I hope each of you enjoyed a restful and meaningful holiday season with your families and loved ones. As we begin our second semester, it is bittersweet and especially meaningful for me. This will be my final semester serving as superintendent before retirement. It has been a true honor to work alongside such dedicated professionals, board members, community members, and students. The commitment, care, and professionalism demonstrated by our teachers, support staff, administrators, and service teams make our schools places where students are known, supported, and inspired to succeed. Our work continues!
As a superintendent, I believe deeply in accountability. Public schools should be transparent about results, honest about challenges, and relentless about improvement. But accountability must be grounded in reality and not in shifting labels that create the illusion of progress without changing what students actually know.
In 2017, the Oklahoma State Department of Education declared a “total reset” of state test results. That reset redefined what “proficient” meant by aligning Oklahoma’s cut scores with national benchmarks such as NAEP and ACT/SAT. It was presented as honesty and comparability. In reality, it changed how results were labeled, not what students learned.
That same logic continues today. In 2025, the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability justified restoring cut scores by pointing to an “honesty gap” between Oklahoma’s proficiency rates and NAEP. The underlying assumption is that the correct proficiency bar is the one that most closely matches NAEP.
I respectfully disagree!
NAEP plays an important role. It offers a national snapshot and long-term trend data. But it is not designed to measure Oklahoma’s academic standards or curriculum. Our state assessments are built to measure mastery of the Oklahoma Academic Standards, not NAEP frameworks. When we define proficiency by how closely our results resemble NAEP, we are making a policy choice about perception rather than improving instructional alignment.
There is another fact the public rarely hears: schools never receive individual student, school-site, or even district-level NAEP results. NAEP is administered to samples of students for state and national reporting only. Teachers cannot analyze NAEP data for their students. Principals cannot study NAEP results for their schools. Districts cannot use NAEP data to guide instruction. Yet NAEP continues to be used as the benchmark against which we judge our honesty.
Changing cut scores does not improve learning. It changes how many students we label “proficient.” Nothing more.
At the same time, teachers receive little to no actionable instructional data from Oklahoma’s own state tests, and results often do not arrive until the next school year has already begun. By then, students have moved on to new teachers, new grades, or new schools. Whatever instructional value the test might have had is lost. Accountability remains, but improvement does not.
Meanwhile, educators are working in classrooms shaped by realities no test score adjustment can fix. In districts like Lawton Public Schools, teachers contend daily with chronic absenteeism, high student mobility, poverty, housing instability, food insecurity, trauma, and unmet mental health needs. We are a transient community. Students arrive at different times of the year. Instruction is interrupted. Learning time is lost. Yet, our accountability system largely ignores those conditions and “grades” districts on those criteria.
Our own testing documentation is clear: Oklahoma’s assessments are a “point-in-time indicator,” not a diagnostic tool. Still, they are oversold as precise measures of individual learning. That misrepresentation distorts public understanding and undermines the professionals doing the work.
Let me be clear: this is not an excuse. We know, as a district and as a state, that we must get better. But improvement does not come from adding days to the calendar or retaining third graders without first providing teachers the professional development, instructional resources, time, and support required to change outcomes.
More time without stronger instruction accomplishes little. Retention without targeted intervention risks compounding failure rather than fixing it. If Oklahoma is serious about improving literacy and math, the answer is sustained investment in high-quality curriculum, teacher learning, early intervention, and the wraparound supports that make learning possible.
Testing can inform us. It cannot save us!
We can demand high standards and honest results, but we will not get there by shifting cut scores or outsourcing the meaning of proficiency. Real improvement will require alignment, transparency, and plain and simply put, investing in our education system. Now is the perfect time.