The State Superintendent at the Forefront of the GOP’s Education Crusade

TULSA, Oklahoma — “You are at Ground Zero of the left's war on education,” Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters told the crowd inside a barbecue joint on a blazing August afternoon last year.

The day’s Tulsa County Men's Republican Club meeting opened with a prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance and an ovation for the gathering’s featured speaker. Walters, a 38-year-old ex-teacher, was not here just to chat up a friendly audience and raffle off some Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh books. He was here to make a case that, in a country he sees as corrupted by liberal indoctrination and beset with a civil war over young minds, God has a place in public schools.

“I'm going to get to the biggest assault that you see," Walters said to the hushed gathering of predominantly older, white voters. Something, he said, "that makes the left the most mad”: “If you say a prayer. If you mention God. If you were to even quote the Declaration of Independence and say we’re endowed — by who? — our Creator with certain inalienable rights. Folks, that is key to our young people’s understanding of what made this country great.”

Walters became superintendent, a role that oversees all public education in the state, a year ago after winning a commanding margin during 2022’s midterm elections, and he’s quickly catapulted himself to the forefront of social conservatives’ influence over education just as the 2024 presidential election promises enormous consequences for American schooling. Wielding a doctrine of brimstone-salted classroom policy, he is the incarnation of a post-pandemic GOP school takeover attempt that has boiled over from local boards to higher-profile jobs like state superintendent and beyond.

Walters has tried to use his office to back a courtroom battle over the nation’s first public religious charter school — a Catholic institution that would be financed by taxpayers but free to teach, enroll and expel students based on faith-based doctrines just like a private parochial school.

Supporters view the concept as the natural outcome of a growing school choice movement that claims legal backing from a conservative-controlled Supreme Court. Opponents say it’s the next frontier in a “full-on assault on church-state separation and public education.” Either way, Walters and his allies are advocating an enormous shift in how schools work in the United States.

But he hasn’t restricted himself to just that cause. He’s instead interjected himself into a consistent string of news cycles. He’s described teacher unions as Marxist terrorist organizations (in the same state where domestic terrorists bombed a federal building and killed 168 people three decades ago). He explored a takeover of the Tulsa Public Schools system, Oklahoma’s biggest, after a fight with the district’s former leader that ultimately led to her resignation. He appointed Chaya Raichik, the far-right social media star who runs the Libs of TikTok account, to a state library committee in January, months after her criticism of a satirical video from a Tulsa school librarian sparked bomb threats.

His staunch opposition to LGBTQ+ rights has come under increasing national focus over the past month following the death of Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old nonbinary student in Owasso who, according to a preliminary medical examiner report, died from an apparent suicide after a bathroom altercation at their high school. Last week, Benedict’s family released more details that documented “numerous areas of physical trauma over Nex’s body that evidence the severity of the assault” while calling on public officials and schools to “come together to prevent any other family from having to suffer through the heartache now borne by Nex’s loved ones.”

Hundreds of civil rights, education and LGBTQ+ organizations have demanded legislators remove Walters from office and investigate his department, asserting his conduct “shows a willful rejection of his duty to protect the health and welfare of the children in Oklahoma’s public schools.” In response, his office said: “Superintendent Walters will never back down to a woke mob.”

Walters has addressed lawmakers in Washington on Capitol Hill and spoken at the past year’s biggest conservative gatherings. He endorsed Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid — after, he said, receiving a call from the former president himself.

But unlike some of his ideological allies, Walters must tend to more than messaging. He is responsible for running a massive, complex government agency that oversees more than $3 billion in spending plus the education of hundreds of thousands of young people. While his hard-line politics have put him at the vanguard nationally, and often in line with the Republican base, his views have alienated an unexpected cohort of former allies and fellow conservatives in Oklahoma — and prompted a battery of unflattering coverage from a dogged corps of local journalists.

