No Mandatory Bibles, No Prager U Tests: Oklahoma’s New Superintendent Unwinds The Walters Era
from the all-for-naught dept
Ryan Walters is no longer the Superintendent of the State of Oklahoma, but he’s still at work doing his nonsensical performative shtick. After vacating his government position in the middle of his mandates for schools to carry copies of the Trump Bible and requiring transplant teachers to take a Prager U developed woke-test to get certified, Walters has since moved on to try to “destroy” teacher unions.
“The teachers’ unions descended and brought chaos to our state. They fought every reform. They fought parents’ rights. They pushed the most radical ideology the country has ever seen. They’re Marxist. They have to be destroyed,” said Walters.
“What we’re doing is we’re getting teachers out of the teachers’ union first, but then we’re creating an army of America First teachers that actually want to go back to teaching math, reading, history, science,” said Walters. “When I say history, I mean actually American values, actual history. You know, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, which forever changed the course of human events. Not Thomas Jefferson’s an evil slave owner, which is what you’re seeing in so many of our classrooms today.”
Except, of course, that Jefferson was a slave owner. Whether that made him “evil” or not is, I suppose, a matter of debate, but it is not debatable that slavery itself is evil. Beyond that, I’ll leave it to everyone else to decide the pros and cons of teacher unions. My wife is an educator, I’ve seen both the good and bad.
My point in all of this is that Walters is exactly where he should be: completely out of government and in an advocacy group where he can shout all about the woke communist lizard-people on the anti-white racist left who want to feed your children to illegal immigrants (I admit, this is an imprecise approximation of his positions).
Conversely, the new Oklahoma Superintendent, Lindel Fields, is doing exactly what he should be doing thus far, which mostly amounts to unwinding all the bullshit that Walters pulled while he was in office.
In the letter, Superintendent Fields stated schools would no longer be required to have bibles in classrooms.
Fields said Bibles are available to students as they always have, in “media centers, used as curricular materials when appropriate, carried by students and staff alike, and accessible on school-issued devices like Chromebooks.” He also said districts can include biblical education wherever deemed appropriate by individual school boards.
Fields said the America First Teacher Test designed by PragerU is not a certification requirement for teaching in Oklahoma. He stressed the America First test is not the same as the US Naturalization test, which is separate requirement for teacher certification.
The letter went on to note that some of the standards put in place for state testing and what is taught in social studies classes, potentially a reference to Walters’ demands that students be taught all about election and COVID conspiracy theories in classrooms, will be reviewed.
Oklahoma always deserved better than to have someone doing a one-man MAGA performance piece on the backs of school children running education in the state. It appears to now have that. Walters’ actions, it would seem, were all for naught.
Filed Under: bibles, education, oklahoma, ryan walters, schools
Companies: prager u
Comments on “No Mandatory Bibles, No Prager U Tests: Oklahoma’s New Superintendent Unwinds The Walters Era”
Gonna have to stop you there. Oklahoma has always been a backwards place full of cruel idiots. What they deserve is to be cut off from blue state money and left to rot.
The problem is Walters thinks this is a one-or-the-other situation where only one of those two facts about Jefferson can be taught. It’s right in line with conservative black-and-white thinking: “If they’re not teaching that he’s one of the most important men in the history of this nation, they’re teaching that he’s one of the vilest men to ever live!”
We can teach that Jefferson was a slave owner and a president. We can teach that Jefferson raped Sally Hemings and helped write the Declaration of Independence. Painting him as a completely horrible monster or a heroic revolutionary to the exclusion of any other facts about his life doesn’t do anyone any favors. Thomas Jefferson was as flawed as any of the rest of us; his story should be told through his deeds, both good and evil, so that we can judge him accordingly. If we judge him to be a monster, so be it. But we have to judge him fairly, and that means telling people the facts about his life, even if those facts discomfort or disturb us. Walters—and anyone who wants Jefferson to be lionized without criticism—will learn in due time (if he hasn’t already) that one’s deeds are the ultimate judge of who they are, and his deeds really didn’t help his reputation…or the people whom he was elected to serve.
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Also, not for nothing, I bet Walters is pretty selective in which American historical figures he wants portrayed in a purely heroic light.
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Oh, I have no doubt that he sees Thomas Jefferson as a hero whom we should lionize and John Brown as a terrorist whom we should demonize. And that’s before we get to any Black people.
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A person is a collection of all their words and deeds, good and bad, so if you only focus on one or the other you’re not actually talking and/or teaching about that person but rather a butchered version of them, which I’d argue is worse than not talking about them at all.
Can we please send Fields to the Whitehouse next?
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You have to clear out the garbage first or fields will be unable to do anything.
I’m pleasantly surprised that this is coming from a Republican. Let’s see if he commits to basic human decency and reverses all of the right-wing identity politics from the Walters era. If only the state legislature would do the same thing!
Unions or ... what?
You were rather ambivalent about the value of unions, which is not cool.
You can go to your boss and beg for a good working environment. Of course you risk getting fired for doing so, because many bosses have thin skin. Or you can go to your union, and your union can negotiate on your behalf, where the personal risk goes down and the likelihood of success goes up… It’s pretty clear that the union is the superior option here.
Of course it’s possible for any organization to forget about its values. But we shouldn’t assume this has already happened in Oklahoma without evidence. That’s insulting to the teachers. After all, which is more likely, a bad boss or a bad union? … Oh wait! … Checks notes. … Now I remember: this is a story about a bad boss.
