The state of education in Oklahoma is dire. After years of chronic underfunding and declining test scores relative to the nation, Oklahoma’s schools now rank second-worst in the country. Chief among the state’s educational worries is a mass exodus of qualified teachers, creating a record-high teacher shortage. During the 2023 to 2024 school year, the state issued a whopping 5,014 emergency teacher certifications, a more than 15,000 percent increase from the 32 issued from 2011 to 2012.
For much of the past decade, the teacher shortage in Oklahoma has been explained by unlivable salaries and inadequate classroom funding. In the past few years, however, these explanations have lost the weight they once held. With the help of billions of dollars in federal Covid-19 relief funds, Oklahoma schools have filled their coffers and now have access to “unprecedented funding.” The state has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into teacher pay raises and has even begun offering $25,000 signing bonuses for teaching positions in rural areas. Now, teacher pay and total compensation in Oklahoma exceed the regional average. Yet the state still faces a record number of teacher vacancies. Rather than leaving because of financial concerns, teachers have likely fled the state due to harassment and inflammatory rhetoric from Oklahoma’s top education official, Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters.
Before Walters was elected to his current position, Governor Kevin Stitt appointed him as his Secretary of Education. In keeping with other Oklahoma Republicans, austerity measures, charter school endorsements, and support for school vouchers (government funding for students to attend private schools) partly defined Walters’ tenure as Secretary of Education. However, Walters set himself apart by making national culture wars a cornerstone of his platform.
In a state superintendent debate, Walters said that helping pass House Bill 1775 in 2021—Oklahoma’s so-called critical race theory ban—was one of his proudest accomplishments as Secretary of Education, despite no reports of critical race theory being taught in Oklahoma classrooms prior to the bill’s ratification. He attacked teachers and administrators for closing schools due to an influx of Covid-19 cases, saying they were acting out of fear. But when Oklahoma schools were still reeling from the effects of the pandemic, with eighth-grade math proficiency dropping more than in any other state, Walters neglected to respond. He ran his 2022 campaign for State Superintendent on the same anti-trans, “anti-woke” platform that characterized his time as Secretary of Education, and since taking office, he has attempted to put those plans into action.
Walters’s principal method of countering “indoctrination” in Oklahoma schools has been thinly veiled censorship. A key component of Walters’s agenda is banning books with obscene or sexualized content from school libraries; he claims that the ban targets pornographic material, but books investigated by the state for “obscene materials” include Lord of the Flies and The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Walters even proposed a plan requiring districts to provide a comprehensive inventory of all books and materials available to students for yearly review by the State Department of Education, a measure the State Attorney General thankfully shut down.
Some districts have fought back against Walters’s book bans. Edmond Public Schools (EPS) sued him and the Oklahoma Board of Education for attempting to remove The Kite Runner and The Glass Castle from its libraries. Oklahoma’s Supreme Court sided with EPS, declaring that the State Board of Education does not have the authority to decide which books districts place on their shelves. Despite legal setbacks like this, Walters has remained steadfast in using his platform to espouse harmful anti-LGBTQ+ positions. He appointed Chaya Raichik, the founder of Libs of TikTok, to the state’s Library Media Advisory Committee. Raichick, whom Walters has called a powerful ally in fighting against indoctrination, runs the right-wing account known for instigating online hate campaigns against LGBTQ+ teachers. Just last year, Raichick derisively reposted a TikTok made by a librarian at Ellen Ochoa Elementary School in Tulsa. As a result of that post, multiple elementary schools in the district received bomb threats for six consecutive days.
Walters’s inflammatory rhetoric has had tangible and detrimental effects on Oklahoma students. He has targeted transgender and gender-nonconforming Oklahomans, stating that “[r]adical gender ideology has no place in our classrooms.” Amid Walters’s attacks, Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old nonbinary student, was verbally and physically attacked in a bathroom at Owasso High School and died the next day. In response to the outcry over Benedict’s death, Walters published a Fox News op-ed claiming that the media’s coverage of the story was a liberal smear campaign against him.
Teachers who dare resist Walters’s agenda likewise find themselves targets of his rampant verbal attacks. He has said that those who oppose his book-banning efforts support pedophiles and accused teachers unions of being terrorist organizations that are “turning our schools into Epstein Island.” Walters revoked a teacher’s certification for providing her students a QR code which led to the Brooklyn Public Library’s banned books list. Oklahoma teachers say they feel “beat down” by an onslaught of intimidation and threats from politicians like Walters. “It literally brought me to tears,” said one Duncan High School teacher of Walters’s attacks on “woke” teachers unions. The havoc Walters has wreaked upon Oklahoma schools has turned teachers—our most valuable public servants—into political targets.
Educators across Oklahoma say Walters’s culture wars are to blame for high teacher attrition. The state’s teachers have worked through years of underfunded classrooms, but under Walters’s intimidation and attacks, they are finding it increasingly difficult to safely perform the job they have dedicated their lives to. If Oklahoma wants to solve its teacher shortage, it must continue to increase teacher salaries and classroom funding, but that will not be enough. Oklahoma must also reckon with the fact that its top education official has effectively declared war on the state’s teachers for his own political gain.