“What the heck does using data as a flashlight instead of a hammer mean? Your A-F (school grading) system feels like a hammer, and, quite frankly, as an outsider, it looks like a hammer.”

He held up a copy of the new ImpactTulsa report opened to the page with third-grade reading achievement plotted out for area schools, pointing to the few dots that represent schools where achievement is high despite extreme rates of poverty.

“Let’s look at our successes and figure out how to grow them,” Edmondson said.

Union Superintendent Kirt Hartzler said Tulsa-area superintendents already collaborate more than is typical for an urban area and that contrary to political rhetoric, public school leaders embrace the use of data to drive decision-making.

“The Tulsa region has a 72.1 percent graduation rate. That’s unacceptable. I say ‘we’ because I’m not just talking about one district but all of the districts. I would expect us to be closer to 80, 84 percent,” Hartzler said.

Ray Owens said his current service as pastor of Metropolitan Baptist Church in north Tulsa and his past experience as a Teach for America corps member teaching in south central Los Angeles in the early 1990s inform his perspective.