July Review/August Preview

Best Month Ever!

Typically, when I blog about my blog, I don’t get a lot of page views. Still, I like to take the time to recap a busy month and preview the next one when I can. And this month I get to brag a little bit. Okeducationtruths is a small operation with a good local following (and a few readers from outside the state). Prior to this month, the best month for page views was April with just over 11,000. I’m on track for 17,000 in July, thanks in no small part to the efforts below. Keep in mind, if the education policy landscape in Oklahoma were better, this blog wouldn’t even exist.

Here are the top five posts from July:

1. A well-written letter – The most viewed post all-time on this blog was actually written by someone else. Broken Arrow Public Schools superintendent Dr. Jarod Mendenhall. His letter captures the questions that we all have as Oklahoma educators about the failures of the testing cycle and the SDE response to it.
2. Pulling Out of PARCC – Before we learned that we wanted to keep our toes in the pond, we learned that staying in the testing consortium in which we remain a governing state would be like “drinking a milkshake through a cocktail straw.” And that metaphors are strange little rhetorical devices.
3. Of Standards and Rules – How would you, if you were Janet Barresi, deal with the Republican backlash over the Common Core while continuing to appease your Chiefs for Change overlords? You would continuing implementing the standards but rename them something else – all without legislative approval.
4. We were on a break! – The SDE did have to clarify that while Oklahoma will not be testing with the consortium, we are remaining with PARCC. And since, as of this writing, Oklahoma is still listed on the PARCC website as a governing state, I guess that’s true. What’s not clear is why.
5. More Responses to Barresi’s Response to the Testing Debacle – Two groups representing a large number of districts and administrators took the state superintendent to task for blaming the breakdowns in testing on school districts. And rightly so.

Going back to number three, I’ll try to have a post written in a day or two discussing the recently adopted arts standards and the upcoming cycle for science adoption. I also have been working on a glossary of eduspeak to post (and add to continuously). Finally, I’ve been thinking of posting a page on the blog linking to all candidates for state superintendent with the stipulation that I won’t be making any endorsements. Hopefully I’ll have that completed in August too.