Proof That Writing Rubrics in Oklahoma Are Designed to Fail Your Kids

I’ve been an English teacher for over 20 years. I know how to teach students to write essays. It is in my blood.

I can usually take any student from a mediocre writer or a poor writer to a functional writer. I have worked in districts with zero vertical team and a micromanaging vertical team.

But the State of Oklahoma (at least), a state whose government is notoriously anti-public school, is always working to make public schools seem like they are underperforming.

The proof might be in the recent state of the state where Governor Stitt stated that he would raise the cap on private school vouchers from 5 million to 30 million when public schools are drastically underfunded. The requirements in surrounding states like Kansas for receiving vouchers to send your kids to private schools is qualifying for free lunches at public school. Oklahoma has no such caps. Don’t get me started on the egregious A-F grading system as a way to keep minority schools in failure and the mindlessness of standardized testing that our country still thinks is a good measure of what students “know”.

Yesterday, however, upon examining a rubric for the 8th grade writing test I began to realize that the rubric was not only unfair but probably not written by an ELA specialist.