Last year state Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt removed Walters as education secretary, another role he’d been appointed to and in which he was serving simultaneously. A flood of employees has abandoned the state education agency, including high-profile departures who have publicly criticized Walters’ leadership and sued him for wrongful termination. An Oklahoma City-area school district is also suing Walters’ office, challenging orders to remove two books — including the 2003 novel The Kite Runner — from its high school libraries after the state library committee proclaimed they contained pornographic material. The superintendent’s office used state resources to hire a communications firm tasked with boosting Walters’ national profile, according to one local investigation that has raised questions about improper spending.

“What’s a shame is that he and I — we didn’t agree on a lot of things — but we agreed on public education and educating our kids,” said Republican state Rep. Mark McBride, an assistant floor leader and education appropriator who now is one of Walters’ fiercest conservative critics. “Since he got elected, he just has gone off the rails. I can’t support much of anything he does.”

Walters is also facing more potential legal trouble; the FBI and Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond have looked into questions surrounding Walters’ campaign and a prior role he held leading a prominent education nonprofit once known as Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, according to four people familiar with the probes. Democrats have sought to impeach him. Republicans have subpoenaed him.

“My speculation, and I have heard that he’s made this comment, is that he would like to run for governor,” said McBride, who proposed legislation to curb the superintendent’s power soon after Walters took office. “I’m sure that he might consider himself as a [federal] secretary of Education … or something like that if he’s crazy enough.”

Yet if Walters is chastened by his array of opponents, he does not show it publicly. In a statement to POLITICO Magazine, Dan Isett, a Walters spokesperson, said staff departures were necessary to “end a union stronghold in Oklahoma’s education,” that Walters has never been interviewed or subpoenaed by federal investigators, and that “the liberal media and jealous liberal activists” have sought to undermine the superintendent.

And after Tulsa’s GOP gathering emptied, Walters compared his work to one of his political idols. “He took some hard-line stands,” Walters told me of Winston Churchill in a slight Oklahoma drawl, between sips of sweet tea. He wore a black “W.W.J.D.” band around his wrist. Dressed in designer blue jeans, a navy sportcoat and brown roper boots, Walters seemed at ease as he deployed Fox News-ready talking points, peppered his answers with ‘Yes, sir’ and never raised his voice.

“Oklahomans see very clearly, the left are the ones who politicized the classroom,” Walters told me. “My goal is to take those politics and rid them from the classroom.”

‘This guy is nothing without the governor’

Years before he captivated crowds at national rallies for influential conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, Walters was his hometown’s star teacher.

He grew up in McAlester, a predominantly white southeastern Oklahoma town of about 18,000 people that is home to the state’s infamous penitentiary, a major Army ammunition plant and a string of prominent state Democrats. Walters said he was enchanted as a kid by classroom lessons on American history. He credits his childhood educators, plus supportive parents who serve as a minister and elementary education director at a local church, for nurturing his interest in teaching. He left home for college, attending Harding University, a private Christian institution in Arkansas. But a year after he graduated in 2010, he was back at McAlester High as a teacher.

His first year in the classroom was challenging. He later remembered that it hit him “like a ton of bricks.” But he proved popular both with students and the administration at his alma mater and soon was teaching Advanced Placement history and government courses. He was named McAlester’s teacher of the year in February 2015 and five months later was picked as one of 12 finalists for the state’s highest teaching honor. “An outstanding educator,” Walters was quoted as saying at the time, “can transcend racism, poverty, and all other barriers that stand between a child and success.”

He developed a reputation as a charismatic instructor and tennis coach with a Twitter habit and a regular classroom wardrobe of suits and skinny ties. But in the early days, he largely kept his politics to himself. His online feed was filled with posts admiring Bachelor in Paradise and Game of Thrones, and predictions that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential election. “You can hear this from my former students; they didn’t know I was conservative,” Walters said.

Walters does not offer much detail on the precise events that shaped his current politics. Former students and some of his onetime colleagues have told me and other journalists that they have trouble reconciling Walters’ political persona with the person they once knew. Walters didn’t seem keen on answering more questions about his evolution, either. He and his advisers were eager to talk when I first started reporting this story last year. But Walters canceled follow-up interviews as controversies piled up through the winter and spring.

