In this runoff, Franklin's Secretariat at the Belmont and Taylor might as well be lapped
The great Jami Jackson-Cole, runner of Oklahoma Edvocates Facebook group, a haven for teachers and advocates in the midst of attacks on public education from the governor, the legislature, the former state superintendent and the impossibly embarrassing gubernatorial candidate Mike Mazzei, posted something on Monday.
From a candidates forum, it’s a video of James Taylor and Robert Franklin, passing a microphone back and forth, answering questions.
Taylor and Franklin happen to be the remaining two Republicans vying to become Oklahoma’s next superintendent of public instruction.
The runoff election is Aug. 25.
It’s a 12-minute clip, but just a couple minutes near the end will do.
The question came from a University of Oklahoma student.
Past superintendents have pushed their political agenda, rather than focus on us getting an education. What would you do to focus on the needs of K-12 students, rather than pushing your agenda on them?
“Oh, my goodness, that is a powerful, powerful question,” Franklin said.
In real time, what he said next lasted about a minute and a half.
Here it is:
We’ve been talking about the Mississippi Miracle and the injection of phonics.
What’s happening in Mississippi over the last decade?They’ve been very targeted and they have raised their scores. But … if you look at scholarly research, what they’re saying is things start to flatten out in middle school and their ACT scores don’t look much different than ours, and that is the mathematical, statistical analysis that’s in play and we’re seeing it happen in many other southern states as well.
So, the first footprint that you just asked is, push hard in the early grades.
Third grade is far too late. I’ve heard my colleague here speak about it. Third grade is far too late to be talking about retaining children. That needs to be much, much earlier.
But we have to invest in the middle schools. If you have a middle school pre-algebra teacher and you have 35 children in your classroom, and that teacher is alternatively certified, your chances of scoring strongly on your ACT math score is really, really subdued.
OK, we have to invest in enough resources to get enough people back into this pipeline that are trained and want to be in the education space and will stick around long enough, and [be retained] long enough so that four, five and six years into it, they don’t leave us and they’ll stick around because the scholarly research will tell you it takes about five years to seven years to hit your stride as a teacher, to really become an effective, effective teacher.
Whoa.
A thunderbolt.
I think I learned more about the actual public education process in 90 seconds than I previously knew in a lifetime.
It was like listening to Bill Clinton in the old days.
He knew it and he knew it cold. Not only did he know it cold but he could explain it in a way that everybody knew he knew it cold and understood it themselves, too.
What do we hear when the vast majority of folks talk about education?
It’s all about third-grade literacy.
No, they have to be reading before third grade.
Class size is the problem.
Teachers are leaving is the problem.
Teachers are being replaced by non-teachers is the problem.
It’s about resources. You have to spend.
It’s not about resources. You don’t have to spend.
Franklin addressed it all. Further, he addressed it in a way that connects it all together, convincingly, leaving everybody in the room smarter than they were when they entered the room.
If the voice of the NBA, Mike Breen, were calling it, he’d give it a double “BANG.” (And the great Marv Albert would give it a double “YES.”)
As for the questioner, “past superintendents” likely referred to just one person, Ryan Walters, who cared not a whit about the education process, only his political future. A future his overreach, as it turned out, killed.
Now we have Lindel Fields, appointed by Kevin Stitt, who’s said all the right things and who, best we can tell, remains busy getting the department re-staffed and working the way it was designed to, of which we can all be thankful.
But even Fields can’t be in Franklin’s league, can’t know this stuff in his bones the way Franklin knows it. His background’s in career technology, not K-12.
We can do so much better.
Taylor took a crack at the question, too.
You’re right, the teachers are not trained. I’ve spoken about this many times, that our first-year teachers are kind of like thrown to the wolves. They know their subject matter, but they do not have the necessary classroom discipline.
That is my strength, and I will incorporate that into my administration, and we’ve got technology that we can do those types of things, and that would be my strength, and we’re going to do that.
It wasn’t all he said.
Taylor said third grade was too late for literacy, it has to come in the first grade, before going on about his young daughter’s reading ability, but not her penmanship, losing the thread of his answer, which already needed work.
The only convincing thing from Taylor appeared to be his contention that, because he can keep an overcrowded classroom in order enough for learning to take place — “That’s my strength” — he will therefore pass it on to every other teacher in the state, magically perhaps, which is patently absurd.
Taylor offers no confidence.
“We’re going to do that,” he said.
Gee, thanks.
Were Franklin elected, we now know his ability to speak to the legislature, uninterested in his own political clout, only interested in educating young Oklahomans, maybe like they used to be educated when Brad Henry, a Democrat, was governor.
The thing about that?
When you’re not in it for yourself, when you’re selfless, committed and awash in expertise, you tend to end up with all the clout anyway.
So there it was.
Two minutes between the two of them, offering everything you could possibly need to know.
One guy speaking rapidly, guessing, attempting to be convincing.
“I’ve spoken about this many times,” he said.
The other guy not even trying to convince, just explaining where we are and what needs to happen.
Taylor sounds like he’ll try hard.
Franklin knows.
They’re both running.
But it’s no contest.
I just wish they would stop running as a republican. It’s 2026 and whatever is left in the trump gop are either willfully ignorant, political chameleons or hateful maga’ts like their leader. It just doesn’t sit well but it’s a lot better than our recent experiment in that role.