Frosty Troy passionate about public education

Frosty Troy, editor of the Oklahoma Observer, winner of more than five-dozen journalism awards, and passionate supporter of public education, keynoted our recent celebration of public education and spoke on our “Schools of Thought” television program when he came to town in mid-April.

Several of his points in both venues bear repeating.

He said: “What really made this a great nation and a great democracy was public education. Early schools were at first for the kids of the leaders and elite, and then they said, ‘Why don’t we teach all kids to read and write and tote a sum?’”

“Thus was born the finest educational system on the face of the globe today. I don’t care what the critics say – when you see who comes to school in this country, and the percent who are successful, you see we are a roaring success.”

Pulling no punches, he took on the No Child Left Behind federal legislation: “NCLB is the sorriest statute I have ever seen. We’re dropping vocational ed, music, art. For a lot of kids that’s what it’s all about. Imagine testing special ed kids at grade level. The special ed cohort fails and then it fails the next year and that’s it. They say the whole school has failed. Shame on them. To me, it’s just a way to push vouchers,” he said.

Yet even that part falls short, he pointed out. He said that in Chicago there were 240,000 kids who qualified for vouchers through NCLB sanctions last year, and only seats for 5,000 students. Same situation in Washington, DC. “So the private and parochial schools cherry-picked the best,” he said.

“And who do you leave behind?” he asked. “The lame, the halt, the blind, the learning-disabled, the poor kids, and a few liberal kids.

“Instead we should rehabilitate those schools and put our best teachers there. I love the standards,” he said. “That’s the best part of NCLB. But if you set the bar too high you set perfectly good schools up to fail. And that’s wrong.”

Most importantly, he took issue with the one-size-fits-all foundation of No Child Left Behind, that all students must achieve certain arbitrary cutoff points at the same time

“We must always remember,” he said, “God gives kids different gifts. Let’s not try to make them all the same. Let’s celebrate the gifts they have.”