Walters did suggest, though, that some of his political views intensified around the time he was nominated for the state’s teacher of the year award. He claims educators he encountered during that time “lashed out” at his support for school choice, though it’s not clear how stridently he made his views known publicly. He also remembered defending Thomas Jefferson during one teacher training that he said criticized the founder’s legacy as a slaveholder. His hard-right views later “crystallized” during his campaign, he said.

“I had these moments where I started to see what’s going on,” Walters said. “There was this dramatic shift, even in a state like Oklahoma, towards these associations and groups in place that are pushing a viewpoint that I just don’t see out of most Oklahomans.”

He started writing op-eds for conservative media outlets The Federalist and Daily Caller, where he suggested defying “unconstitutional court rulings” and criticized the Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage. Yet he hadn’t fully adopted his current culture warrior persona. In 2018, he served on a committee that helped write the state’s straightforward social studies curriculum — and praised the final product in 2019 without a single complaint about the type of “woke ideology” he denounces today.

Randy Hughes, McAlester’s former superintendent, would later describe Walters as “one of the most remarkable educators to have served students at McAlester Public Schools.”

And that could have been the extent of Walters’ career, if it wasn’t for a major political patron.

“This guy is nothing without the governor,” said one knowledgeable Oklahoma power broker who requested anonymity to discuss Walters because of the volatile political situation. “He is coaching tennis in McAlester without Kevin Stitt.”

The governor has said the two became friends after meeting at high school tennis tournaments during Stitt’s 2018 campaign while his daughter was competing, and Walters was coaching one of the other teams. “I just knew that his heart was all about kids, it was all about outcomes and it was all about becoming top 10 in education,” Stitt said of Walters in a 2021 Harding University video feature about Walters.

After the governor took office in 2019, Stitt appointed Walters to serve as a member of the state’s Commission for Educational Quality and Accountability. Weeks later, Walters became the executive director of Oklahoma Achieves, a nonprofit established by the state Chamber of Oklahoma in 2013 to advocate on education with the business community.

When he took the job, Walters insisted that he be allowed to continue teaching at McAlester — and start a new second teaching gig at an Oklahoma City high school — in a kind of hybrid in-person and virtual role that augured the sort of classes endured by millions beginning the following year. In the first Covid-19 summer of 2020, Oklahoma Achieves folded into a new nonprofit — with Walters still at the helm — called Every Kid Counts Oklahoma.

Stitt soon announced a $30 million federally funded school pandemic assistance program that featured private education tuition subsidies and grants for families to purchase remote learning curriculum, technology or tutoring. Every Kid Counts Oklahoma and Walters were responsible for awarding the remote learning funds.

The U.S. Education Department and local investigators later documented significant problems with how Oklahoma administered and spent school pandemic assistance funds. Authorities said Walters, in his role at Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, organized a meeting with a company known as ClassWallet before the state gave the firm a no-bid, $18 million contract to help administer Stitt’s tuition and remote learning initiatives. Those programs were also beset with improper spending and insufficient documentation, authorities said.

Back in 2020, though, those issues weren’t yet public knowledge. That September, Stitt cited Walters’ pandemic spending leadership when the governor appointed him as the state’s education secretary. Less than a year later, Walters launched his campaign for state superintendent.

'Our schools are not going to go woke’

Walters’ entry into electoral politics came at a time when Covid-19 and the country’s racial reckoning had Oklahoma primed to fight over education. Two months before Walters officially launched his campaign in July 2021, Stitt signed state laws that curtailed school mask mandates and barred educators from requiring courses or teaching concepts that cause individuals to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress” due to their race or gender.

During the campaign, Walters praised H.B. 1775, the state’s race and gender teaching requirement, when the American Civil Liberties Union launched a still-ongoing lawsuit to overturn the law. He said the Biden administration was “way out of line” after a state mask mandate ban sparked a fight with the White House. “Only a parent should be able to make the decision if their child receives the vaccines or wears a mask to school,” Walters said while hundreds of mask and vaccine opponents rallied at the state capitol.

By early 2022, Walters’ campaign was defined by taking stances on everyday education issues — such as early childhood reading, school choice, and private sector-friendly school reform — and weaponizing them with a culture war message that resonated with social conservatives. Republican Govs. Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis had already pioneered similar models in Virginia and Florida, noted Matt Langston, Walters’ main campaign aide who would eventually become his chief policy adviser after he took office.

