John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, wonders if the days of authentic teaching and learning will ever return. After a quarter-century of NCLB mandates, are there still teachers who remember what it was like in the pre-NCLB days. John does.

He writes:

Our public schools are facing unbelievable threats. We need to unite and fight for culturally meaningful, holistic, teaching and learning. To do so, I believe educators must remember the divisions that took off after the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), which mandated test-driven, competition-driven instruction. So, I believe we need cross-generational discussions about both – the weaknesses and strengths of urban districts before the NCLB.

Corporate school reformers used top-down, accountability mandates to rapidly transform schools serving our poorest children of color, but in my experience, those were the students who were most damaged by their output-driven reforms that forced teachers to be “on the same page” when teaching the same lessons.

However, thirty-plus years ago when I started teaching in the Oklahoma City Public Schools, teachers’ autonomy was respected. Teachers in our 80% Black John Marshall High School were urged to build on students’ strengths, not just remediation. Many teachers failed to use that freedom, but we were encouraged to frontload the semester with lessons the students would love in order to turn them onto “learning how to learn.”

On the first day of school in the mid-1990s, I held up a copy of the old Oklahoma history textbook, Panorama of Oklahoma.. The book wasn’t as bad as the curriculum and the video that State Superintendent Ryan Walters is now mandating. But it pushed “inspiring” passages about our state. According to the curriculum guide, the book could be used to explore themes such as “The Spirit of Oklahoma” and “Oklahoma as the Heartland.” One suggested lesson was watching the video Oklahoma by the Department of Tourism.

When the laughter subsided, I showed my students the newly approved book we would use, The Story of Oklahoma, by the late Danney Goble and James Scales.  My job was to help the students “read the authors’ minds” and understand the most important information and concepts that they sought to communicate. I explained Goble’s sales pitch to the OKCPS where he admitted that his book was written on a higher level than other texts, but he demonstrated how students would be able to follow a lesson if it were told as a compelling story.

Goble chose the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (as it was called back then) as one of the pivotal moments in the book. This massacre happened during the post-World War I panic known as “the Red Scare,” when immigrants and people of color were often seen as threats to America’s way of life, and when up to 300 died as a white mob burned the section of town known as “Black Wall Street.”  The text included a photograph of the burning of Mount Zion Baptist.

The lesson concluded with Goble’s closing words on Mount Zion:

All that was left was a shattered hull, an ugly hole – and an $84,000 mortgage that would have to be repaid … In a remarkable display of courage, tenacity, and will, Mount Zion’s congregation proceeded to rebuild the church.  Not only did they rebuild the church structure but they also paid off the original mortgage. …”

Goble concluded:

“Let that serve as our point. Those anonymous black Oklahomans endured and triumphed over momentous times.  Like others – nameless roustabouts, oil millionaires, tired housewives, …, even Tulsa’s white rioters – their lives were the stuff of which history was made.”

The end-of-class bell rang. Nobody moved or made a sound. Will, a baritone in his church choir, stood solemnly and said, “Please tell your friend, Dr. Goble, that we appreciate what he is doing.” The rest of the class remained seated, watching Will clasp my hand as if I were a preacher after a Sunday sermon and, then, the entire class lined up and shook my hand as each filed out of our room.

Similarly, our curriculum director encouraged me to start classes with the 20th century to get the kids hooked on history, and then double back to the first years covered in the classes. In World History, that meant we started with a scene from Cry Freedom with Denzel Washington, playing the role of the South African hero Stephen Biko, explaining imperialism.

As required, I would put each day’s learning standards on the blackboard, in addition to the day’s “History in the News.”  That meant that students would come in early to see what  contemporary topic would be discussed, and make suggestions for other topics, as well as report on conversations they had had at lunch about yesterday’s lessons. This was doubly meaningful when seniors visited when younger students were coming to class and got sucked into these higher level conversations.

One day, the older students previewed scenes in Marc Levin’s award-winning movie, Slam. It portrayed a Black rapper who used poetry to defuse conflict in the inner city. Before the start of the first-hour class, a crowd gathered to watch a gripping scene where the rapper used free verse to extract himself from a jailhouse situation.  As older students crowded around the television, the freshmen had to squeeze in closer to see.

Mike, a tall, impressive senior, was a perfect role model. His first-hour teacher knew he would quickly catch up on whatever he might miss in class, and freed him to guest-teach a lesson on Slam.  He gave a motivational lecture on the power of satire and metaphors.  He closed, as usual, by citing a line from Dalton Trumbo’s Spartacus, “I’d rather be here, a free man among brothers, facing a long march and a hard fight, than to be the richest citizen of Rome.”

We should remember the lessons learned by listening to students, and together building a culture where they share insights about topics ranging from Keynesian economics to Ralph Ellison’s childhood in Oklahoma City’s “Deep Deuce,” to Clara Luper leading the 1969 Oklahoma City Sanitation Strike march. They saw those lessons as a sign of respect. For example, a militant Black Nationalist and I got caught up in an after-school discussion of a New York Review of Books article on the history of Black families. When we realized that more than two hours had passed, he said, “You are the coolest white man I’ve ever known. You respect my brain.”

Again, I want us to move beyond the last two decades of teach-to-the-test, which almost all of my students saw as a sign of disrespect, treating them like a test score. We all need to participate in cross-generational conversations on how we can do both  – defeat the attempts by Ryan Walters to impose rightwing ideologies on our students, and build on their strengths and moral compass in order to prepare our kids for the 21st century.