Re: Hi there, Doug
“You were rather ambivalent about the value of unions, which is not cool.”
I’ve never been terribly interested in being “cool”, whatever the hell that means.
“You can go to your boss and beg for a good working environment. Of course you risk getting fired for doing so, because many bosses have thin skin. Or you can go to your union, and your union can negotiate on your behalf, where the personal risk goes down and the likelihood of success goes up… It’s pretty clear that the union is the superior option here.”
Funny enough, I actually have an 8 to 5. And I’m not union. And I literally do what you’re saying I won’t get positive results from, and yet I do.
Look, unions aren’t bad. They aren’t good, either. They’re somewhere in between and we all have to do the math and decide if they, at this very moment (not historically, not as a tally of all that they’ve done previously) are a net positive or negative. I, personally, am both ignorant and ambivalent for the very same reason: I’ve never been in a union and don’t feel comfortable passing final judgement on them.
“Of course it’s possible for any organization to forget about its values. But we shouldn’t assume this has already happened in Oklahoma without evidence.”
Literally nobody, including me, did that. Like….not even close.
“That’s insulting to the teachers. After all, which is more likely, a bad boss or a bad union?”
They’re both made of people so….pretty close call to me, honestly? Could go either way? I mean, probably the former, in my experience, but I have no reason to think that the margin on that is huge.
“Checks notes. … Now I remember: this is a story about a bad boss.”
Indeed. That’s why I find your critique, though I think well articulated and clearly passionate, so bewildering.
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I’m in in a union job. It’s great for some reasons and those great things have some unfortunate side effects. I get good pay and generally good benefits relative to other jobs, but the reliability of pay and benefits means that some people will stop putting effort into their jobs because they think they can just rely on union protection to keep their job and the comfy benefits. This is a union problem not because unions are bad, but because bad unions don’t do enough to make sure they aren’t protecting bad members. Because a bad member ends up having other union member employees make up for their lack of work ethic. I’ve done the jobs of other people who made more than me because if I didn’t, the work didn’t get done and we all looked bad and the clients didn’t get served (and I work in a field where the clients deserve better and aren’t wealthy entitled assholes).
The thing is, it’s not that unions are good or bad. It’s that unions become necessary because we haven’t otherwise mandated by law that employers pay fair wages and society hasn’t realized that universal health care would solve a lot of issues relating to people holding jobs they’re not right for because they need the medical insurance. Union membership could naturally go down if more social programs were passed at the federal level and make many of the issues unions negotiate over moot. But of course we’re heading further in the opposite direction from this so it feels like a pipe dream to even suggest it, despite polls showing the individual ideas are popular even with the Fox News crowd as long as you don’t call it socialism.
All that said, fuck police unions. The idea that justice can be negotiated away as terms of a contract with police officers is bullshit.
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Hi. Someone with an actual degree in industrial and labor relations, which included multiple semesters of labor history, collective bargaining, labor economics and more. It’s perfectly reasonable and acceptable to be ambivalent about unions. Collective bargaining has been fantastic in some situations and some scenarios, and it’s been a disaster in others. Understanding where and when unions make sense is kind of important. Also, understanding where and when unions go bad is also important, because there’s a long history of them becoming corrupt.
I’m not saying they always are corrupt or always tend that way, because that’s not true. But the history of corrupt unions that start to focus on the union over the workers they’re supposed to represent is fairly large. There is also a long history of unions creating larger issues by focusing exclusively on maximizing members comp & benefits to the exclusion of other issues, which can cause real problems.
There are tradeoffs in all approaches. I think it’s kinda important to understand what those tradeoffs are before making blanket statements as you have here about unions that are simply not borne out in reality.
I think unions and collective bargaining have their place. But there can be no honest discussion of unions without acknowledging their failures and limitations.
'Actual history', that being what he WANTS to be true
“What we’re doing is we’re getting teachers out of the teachers’ union first, but then we’re creating an army of America First teachers that actually want to go back to teaching math, reading, history, science,” said Walters. “When I say history, I mean actually American values, actual history.
Said the person who tried to force very specific bibles into every classroom in direct opposition to the first amendment, and ‘teach’ students blatantly fraudulent history like who won a particular election and where a virulent disease came from and how it was handled…
As always with that lot, every accusation a confession, every self-given label a rejection of.
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I guess you can add that whole “building a wall of separation between Church & State” thing to the list of Thomas Jefferson facts he doesn’t want kids to know.
The medium is important..
Right and left wing people talking about the american school system seem to close their eyes to the conditions “on the ground”. If a school system is badly underfunded and has, as a consequence, badly trained and vetted teachers that teach badly, they therefore also teach things like critical race theory and history badly. If you don’t have a functioning medium (i.e. school system) to convey your message, you get garbled nonsense that make things worse instead of better. Insisting on the importance of these topics avails you nothing then. People seem to miss that.
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Critical Race Theory is not generally taught in K-12 schools.
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You mean it is not ever taught in K-12. It’s basically a small graduate school level area of study, that a bunch of idiots tried to pretend was being used to indoctrinate children.
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School. Teachers. Never. Taught. Critical. Race. Theory.
It was something taught is college level legal classes that was used by a bad actor to capitalise the racist fears around BLM and weaponise it as part of wider attacks on education and diversity initiatives.
For now...
That may be an apparent end to the story for now but remember that this IS Oklahoma (Florida, Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, etc) and this will not be the last of this madness. I’ll guarantee it.