uh, for education for fifty percent fewer students. Mm. Whereas Oklahoma's flat at four billion. So you gotta have some funding.

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But what you brought to light to me was this Schusterman-funded research on the problems of skin-deep tutoring based on the science of reading, essentially meaning that it's not enough to just sit down with students and, and sort of teach them how to read, because if you do it without understanding,

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it's kind of all for naught. Yeah, and, and here's what I've learned since then, that the SRI who, um, uh, did the study funded by Schusterman, they for a long time

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believed that tutoring was very effective. They were shocked when they found these results, and here's, I think, a major part, and what I think they think is a major part. When you could do high dosage tutoring,

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that, that's promising, you know, if you can t- if you got the money to pay for high dosage tutoring. But then COVID comes along, take... And then the COVID money disappears.

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They had used the COVID money for the high dosage tutoring.Now they're looking for cheaper shortcuts.

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Some- even in Mississippi, they, uh, adopted a really awful online AI program which, um, you know, is, you know, devastating. So it means then, and it also means in terms of long-term change,

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how many kids' parents want them to be getting third grade, uh, reading instruction by AI? And now it's gonna continue on for a lot of them through 12th grade.

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Uh, and then what happened, the surprising study, um, they found that... And this is my, my wording. It's what-- it's the culture that matters.

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And once it begets to a point where you're pressured to raise scores, then even if you've got a good program, a lot of those places had good programs, so you're f- uh, uh, pressured to raise scores.

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So as a result, teachers who didn't want to would spend 75% of their time with their students doing skim deep, skim deep tutoring, and that's likely to undermine reading comprehension over the long run, a- and even in the short run, uh, and sometimes.

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You mentioned the phrase high-dosage tutoring. Just to make sure that our viewers and listeners understand what you're, what that is, what is high-dosage tutoring? Well, you know, there is a lot.

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They drew upon a lot of, uh, cognitive science, and they would train tutors well, but they would do-- they wouldn't just do it just briefly.

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This was something they s- invested a lot of time as well as resources in, and you gotta be buil- resourcing, um, investing human beings' time to build those relationships if you're going to really lay a, a learning...

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If you're gonna learn how to learn. I mean, there are so many people who will just offer their services as a tutor, um, and it's online. It w- so would you agree that, uh,

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AI, no good for tutoring, but e- even sort of an online thing, is that beneficial at all, or does it need to be in person? Uh, I would think in third grade, I can't imagine doing it, doing that. I think

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I don't wanna-- I don't have the expertise to say that we just can't use AI, uh, at any grade or A level. What I see here, and I, I can't prove this, but ha- from having read so much of what's going on, um,

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I think this is a path towards privatization because you're gonna end up having a lot of, uh, for-profit organizations do-- coming up with their AI programs, coming up with their tutoring programs.

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And so just like you have microdosing and microdiplomas in colleges they're pushing for, I think this could be a way of, um, of, uh, you know, in...

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And in fact, there's so many of these people who are out, o- out front saying the end of public education is upon us, and that by 2050 we'll ha- be, you know,

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90% of the people will be, uh, not having access to, to any public education. Right, and that, that's the problem, access. Not everybody's gonna be able to afford, uh, private education.

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Julia Kurt had a, a terrific video, uh, just showing how much public money was going to private education, and a lot of the conversations I've had with folks have sort of come to the same conclusion, that this has long been the plan for public education, to sort of wear it down to its nubs, to where eventually it surrenders.

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Well, and this is something Oklahoma needs to take into account as we're spending more money on, on, uh, vouchers. Once

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y- once you're fully in place, so you're recruiting people who have not been in private schools before, once they are there,

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the learning loss for those kids who had not been, uh, in, uh, uh, p- private schools before in Ohio was twice as much as the learning loss due to COVID.

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And in a lot of states, the learning loss is around the same as with the loss of, of COVID. So, you know, we're, we're taking all these privatization risk. Let's talk about, um, your prescription for reading.

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If you were all of a sudden, uh, named the czar of reading, how, how, how, how would you... That's a big, lofty title because, I mean, e- even the state chamber, it's gotten their attention.

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They're like, "Oh, we need, we need to get these kids on the path to reading." How, how would you approach it? Well, I, I, I usually approach everything in two ways.

