A Win for Public Education

Ryan Walters, gone but not forgotten, continues to haunt collective memory in Oklahoma. As our erstwhile Superintendent of Schools, he took very little interest in academic progress but gave himself completely to ideological cosplay.

I wish I could say that he was tilting at windmills, but he made extraordinary headway in altering our culture of education. He came after Tulsa’s local superintendent and forced her ouster in a bloody coup. It was a defeat for experience and seriousness of purpose. He denigrated trans students, adding to their misery, focusing notoriously on young Nex Benedict, who committed suicide under relentless bullying. Walters expressed pro forma sympathy and then turned the event into an attack on “woke” mobsters.

He then instituted a loyalty test for candidate teachers whom he suspected of liberal derangement. This, in a state with chronic teacher shortages and dismal performance at every grade level. At both the beginning and end of his wretched tenure we were fiftieth in the nation in academic excellence, meaning that we were not excellent at all.

But Walters wasn’t interested in excellence. Whatever you may think of Charlie Kirk, he was top of mind for Ryan Walters, who saw in his murder yet another opportunity to push an agenda of radical heroics. He gave the same singular focus to religious instruction, believing that it was his holy commission to flog Biblical truths in a public-school setting. I know a few things about Biblical truths, and they do not belong in a program of indoctrination, which is what Ryan “Headship” Walters had in mind.

But now we can sigh with collective relief. Walters has been out of office for six months, yet what remained behind was a contaminated stew. Floating in the center was a social studies curriculum that zealously foregrounded Walters’ obsessions. That means election denialism, the supremacy of Christian doctrine, and bogus “science” about the origins of COVID. All of this came out of an unholy alliance between MAGA-brand Walters supporters and Prager U., the spurious purveyor of “traditional values” that is one of the intellectual pillars of retrograde education “reformers.” As a Jew who came of age during Dennis Prager’s ascent, I know a little about his angry Jewish certainty. I wouldn’t want him to walk through the doors of the Synagogue, let alone influence a schoolchild in Oklahoma.

But now all of this is over. In a landmark deliberation toward the end of March, the State Board of Education reversed course on Walters. A new social studies curriculum is now in place which speaks approvingly of the integration of Tulsa schools and hails a decision protecting Native children from mission schooling. All the garbage of the Walters curriculum is gone and the mandates he imposed have been swept away.

If it needs to be said, this happened in Oklahoma under ruby-red committed Republican auspices. It is a powerful reminder that there is always hope, that every voice counts, and we can correct course in November. There is a point where ideologues go off the rails and even their supporters feel compelled to repudiate them.