A Teacher’s Story – Why I Quit Teaching In Oklahoma Public Schools

Becky Pellam, PhD, spoke to Michael and Jenni on Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024, about her teaching experiences in Oklahoma.

Dr. Pellam came from Texas, where she taught in the Dumas district. She loved it there, but she met a man from the Oklahoma panhandle and settled in on a ranch they bought there together. Hungry to teach again, she applied to Guymon PS and was hired as a Teaching Coach.

Before she started, she had great feelings about her time there and what she could do to help the kids – the majority of whom had ACT scores in the single digits. After she began, her experience changed drastically.

During her year of employment in Guymon, she was bullied by the other teachers, many of whom told her she was a ‘plant’ from the central office sent to spy on the other teachers and refused to submit their benchmarks to her. She talked to her superintendent about the situation but she seemed to get nowhere.

She talked to the school board president, who listened intently and believed her report, but asked her to contact the Board’s vice-president. When she did, the long-time, active OSSBA (Oklahoma State School Board Association) member told her that he had heard she was a trouble maker and knew she was the problem, not anyone else.

Needless to say, after she was told by the Superintendent to falsify benchmark data to the school board, she had it in her mind to quit, but then the school essentially fired her anyway.

Here’s Becky’s story about her employment with Guymon in her own words:

After being forced to leave Guymon public schools, she was hired at DOVE Virtual Acadmy (DVA) – an Oklahoma online public charter school.

Dr. Pellam talks about how – just like her experience with Guymon PS – everything started fine, but quickly turned sour.

The Principal almost immediately had Dr. Pellam teaching THE ENTIRE HIGH SCHOOL class of nearly 100 kids to the tune of 12 and 13 classes per week. For those who aren’t teachers, that’s 3 TIMES a ‘normal’ amount of coursework. For each class, there is a certain amount of ‘prep’ that has to happen to develop the course and to assist/grade/monitor the students. This level of coursework would exhaust anyone, but Becky also was helping to run a ranch and raise their daughter at the same time.

In the end, she found that DVA was ALSO cheating the accountability system by enrolling ‘ghost students’ to get their enrollment up (in Oklahoma, schools are appropriated funds via the number of ‘butts in seats’), but then unenrolled over 40% of their students – the ones on the lower end of the academic spectrum – when it came time for state testing.

Here is Dr. Pellam telling the story about her employment with Dove Virtual Academy:

Toward the end of the LIVE 2 hour+ broadcast, Jenni and Dr. Pellam began to talk about what education actually is.

Few people – including teachers and administrators today – know what it means to EDUCATE a child. It’s certainly NOT what we’re doing in Oklahoma right now. Right now, we’re training kids for jobs, not educating them in order to be the people best able to decide what they want to do.

There is method to this madhouse approach of education, however. Uneducated people are compliant people because they don’t know how to think for themselves. They do what they’re told because they’re conditioned to do that. They can’t think for themselves because they’re not educated, they’re conditioned.

Becky and Jenni took several minutes to flesh out this fact so that people could hopefully understand what it is that Oklahoma is doing wrong in public education. And that’s after we spoke about the horrible public school culture – the teacher/administration bullying that goes on against those who want to come in and actually teach and do the right thing.

Here are Becky and Jenni discussing the idea of what REAL EDUCATION looks like:

Dr. Pellam is VERY BRAVE for coming forward in this way.

Jenni had the very same kind of experiences while she was teaching in Oklahoma public schools 25 years ago, so this is not a new thing – THIS IS TEACHER/ADMINISTRATION CULTURE IN MOST OKLAHOMA SCHOOLS. Good Oklahoma teachers simply leave rather than try to do anything because they know nothing they will say will be heard or addressed.

See, no one listens to them because the fixes necessary REQUIRE HARD WORK, not just THROWING DOLLARS AT THE PROBLEMS and no one from public school administration, to our legislature, to our Governor really want to do the work that is required to solve the deeply entrenched problems with public school culture in Oklahoma.

Oklahoman’s shouldn’t BE FORCED TO PROVIDE THEIR TAX DOLLARS FOR THESE UNFUNCTIONAL SCHOOLS. If we really care about kids – and do we really? – we would FIX the broken public school administrative culture, instead of forcing taxpayers to provide private school tuition dollars to people who can already afford a private school education for their kid/s!