We shouldn’t take dangerous shortcuts to educate Oklahoma’s most vulnerable students

At a time when my classmates were learning the building blocks of reading, my first grade teacher was informing my mother that I’d be illiterate.

Let’s just say that learning my teacher had washed her hands of me solely because I wasn’t hooked on phonics went over like a lead balloon with my mother, a former classroom teacher whose education degree featured a speciality in reading.

Every day after school that year, my mother worked with me at home, teaching me how to read. Thanks to her tutelage, by the time I reached second grade I was reading at grade level. And by third grade, I was reading well above it.

That lived experience of having a first-grade teacher who didn’t have the slightest idea how to teach a core foundational subject to a struggling student is one of the reasons I’m positively petrified by Oklahoma lawmakers’ absurd plan to put people without teaching experience — or even any college education — at the helm of our pre-K through third grade classrooms.

Supporters say hiring these so-called “adjuncts,” who must only have “distinguished qualifications in their field,” will help address our state’s ongoing teacher shortage. Opponents suspect hiring untrained teachers could cause long-term negative consequences for our youngest students.

Oklahoma lawmakers were the first in the nation to try this failed experiment with our older grades, and it’s worked so well that we still have some of the worst academic outcomes in the nation as trained teachers continue to leave the profession in droves.

So, it is mind-boggling that we’d now want to expand this concept to our youngest students who desperately need qualified teachers who know how to manage classrooms and teach foundational skills.

Because one thing I’ve learned from virtual school days is that it is not easy to teach my children, who are in their foundational grades, despite me theoretically having “distinguished qualifications” in reading and writing by way of winning journalism awards and leading a newsroom.

It terrifies me that our crippling teacher shortage has led us to a point where we think it’s prudent to use people with no formal education training to teach our youngest children the building blocks that they’ll need to be successful throughout life.

I could see allowing districts to temporarily hire people who are enrolled in college and maybe a few hours away from the completion of their education degree, but we’d have to be crazy — or desperate — to entrust someone untrained to teach reading just because they can read well.

In response to criticism, some Republicans now propose requiring adjuncts to complete training on how to teach children to read — by the end of their second year in the classroom.

What about the poor kids who are placed in that adjunct’s classroom that first year? Are they disposable? Why is it suddenly OK to allow some children to fall through the cracks and be victims of our adult leaders’ inability to keep qualified educators in their classroom?

I could have been one of the children who fell through the cracks had I not had a determined mother with an education degree at home.

Because while I arrived in second grade able to read, I discovered I lacked the basic math skills required because my first-grade teacher didn’t teach that subject at all. I suspect she didn’t know how, and as a result, I spent several weeks taking remedial courses to get caught up.

Years later, I still remember how miserable — and confusing — it was to be behind my peers. My class didn’t stop to wait for me to get caught up. My second-grade teacher continued to build on what I was supposed to have already learned.

We’re at a crossroads, and my question is do we want our classrooms to produce well-educated students? Or do we want our schools to be little more than a babysitting service?

If lawmakers want our schools to simply be low-paid babysitters, then be brave enough to admit it. But I suspect they don’t want to say the quiet part out loud because their constituents — and businesses — demand that we produce students who are literate in math and reading.

If we can’t get qualified people to teach, then lawmakers need to do some soul searching and figure out what’s fundamentally wrong with how they’re doing things.

Every child should have someone in their life like my mother, who can fill the gaps, but they don’t. Our lawmakers should be moving mountains to ensure every child has the best teachers in their public school classrooms, not taking dangerous short cuts that put student outcomes at risk.