“You can take education and put it into a much broader worldview,” Langston told me. “And that becomes a way of building a very credible base of individuals who may not be ‘education voters,’ but they are looking at it and saying ‘We’re very frustrated. We are very disenchanted with a lot of things that are happening within the country and the state.’”

Social media became a focal point for the campaign’s strategy. That left Walters facing a choice between positive messages that garnered a handful of retweets and impressions, or something darker.

“To be clear, in Oklahoma, our schools are not going to go woke," Walters said in a widely shared March 2022 video that praised the country’s Christian roots after a religious group criticized his embrace of the state race and gender law. He then wrote in a Fox News op-ed that “the far-left's attempts to destroy our nation's history and indoctrinate our children must be stopped.”

The next month Walters attacked a Stillwater Public Schools policy that had allowed students to use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, a policy that had been in place for years without incident, according to the district. “You have chosen radicals over your students, ideology over biology, and ‘wokeness’ over safety,” Walters told the board. The firestorm garnered more media coverage and culminated later in the year with a state law that restricted transgender students’ restroom use.

“When you start looking at those comparisons,” Langston said, “whether he weighs in on ‘We need more teacher pay’ or ‘Our teachers are the greatest here in the state and this is why’ versus rolling out a position on ‘We have to stop porn in schools,’ or ‘We have to stop liberal indoctrination’ — it's not even close to the amount of attention either one of those gets.”

The strategy paid off. Walters won 41 percent of the vote in a four-way GOP primary, then 53 percent in a party runoff. During the general election, he didn’t stray from appealing to the conservative base. He called to revoke the license of a high school teacher who resigned in opposition to Oklahoma’s banned-concepts law and accused his opponents of supporting “radical gender theory.” Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her spouse each donated to Walters. Americans for Prosperity and other national conservative groups sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to support Walters. Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz was another backer, and Walters posed for selfies with Youngkin ahead of the election.

Walters won with nearly 57 percent of the general election vote — putting him at the forefront of a new wave of Republican state school chiefs in Arizona, Idaho, Georgia, South Carolina and Wyoming.

‘They want to destroy your family’

The protesters crowded against the barricades outside Moms for Liberty’s summit in Philadelphia last summer may not have known about the teacher from McAlester. But one of the country’s most influential conservative education groups offered an ideal venue to build Walters’ national profile.

“The reality is the forces that you all are fighting — these are folks that want to destroy our society,” Walters told the gathering’s Republican audience during a panel with education chiefs from South Carolina, Arkansas and Florida.

“They want to destroy your family,” Walters said. “And they want to destroy America as we know it. This is the fight that we’re in, folks. The stakes couldn’t be higher.”

Walters has asserted that his political opponents are waging “civil war” against children and conspiring to topple religion, and he’s defended a highly disputed conservative philosophy that rejects the separation of church and state. “There’s no basis for it in the Constitution,” Walters told me. “This was not something the Founders talked about. This wasn’t a core fundamental principle. And what we’ve seen is the left weaponize this term to actually mean the state will promote atheism and target any other faiths.”

Instead, Walters wants to inject religion into public schooling. Last year, he called to enforce an Oklahoma law that requires a daily minute of silence at schools — and said students must be told they can pray during that time. He seized onto a dispute over a graduation ceremony prayer delivered by a Tulsa Public Schools board member amid a broader clash with former district chief Deborah Gist over academics and financial controls. (Walters even floated a state takeover of the district before Stitt downplayed the idea and Gist stepped down amid pressure from the superintendent and his allies.)

But most significantly, Walters has used his megaphone to support Oklahoma’s campaign to open explicitly religious public charter schools.

Religious liberty and public schools have tangled in the Supreme Court for decades. Yet church leaders and conservative advocates say Oklahoma’s campaign for religious public schools promises a monumental leap for school choice and religious liberty. Instead of simply giving families subsidies they can use on private school tuition — as other states have implemented — this new model promises a direct injection of taxpayer funds into religious schools that can hire educators, enroll students and teach classes based on church doctrine.

