State superintendent candidates talk teacher shortage, state funding and new ideas for Oklahoma

April Grace, Jena Nelson, John Cox, Ryan Walters, and William Crozier are running to succeed State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister, who is term-limited and in the fall announced that she was changing her party registration to launch a bid for governor.

Sponsored by the Oklahoma PTA and moderated by the League of Women Voters of Oklahoma Trustee Mary Jane Lindaman, Tuesday’s forum touched on the state’s chronic teacher shortages and the level of per-pupil spending, the candidates’ philosophies on local control, opinions about rural school consolidation, and their own experience as educators.

Walters is Gov. Kevin Stitt’s appointed secretary of education and works as chief executive officer at Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, an education reform outfit, while teaching one class for McAlester Public Schools. He was a finalist in the 2016 Oklahoma State Teacher of the Year contest.

Walters said “our education outcomes are 49th in the nation and that’s not good enough.”

What current problems need to change to improve those outcomes?

“Parents are in the driver’s seat of their child’s education; we don’t have any kind of a liberal indoctrination in our schools and we don’t have any liberal agenda in our system,” Walters said.

Walters called the Oklahoma State Department of Education a “bureaucratic mess” that is not properly using its funding to support districts and teachers and said, “We haven’t had a state leader focused on individual student outcomes and parent choice.”

Nelson, the only Democrat in the race thus far, teaches English composition and academic enhancement classes at Deer Creek Middle School in Edmond and was the 2020 Oklahoma Teacher of the Year.

Nelson said the pandemic permanently altered the future of how education is delivered and “collaborative” conversations at the local and state levels and a reduction in politicized rhetoric are needed to determine the way forward.

“We are not going back to February 2020,” said Nelson, who said she is running to elevate the voices of today’s public school educators, parents and students. “Right now we are at a critical point in education in our state, and I want to lift up those voices.”

Cox, the Peggs Public Schools superintendent, and Grace, the Shawnee Public Schools superintendent, are registered Republicans, though Cox previously ran as a Democrat for the same office and lost to Hofmeister, then a Republican, in 2014 and 2018.

Cox said he is running because as a school superintendent, “I live the mandates that are passed down by the (state) Legislature and the federal government right here at my desk every day.”

He wants to see the state Department of Education become focused on service to local schools rather than regulation and compliance, to do away with state tests that take away instructional time at the end of each year, and lead an overhaul of Oklahoma’s school report card system.

Before Oklahoma started seeing chronic teacher shortages, it was common for Cox to have 75-100 resumes on his desk from teachers interested in working in his small school at any given time, but today, he has just two.

Grace said the state needs to incentivize experienced teachers to remain in the profession at five-year intervals beginning after a teacher’s fifth year.

Nelson said she is currently working with other former state teachers of the year from across the country on ideas to address the teacher shortage.

One idea she is pursuing is having a teacher cadet program in every high school to recruit students into college teacher prep programs and to offer new support and incentives to students in Oklahoma’s teachers college programs.

As for Oklahoma’s current level of per pupil state spending, which the moderator said currently ranks 46th in the U.S., Cox, Grace and Nelson all said they think more strategic investments are needed to improve academic achievement.

“We cannot just throw a bunch of money (one time) and then cut for 10 years and then throw a bunch of money (again) and then cut for 10 years … I don’t know if we have the adequate funding to do what we need to be (in the) top 10,” Grace said.

All four candidates in attendance were aligned on one issue – they all expressed opposition to forced consolidation of schools in rural Oklahoma.

Grace joked that there are “two ‘C’ words no one ever wants to discuss – cancer and consolidation.”

She and Walters both said state Department of Education resources need to be redirected to create more direct support for educators in smaller districts who lack local resources. Walters said the department could also help small districts identify budget efficiencies.

Cox, president of the Oklahoma Rural Elementary Schools organization, said “I’ve been fighting consolidation for 20-something years.”

Not appearing at Tuesday’s forum was Crozier, a Union City resident, and perennial candidate, having run in 1972 in the 4th District congressional race, and multiple times for state superintendent.

He is best known for a 2006 race against then-incumbent Sandy Garrett, in which Crozier said school safety could be improved by the creation of bulletproof textbooks that children could use to defend themselves in the event of a school shooting.

Jerry Griffin of the Tulsa school board recently announced he would be running for state superintendent, but he did not end up registering as a candidate during last week’s three-day filing period.