OK Schools Chief Quitting To Spend More Time Clinging To His Gun (Peener) And Trump Bible
Can watch all the porn he wants as CEO of new rightwing teacher union busting group.
Oklahoma state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, who has spent his time in office seeking attention from Donald Trump and Fox News with stupid culture war fights while the schools have suffered, announced Wednesday — on Fox, of course — that he will step down and take a job as CEO of a newly founded rightwing anti-teachers-union group.
Walters was elected to the job in 2022 even though (or because?) he believed the stupid conspiracy theory that “they” are putting litterboxes in the schools for children who identify as cats. Once in office, he promptly got to embarrassing himself by saying he thought the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre could easily be taught in public schools without violating his ban on teaching “critical race theory,” just as long as the lessons don’t “tie it to the skin color and say that the skin color determined that.”
Since then, Walters has been a regular laughingstock with his demands that every classroom in Oklahoma have its own Trump Bible, his bizarre state Board of Education meeting where a TV monitor showed nekkid ladies in some softcore ‘70s skin flick, and his announcement (and apparently nothing else) of a new PragerU anti-woke teacher certification test that nobody can actually fail. As far as we can tell, the test was never actually given to any teachers, but it continues to generate junk mail from PragerU, so Mission Accomplished.
Anyway, now he says he’ll resign sometime in early October to become the CEO of the “Teacher Freedom Alliance,” a nonprofit created earlier this year with the goal of undermining teachers unions. It’s an anti-public-education spinoff of the rightwing anti-union outfit Freedom Foundation, one of those innumerable far-right operations funded by any number of far-right dark money groups, including the Koch-bankrolled Americans for Prosperity and an assload of right-leaning foundations that have funded other efforts to destroy unions.
On Fox News, Walters left out those little funding details, not that he’d be embarrassed by them. He was content to portray the Teacher Freedom Alliance as an exciting new “grassroots” group that’s also YUGE, as befits its glorious mission. “We’re going to destroy the teachers unions,” he bragged. “We have seen the teachers unions use money and power to corrupt our schools, to undermine our schools.”
And don’t you dare call his new employers an astrofurf group, you monsters, because that’s probably a call for violence these days. “We are one of the biggest grassroots organizations in the country. We will build an army of teachers to defeat the teachers unions once and for all. So, this fight’s going national, and we will get our schools back on track,” he burbled.
The TFA homepage boasts that the group has 2,921 members. That’s some enormous army of teachers, or at least the people who’ve signed up for a free membership, compared to the 3 million members of the National Education Association and the 1.8 million in the American Federation of Teachers.
This won’t be Walters’s first goat rodeo with the Freedom Foundation, either, as Oklahoma nonprofit newsroom The Frontier reports.
In 2023, Walters was the keynote speaker at the Freedom Foundation’s Teachers for Freedom Summit in Denver. The event featured sessions such as “Teachers Unions: An International Problem” and “Is woke curriculum taking over your subject?” Walters billed the state $552 for airfare, mileage and per diem expenses for the appearance, The Frontier previously reported.
Those teacher “summits” aren’t the kind of education conferences where teachers exchange ideas to use in the classroom, either. They’re how-to confabs that provide “intensive leadership training” and workshops on how to decertify their own local and state teachers unions. Like motivational seminars for union-busting.
Wouldn’t you know it, Walters also happened to speak at Freedom Foundation’s March rollout event for the Teacher Freedom Alliance. At that event, Walters said that had been partnering with the Freedom Foundation to get Oklahoma’s teachers unions “out of the way.”
Freedom Foundation CEO Aaron Withe claimed that the new union-busting organization was simply springing up organically — from his dark money think tank — in response to demand from what has to be dozens, maybe even scores of public school teachers who are abandoning teachers unions because they’re “frustrated by the funding of radical agendas driven by union bosses,” and insisted that the TFA is simply an “alternative for pro-America educators who seek to restore traditional values in the classroom and provide students with the high-quality education they deserve – free from political influence and union control.” OK, maybe a little rightwing political influence, but that’s not “politics,” it’s patriotism.
We can see why Freedom Foundation decided it needed to spin off a group aimed solely at its mission of decertifying teachers unions. As the Center for Media and Democracy reports, its initial efforts at trying to enlist teachers to the glorious mission of cutting their own throats haven’t been terribly effective.
Last year, the Freedom Foundation helped fund an alternative employee organization to compete with the Miami Dade teachers’ union in Florida. But the effort failed decisively: teachers voted overwhelmingly — 83% to 17% — to keep their existing union representation with United Teachers of Dade, a local union of the Florida Education Association affiliated with the national American Federation of Teachers.
The Freedom Foundation poured extensive resources into the campaign to unseat the existing teachers’ union, as CMD previously reported, and claimed that its efforts were going to bring the union “to the brink of extinction.”
The TFA website says the organization is all about “helping teachers to develop free, moral, and upright American citizens,” a phrase that’s liberally sprinkled all over the site. Membership is free, and the group claims to offer “FREE $2M Liability Insurance” and “Professional Development Credit Hours,” but the details on the latter aren’t provided.
At the March rollout event, Freedom Foundation CEO Withe claimed that TFA would “end the teachers unions by ending their monopoly,” although he didn’t actually claim the group will provide any real replacement for collective bargaining. Besides, who needs job security or a contract when you belong to a group that promised to give teachers free curricula that’ll fight leftist indoctrination by instead indoctrinating kids “to love our country; we’re going to teach them that capitalism is the best economic system ever created.” Especially if you just trust the bosses.
Sounds like a great job for Walters, since it’ll allow him to bloviate on Fox about culture war issues all he wants, without the pesky public duties that come with holding elective office. And besides, he’ll be able to do his new job while remaining in Oklahoma, just in case God tells him to run for governor or something.
[Oklahoma Voice / Center for Media and Democracy / NonDoc / Frontier]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d like to make a one-time donation, here’s your button. Electronic payments are about as light as money gets, right?
>>by saying he thought the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre could easily be taught in public schools without violating his ban on teaching “critical race theory,” just as long as the lessons don’t “tie it to the skin color and say that the skin color determined that.”
Sure, you can say there is "circle"! Just don't talk about its being round!
Honestly surprised this shitbird resigned, wow!