“We’re all looking at the same end in mind,” said Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, “which is ultimately breaking the monopoly of public schools on education so that parents have real, universal choice. That’s the end goal.”

A series of conservative arguments lie at the center of this campaign: Judeo-Christian beliefs are historically bound with education in the United States. Government has improperly imposed secular standards on public schools in an infringement on religious liberty. And public funding must support religious schools if the public is going to pay for education at all.

Some of those views got a boost from three Supreme Court cases that expanded faith-based institutions’ access to public funds — Carson v. Makin in 2022, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue in 2020, and Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer in 2017.

Former Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor, while leaving office after losing his primary to now-AG Drummond, cited those cases when he declared in 2022 that the state could not block churches from using taxpayer dollars to create public schools that teach religion like private schools.

Catholic authorities used O’Connor’s nonbinding opinion to justify their attempt to open the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would be the country’s first public charter to function as a religious institution. Groups aligned with the conservative legal movement and its financial architect, Leonard Leo, have promoted the publicly funded Christian school in the hopes of creating a test case that would change the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state.

“The Supreme Court has been wrong. There is no separation of church and state in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. It doesn’t exist,” Walters told a convening of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., last fall. “So we will bring God back to schools and prayer back in schools in Oklahoma, and we will fight back against that radical myth.”

The idea has divided even conservatives. Drummond withdrew O’Connor’s opinion under the argument that it misused “the concept of religious liberty by employing it as a means to justify state-funded religion” and he is suing to stop the school from opening. An array of civil rights groups, faith leaders and secular organizations have also sued to block the school and excoriated the embrace of religious orthodoxy in public education.

“What’s happening with Ryan Walters and his cabal is happening all around the country, as part of this emboldened Christian nationalist movement,” said Rachel Laser, who leads Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “And one of their key frontiers for making America a Christian nation and retaining their power and privilege in America is a takeover of public schools.”

Walters had weathered a bumpy start in office. Stitt reappointed him to continue serving as education secretary in January 2023, which would have granted Walters sweeping authority in an unusual double-barreled state role if lawmakers approved. But Drummond, the new Republican AG, soon opined that Walters could not legally hold two state offices, and later said the superintendent’s unilateral attempt to require schools to notify parents if their child changed their gender identity and ban "pornographic" library content should be voided. Just months into the job, Walters’ new employees told journalists the education department had become “toxic” after he took office.

“The culture changed within a matter of weeks,” said one of Walters’ former colleagues, who requested anonymity to discuss the superintendent’s tenure. “The real fear that people felt across the agency was not only that they might be fired but that they would be caught up in something illegal and they would be responsible for it. I had never seen a culture like that.”

In response to written questions about the staffing turmoil, Dan Isett, the department’s director of communications, said: “Many of the staff departures have been necessary and long needed to end a union stronghold in Oklahoma's education. Change is sometimes difficult and necessary.”

In April 2023, Stitt replaced Walters as education secretary with an Oklahoma State University professor. People close to the situation told me Walters was furious to be cut from a second role.

His replacement, Katherine Curry, then resigned just months after taking office citing the “complexity and political environment” surrounding the secretary job. Curry later told The Oklahoman that the state superintendent’s office would not turn over information on how the agency budgeted and spent money. Another department grant official, Pamela Smith-Gordon, abruptly left her office in the fall citing similar concerns. She also told the Tulsa World that she never saw Walters in the office.

“I don’t know if he doesn’t know what the job is that he ran for, or if he’s scared to do the job that he ran for, or he doesn’t know how to do the job that he ran for. What I do know is that he isn’t doing it,” Gist, the former head of Tulsa schools, told me a few days before she resigned. “The superintendent's actions have made it clear that he's focusing on political talking points rather than the real work of serving the community.”

‘We're being overshadowed by the antics of our state superintendent’

New controversies continue to blossom. Walters pushed out an Oklahoma City-area principal who moonlights as a drag queen. Walters reposted an altered version of a librarian’s satirical video that spurred school bomb threats when it was amplified by the Libs of TikTok account. Benedict’s death is now the subject of a federal Education Department civil rights investigation. Hostile onlookers are not an unusual presence at state board meetings.

