Ryan Walters, Superintendent of Oklahoma Public Schools, continues in the fine old the Republican tradition of starving public schools. Taxpayer money is already being diverted to vouchers to pay for private and religious schools, although taxpayers want their public funds to go to public schools!
But now, public schools are on life support.
Public schools are the backbone of democracy. The great American innovation was sending the sons of the poor to school with the sons of the rich. However, the gap between rich and poor in American has now reached an all-time, unsustainable high.
Public schools are needed more than ever to hold communities together. This dynamic has not been considered in the rush to privatize.
For the past ten years, Republican administrations in Oklahoma have deliberately underfunded public schools and just watched as qualified teachers fled Oklahoma.
From June through December 2024, the state issued 4,676 emergency certifications for “teachers” who have no teacher training and no subject-area training. These emergency certifications, now the norm, were intended only as a stopgap measure after 30,000 qualified teachers left Oklahoma or gave up on the profession between 2012 and 2018 (https://www.oklahoman. com/story/news/2024/01/22/emergency- teacher-certifications-oklahoma- new-record-nearly-5000-issued/ 72314377007.)
Now Republican leaders nationwide say dramatic measures are needed to remedy student academic stagnation. This seems to have been the plan all along: to starve public schools of resources, say they have failed, and close them.
And Oklahoma, according to Walters, “is setting the national standard.”
On March 24, 2025, Ryan Walters wrote to Oklahoma parents. His comments are shown in quotation marks, mine are not.
Walters says his focus includes: “Career Readiness – Preparing students for college and careers.”
Business owners complain that new graduates cannot write. Oklahoma must pay teachers enough to get professionals who will actually teach writing!
All English teachers intend to teach this vital skill but find that there’s too much other ground to cover in a good English class. Writing gets left out because it is fiendishly difficult to teach, and giving feedback is incredibly time-consuming.
In 1999, I began teaching in the business school of Southeastern Oklahoma State University. My students had the same problem I had as a high-school graduate; we had not been taught to write. I felt for them because I struggled with learning this skill for years, and I knew their business expertise would hardly matter if they couldn’t write even a clear memo. I wrote a reference book of short-cuts to grammar and writing that helped my students, but that was still was no substitute for students having had written assignments throughout K-12.
Teachers are professionals who must be treated and paid as such if we are to raise academic performance in our state, which now ranks 49th out of fifty on academic achievement. And we must no longer omit writing from the basics.
“At the Oklahoma State Department of Education, we prioritize parental empowerment, academic excellence, and transparency [Walters says]. Our goal is a student-focused system free from indoctrination and driven by choice.”
Sounds fine, doesn’t it? But read between the lines. Republicans want to privatize education altogether. There is just too much money to be made for education to remain under the purview of government. Parental choice is touted as the reason for appropriating taxpayer money for vouchers to pay for private schools. But if you do not live in a big city, good luck. Public schools may be the only choice in rural areas, and, when schools close, the whole community suffers.
Education is a billion-dollar “business.” If private interests get their way, schools will be run like a business and milked for as much return as possible. Private schools will raise prices higher than the fees covered by vouchers, so that both individual families and taxpayers will be required to pay for them.
Republicans also want more control over HOW children are indoctrinated. They distrust what they view as the “leftist” doctrine of public schools. You know, indoctrination like diversity, meaning everyone is welcome; equity, meaning everyone gets a fair chance; and inclusion, meaning students with disabilities get the help they need. If your child is disabled or has special needs, good luck finding a private school that will give him what he needs, if he can even get accepted.
“Awareity” is the name for the system that gives parents a way to report their concerns about schools. It was originally deployed by former State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister to allow community members to report their concerns about school safety, including bullying (The Daily Oklahoman, November 26, 2024).
But now Walters is encouraging parents to use the system to report any suspected violations of HB 1775, the legislation that prohibits teaching concepts about race or gender. Teachers are warned against teaching anything in the nation’s history that gets too close to the truth of how African- Americans, Native Americans, women, immigrants, and minority groups were treated. Truths deemed “uncomfortable” are banned by this illadvised law.
In the otherwise excellent Durant public schools in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I was taught nothing about indigenous genocide, slavery, or the plight of women. Must today’s students also be left ignorant of any unpleasantness?
No!
We can trust professionally trained teachers to introduce unpleasant truths gradually by grade level. They need to teach that horrific things have happened worldwide and throughout time, and that America did not escape the dark but all-toohuman tendency to scapegoat others, even unto death.
Even in spite of the legal restrictions of HB 1775, students will eventually realize that their teachers lied to them, by withholding accurate information about the country’s past. Lies of omission are every bit as hurtful as disinformation. Learning about past horrors, at whatever age they finally encounter them, can be devastating to students who are unprepared.
But to learn, along with the awful pain from the past, that this country eventually admitted its faults and has striven since to correct them, can make students feel elated and encouraged, as they understand what humans can, and have, overcome.
Oklahoma has the fifth highest high-school suicide rate in the country. Students need truth. They need to learn that the world can be a dismal place but that it is up to each of us to preserve the dignity and human rights of each other.
Americans are all in this together. If we must fight to keep our democracy, let us begin by fighting for one of democracy’s foundations—public education for all.
No more taxpayer funds for private schools!