Walters wants to destroy public ed in Okla. All he needs is your vote

Last Updated on August 6, 2023, 2:52 AM | Published: October 25, 2022

Putting Ryan Walters in charge of public education in Oklahoma is like inviting Kanye West to speak at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. 

The Republican candidate for state superintendent for public instruction’s contempt for teachers and students runs so deep, Walters should not be allowed within 500 feet of a school.

The danger here is existential. 

If Walters and Gov. Kevin Stitt, his chief advocate, win election on Nov. 8, parents of public school students will be subjected to a statewide grift in which funding for public schools gets diverted to private and charter schools while large swaths of Oklahoma are left wanting. For children remaining in depleted, compromised public schools, Walters has a plan to indoctrinate those kids into hyperconservative political worldviews. 

In a recent campaign stop in Bartlesville reported by Tulsa World’s Andrea Eger, Walters let the audience know that he was coming for their teachers — specifically, history teachers.  

“What I will do is I will put together courses — I’ve been talking to Hillsdale College on this, they’re great, they’re great — and have every U.S. history teacher and every history teacher in the state go through that training, so they know the basics and that every kid will have a teacher who is learned on U.S. history, on the Constitution, on those fundamental principles,” Walters said. 

“They’re great, they’re great,” he said. So nice, he said it twice, right? Well, if you want your children’s education determined by Donald Trump and the noxious coterie of fascists, insurrectionists and Christian Nationalists he appointed to the 1776 Commission two months before his electoral defeat, then “they’re great.” 

The 1776 Commission was formed as a counter to the 1619 Project, the reporting endeavor set up by investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times to evaluate American history through an inclusive process that acknowledges the struggles and accomplishments of minority populations throughout history. When your uncle at Thanksgiving starts raging about “critical race theory,” it is because his hate vector of choice at Fox News or Newsmax told him that the 1619 Project was erasing white history. 

The chair of the 1776 Commission is Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, a notoriously hard-right institution founded by the Free Will Baptist Church in Hillsdale, Michigan. 

No members of the commission had any specialty in U.S. history. 

Instead, they were people like Brooke Rollins, CEO of the America First Policy Institute; Charlie Kirk, CEO of Turning Point USA, and Thomas Lindsey, director of the Center for Higher Education at the conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation, who was known as “The Enemy of Democracy at Shimer College” before being removed as president of that small Illinois college. 

Walters, who is also CEO of Oklahoma City-based Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, a non-profit fully backed and funded by national school voucher advocates, is notorious for his anti-”woke” rhetoric used in his car selfies filmed outside public school buildings. He is hand-in-glove with the people who want to preserve the patriarchal, caucasian-centric “great man theory” that was part-and-parcel of public history education during the segregation era. 

Walters is supporting a curriculum teaching that public accommodation laws that opened lunch counters, restaurants and other spaces was, according to the 1776 Commission’s curriculum, “where the line between private conscience and government coercion began to blur.” The curriculum also makes the highly specious assertion that “the civil rights movement was almost immediately turned into programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the Founders.”

This is a curriculum that Walters and his enablers are pushing, a belief system that teaches young Black students that the historic chain of events that led them to an integrated public school were all mistakes. It teaches manifest destiny to indigenous people. This is disenfranchisement. 

This should make all Oklahomans of sound minds apoplectic with rage. 

But at the core, Walters and the people with the 1776 Commission, which privatized itself after President Joe Biden disbanded the official government organization on his first day in office, are running a grift, and it has been done before. 

Under Gov. Scott Walker, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction announced in October 2015 that the number of students attending private schools using school vouchers had doubled since the state lifted enrollment caps. What that office failed to point out is that of those students using vouchers, 75 percent were already enrolled in those private schools, and only 19 percent were transfers from public schools. 

So, public school funds were used to reduce tuition for people who were wealthy enough to afford private school in the first place. In the following school year, the Wisconsin State Journal reported, the state would spend $258 million on school vouchers and reduce public school funding by $83 million.

This is what will happen in Oklahoma if Walters wins election, and Oklahomans living in rural areas with no private schools in their vicinity will incur a funding cut for their children’s public education, but with nothing to replace that hollowed-out classroom. 

Public education should be something that simply works, but Walters has spent months undermining and crippling Oklahoma schools with nonstop antagonism and directing a steady stream of hate toward people who did not need more of it. 

Oklahoma’s public school students deserve far better than a dudebro who wants to take them down on his first day in office.

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