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One, if it's cheap and simple and quick that they're saying, "This is the easy solution," I'm gonna be very, very suspicious.

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Uh, and th- they've bought into the, to the think tank's arguments that, "No, this isn't hard." You know, we've got Oklahoma legislators that say, "We've just chosen to go down a path where the kids can't read."

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The second thing is you listen. You listen to cognitive scientists. You listen to, uh, uh, social sciences. Um, in fact, I'm doing a research

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finish- uh, I finished up a research piece on Adam Tyner, who I respect, has done this history of Oklahoma education's failure.And it's, but it's all data-driven.

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It's not taking into account what the social science and the cognitive science say, and we can't just block them out of, uh, of, um, uh, our research. Gotta listen to parents. You gotta live it- listen to communities.

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Um, if I had a magic wand, I would h- hold back on the reme- mediation side until you had an infrastructure in place.

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Now, it's o- it's one thing to go ahead on the remediation side when you're building an infrastructure and you trust the people who are building it to put children first and not be ideology-driven.

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But given the lies that have been perpetuated in Oklahoma, as in other states,

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I would feel a lot more comfortable if we followed d- first do no harm and get these holistic supports in place before we go down the remediation path.

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So I, I failed to ask this at the beginning, but I'll, I'll make sure and ask it now. Y- you have an extensive academic background. Could you just tell us a little bit, uh, about that so that folks...

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You're, you're not just a guy who we exchanged emails. You have bonafides. Well, back when I was,

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uh, being trained as a, as a historian during the '70s, a time which was known as, uh, history with the people left out because we drew so much on data, I became a really good consumer of data.

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The thing I enjoyed the most though, though was that I was really good at schmoozing with national and international experts. So that brought me...

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And so I loved then coming to Oklahoma and, and being a, a lobbyist and, and a, you know, a researcher for the ACLU and, and things like that. Well, when I shifted over to public education, what I found was

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I was just blown away by how many brilliant education experts that we were drawing upon in the '90s, especially during Sandy Garrett's, um, uh, time, and they were just absolutely fantastic.

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And then I walked into a m- meeting at Belle Isle Li- Library not knowing that Hannah Atkins, the first Black, uh, state legislator, was ill, and they needed to replace her on the Maps for Kids, um, plan.

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And what we did was we brought in s- many of the nation's top experts and, and obviously Sandy Garrett was big on that. The League of Voters was big on that. And we drew upon

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that real expertise, and we were improving. And I hate to think that we'll not, that we'll end up having 1998 be as our peak, but we were seeing real, uh, improvement. And,

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and I can get, go deeper on this in a little while, but here was the mindset of the Oklahoma City Public Schools. I was teaching a class, and the head of curriculum walked in the door.

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She said, "I've been watching you teach. I think you might wanna try this.

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Why not start off with the 20th century to get the k- kids hooked on history, and then around Thanksgiving, go back to the beginning of whatever subject you're teaching, teach up, and then reteach the 20th century in the fourth quarter?"

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It was absolutely brilliant. You get those kids hooked that first day in class, and they stay hooked on history until they're lining up, uh, for their, uh, graduation exam. Right.

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It's, it's almost, uh, like, you know, I, I've lived a, a life of journalism and digital content, but you have to have a hook. Mm-hmm. Uh, so those, those principles are the same in the classroom. Mm-hmm.

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How do you get students hooked on reading? Well, I mean, [sighs] I'll...

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Now, I, we have to acknowledge, we, uh, if when kids come to school way behind on it, and so first of all, we have to do ha- uh, a m- we do a good job on, on, uh, early education.

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We need to fund it a whole lot better. I don't know what ended up happening on HB 17, uh, 1979 last night, but I'm hoping it, it passed. And I would s- would s- also point out specifically

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the people who I learned the most about from reading instruction were in Maps for Kids, and they were predominantly Republican.

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They took a holistic approach, and we were told from day one we have to be completely bipartisan. And so people like the Potts Foundation, uh, just did an awesome job.

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So I, when it comes to the bottom line, I'm gonna listen to the, um, the experts on that. But I wanna be a part of having,

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sharing the history of what's gone wrong at times, w- w- sharing the history of what worked, and appealing to the kids', uh, curiosity and interest and things like that.

