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

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