In September 2020, Republican Governor Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma named Ryan Walters as Secretary of Public Education, placing him in charge of the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE). As a former Executive Director of Oklahoma Achieves, an education initiative within the State Chamber of Oklahoma, Walters describes himself as empowering parents, teachers, and community leaders to better the state’s education system for all students. Despite this commitment, Walters utilizes his position not to improve Oklahoma’s education system, which ranked as third-worst in the nation, but to instead win points in the so-called culture war.
Examples of Walters’s misplaced priorities are legion. On June 27, 2024, Walters issued a directive requiring schools to incorporate the Bible into curricula and ensure every classroom in the state contains at least one copy of the Bible. Additionally, Walters requested that the Oklahoma State Board of Education approve $3 million solely for purchasing Bibles for Oklahoma classrooms, which would increase the state’s total budget for Bibles to reach $6 million, more than 10% of its annual budget of $45 million for instructional materials. The standards are so strict that only two Bibles on the market qualify: the Donald Trump God Bless the USA Bible, which retails for $60, or the We The People Bible, which Donald Trump Jr. endorsed and retails for $90. These two Bibles are astronomically more expensive than most other Bibles available on the market, with paperback versions of the New King James Version available for as little as $2.99 and several apps that provide the Bible for no charge. This policy would cost Oklahoma between $3.3 million and $4.95 million to purchase the requested 55,000 copies, lead to a 12,000-book surplus, and waste about $1 million. The choice to only accept a Trump-endorsed Bible shows that Walters’s effort is more about currying favor from Trump than increasing Bible accessibility.
In January of 2025, Walters and the Oklahoma State Board of Education unanimously voted to approve a proposal requiring parents to prove their citizenship or immigration status when enrolling children in Oklahoma public schools. Despite Walters’s claims that the goal of the policy is to gather data on the state’s student body, the proposal only requires parent information and doesn’t collect anything student-specific. Immigration and education experts argue that this rule will instead intimidate and discourage parents, particularly those who are undocumented, causing their children to be deprived of their constitutional right to an education, further isolating such families from the public sphere.
This past July, Walters announced a new partnership between the state and PragerU Kids, a right-wing “edutainment” organization that has expressly stated one of its goals is to indoctrinate kids. One component of its partnership is the recently unveiled, 34-question “America First” certification test, which all teachers moving to Oklahoma from California or New York must pass. The test’s goal is to ostensibly prevent “radical leftist ideology” from corrupting Oklahoma classrooms. Not only could this trigger an educator recruiting crisis in the state, but it also highlights a common theme in many of Walters’ proposals: the singling out and denigration of New York and California, which Walters views as woke vessels for teaching left-wing propaganda.
In his zeal to save Oklahoma’s education system from even remotely resembling that of New York or California, Walters neglects an important detail: both states rank considerably higher in terms of education quality. According to US News, New York sits at seventeenth best in the nation, and California is ranked twenty-fourth, while Oklahoma is placed at 48th. Unlike in California and New York, students in Oklahoma are having their education attacked and undermined by a Secretary of Education who is motivated not by students’ needs but instead by scoring points in a meaningless culture war to increase his political cache in Oklahoma, the Republican party, and in the White House.
On September 24th, Walters resigned from his position to lead a conservative education non-profit. Even though Walters will no longer be creating new policies, many harmful ones that he proposed will still be enforced throughout that state. Multiple standards and rules implemented by Walters are being challenged in court, and Walters himself is facing an ethics probe regarding his resignation.. Nonetheless, Superintendent Walters’ repeated, self-interested stunts came not only at the expense of Oklahoma's students, but also those across the country, as Walters’s policies are considered a model by the White House that other Republican states should follow. The education of the next generation is far too important to politicize. Oklahoma needs new leadership that will improve its sinking education system, rather than imposing unnecessary restrictions.
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To learn more about these efforts and to support the fight, please visit acluok.org for further information and ways to take action, from Oklahoma, Ithaca, or anywhere in the country.
Photo Credit
Jimmy Emerson DVM, CC 2.0, via Flickr