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You start earlyThe other thing you have to do that is being completely abandoned. Now, Adam Ti- Tyner, I will say this in favor of him, he, uh, 'cause he, he says a lot of good things.

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We need to teach kids a lot of background knowledge before we- they're gonna learn to read to read to learn. And, um,

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uh, unfortunately, people don't remember that the reason why we stopped teaching background knowledge was No Child Left Behind, and then later on in school reform.

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So we need to get back to having it be a team effort and having history and art and science and, and even before that, Tyler, uh, providing a lot of background i- information that gets the kids interested in the reading.

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Well, it, it, it comes back to funding, I think, in this way, because funding would pay for more teachers, where you'd have smaller classes that could have more devoted time with them- Mm-hmm...

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and therefore more time to teach that background. Right. And, you know, teachers don't just leave Oklahoma because of, uh, low, low salaries. It's they want the ability to teach.

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And that's what the, um, Schusterman-funded, uh, study pointed out, is that the good side is both students and teachers want to teach in a holy sticky way. They just aren't free to do it.

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It's just a, a focus group of one, but I thought my teachers... I went to public school in Muskogee and Henrietta. I thought they were great. Uh, it was a, it was a different era. Mm-hmm. But I wanna...

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So all, all of these great ideas, all of this deep expertise, has anybody hit you up via email, text, anything, and asked you to come help? Uh, yeah.

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I don't know how much detail I should be going into this, but, uh, I'm, there's a couple of... Let's just say I'm very impressed with Lindell Fields and Daniel Hamlet.

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I, I'm very impressed with them, and I think if we were to listen to them, and I, I think... Yeah.

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I think anyone in this situation now, we have to s- slow the damage, minimize the damage of the people who are coming in thinking, you know, with ideology driven, and then

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lay the foundation for the marathon that's necessary. John, is there anything I failed to ask?

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I'm hoping that we can, like, have an ongoing every once in a while discussion about education, 'cause I, I've learned a lot today. Is there anything that you wanna add as part of this initial conversation?

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Well, let me just say in terms of, um, uh, just give two examples of what we were, I was allowed to do with, um, uh, with the curriculum director giving me that freedom.

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Which by the way, when they gave us the, um, uh, uh, Aligned and Pace Curriculum Guide, our principal said, "I know you're not gonna use this, but it's not all bad if you have a struggling teacher or a new teacher.

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But please don't throw it away in case some administrator comes in. Keep it on file." I mean, and so we were supposed to teach things like the Cold War, uh, and the New Deal in eight minutes according to that.

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And of course, they would have to do it even faster today. So what happens when you al- allow this autonomy? Uh, if I'm teaching world history, I'm starting off with the 20th century.

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It's going to be the standard is colonialism. I can give 'em worksheets, or I can have Denzel Washington as Steven Biko explaining

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apartheid as a part of, uh, colonialism and having the kids hooked day one. Or I can give the sales pitch of our Oklahoma historian who wrote this wonderful book, and he's, uh, finishes it up.

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Back then, it wasn't called the Tulsa Massacre, but, uh, he, uh, finished it up with this powerful, powerful, uh, statement about the burning down of the Mount Zion Church and rebuilding it and let that be the lesson to you.

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And so I gave them the sales pitch on why we should have his book rather than Panorama of Oklahoma. And, uh, uh, the bell rang. No one said a word. No one moved.

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The strongest weightlifter at the school, baritone in his church choir, stood up and says, "DT, please tell y- your friend, Dr. Goble, that we appreciate what he's doing."

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And he came up and shook my hand like I was a preacher, and the whole class lined up and after him shaking my hand, um, uh, as they walked out.

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And like I said, whether I started off with the kids in ninth grade or I started out senior year, we had a tradition when they would be lining up for, uh, graduation, we would have a, the last formal class discussion [laughs] while they were lining up.

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Uh, uh, you can't have, uh... That is w- type of culture is what we really need. Inspiration and education is fun. John Thompson, I thank you so much for your time. I learned a lot.

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And, uh, for those of you who are watching this on YouTube or listening on a podcast, leave a question. I've got John's email. I'll, I'll get him the question. We'll get you answers.

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And hopefully, John, we'll have the chance to talk again. Okay. Well, thank you very much