And questions swirl about the superintendent’s potential legal entanglements and ability to work with policymakers. The FBI and state attorney general have investigated Walters’ stewardship of federal pandemic relief funds and activities related to campaign and nonprofit roles he held before winning office, according to four people with knowledge of the investigations who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. (Walters resigned his nonprofit job upon taking the superintendent position last year.) The Oklahoman first reported the existence of the FBI’s investigation.

Walters has not been formally accused of criminal wrongdoing. Drummond’s office declined to comment, saying it does not speak on the existence or nonexistence of any investigation. FBI policy prohibits confirming or denying the existence of an investigation, a bureau spokesperson said. Allegations of criminal conduct are reviewed by the FBI for their merit, the spokesperson added, but such reviews do not necessarily result in a full investigation.

Walters told me in August that he was not aware of whether he was a target of any state or federal investigation. “Ryan Walters has never been subpoenaed or questioned by federal law enforcement,” the superintendent’s spokesman said this month in a statement. “This has been an active lie promoted by the liberal media and jealous liberal activists. Superintendent Walters is transparent with taxpayer dollars and every program that he’s involved in.”

People with knowledge of the matter said federal agents have asked some of Walters’ former colleagues and supporters about the superintendent’s campaign fundraising and reporting practices. Former colleagues told me they witnessed the superintendent’s executive assistant at Every Kid Counts Oklahoma collecting campaign donations for Walters at fundraisers, raising questions about whether firewalls were in place to isolate Walters’ government work from the nonprofit and his political campaign. Authorities have also sought information on lax controls related to the millions of federal pandemic relief dollars that Walters helped oversee in his former nonprofit role.

Oklahoma State Auditor Cindy Byrd’s office is in the final stages of conducting a forensic audit of the state education department, a highly detailed investigation that often helps prosecutors investigate criminal allegations. The U.S. Education Department also conducted a routine review of the state’s implementation of federal programs earlier this year and is finalizing a report that will be shared with Walters’ office.

At the same time his national profile has increased, Walters has at times been sidelined on education policy at home. Oklahoma lawmakers have approved a massive tax credit program for private school tuition, teacher pay raises worth thousands of dollars, a $150 million school safety program, literacy programs and hundreds of millions of dollars in new education funding. “We did every bit of that without our state superintendent,” Republican state Rep. Rhonda Baker told me. “Because we knew that he could not be part of it or the whole thing would blow up.”

“In Oklahoma, the legislature is really trying to move the needle in education,” said Baker, a veteran educator and chair of key education committees in her chamber. “And frustratingly enough, we’re being overshadowed by the antics of our state superintendent.”

McBride, Baker and state House Speaker Charles McCall subpoenaed Walters for a series of records in late December, including his emails from his tenure at Every Kid Counts Oklahoma. Walters responded to most of their inquiries but said he couldn’t provide any emails. Lawmakers have managed to obtain a trove of his messages anyway, McBride told me. Ongoing controversy over Walters’ national media campaign has prompted notable criticism from Stitt and McCall. Walters’ office did not respond to questions about whether the superintendent believes he still has the governor’s support.

But even as he faces dissent from sectors of his party at home, his meteoric rise in the national spotlight hasn’t slowed down. Walters demurs when asked about his political ambitions, including a gubernatorial run. His spokesman added: “While he has many options for the future, those choices are for a later date.”

Even some of Walters' detractors agree that he’s tapped into deep-seated anger over a changing country. “He has become a lightning rod for decades of frustration,” Robert Franklin, a former Democrat who switched parties and leads the state’s virtual charter school board, told me.

You can hear that from the voters at the Tulsa County Men's Republican Club, or the Christian radio personalities who urge followers to take back their schools on long stretches of interstate that span between Oklahoma City, Tulsa, McAlester and beyond. A new generation is now in power.

“Folks are sick and tired of people that say one thing to get elected and go in and do the exact opposite once elected,” Walters told me last summer. “I looked every voter in the eye throughout the entire campaign and I told them what I was going to do.”