Overview:
Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s controversial state superintendent who pushed religion into public schools and clashed with teacher unions, will resign at the end of the month to lead the conservative Teacher Freedom Alliance.
Ryan Walters, the state school superintendent who implemented Bibles in all public classrooms in the state, will resign from his position effective the end of this month.
Elected in 2022, Walters spent his tenure as head of schools routinely injecting religion into the States’ public schools, and he will join the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a nonprofit focused on limiting the impact of teacher unions, in the chief executive position. According to their website, “Walters fearlessly fights the woke liberal union mob,” the group said Thursday on its website.
While the announcement was a surprise for some, many advocates of public education view this resignation as a “win” for Oklahoma’s public schools.
Randi Weingarten, the President of the American Federation of Teachers, dismissed Walters’ new role.
“Teachers are more unionized than any other profession, and the Freedom Foundation’s post-Janus campaign to convince teachers to drop their union has been a dismal failure,” she said. “Schools are about helping kids develop the passion and purpose to pave pathways to a better life — and that means working together, not going to war, a lesson Walters appears not to have learned.”
Even Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond commented that the chaos brought by Walter’s tenure has impacted teaching and learning in the state.
“Ever since Gov. Stitt appointed Ryan Walters to serve as Secretary of Education, we have witnessed a stream of never-ending scandal and political drama. From the mishandling of pandemic relief funds that resulted in families buying Xboxes and refrigerators to the latest squabbling with board members over what was or wasn’t showing on TV, the Stitt-Walters era has been an embarrassment to our state.”
In June 2024, Walters ordered that all public schools in Oklahoma must teach the Ten Commandments. Most recently, he said that all schools in the state would have a chapter of Turning Point USA, founded by Charlie Kirk, who was killed earlier this month. In addition, under his tenure, he adopted a social studies learning standard that echoed Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was won due to voter fraud.
Earlier this year, he required teachers from out of state who wanted to be certified in Oklahoma to take a “woke test” to combat “woke indoctrination”.
In addition, Walters appointed Chaya Raichik, a Brooklyn-based creator of the Libs of TikTok social media account dedicated to harassing liberals and LGBTQ+ people, to Oklahoma’s Library Media Advisory Committee. Raichik had no educational background, no ties to Oklahoma, and no children in the state’s schools.
A former Advanced Placement history and government teacher from McAlester, Oklahoma, Walters was a proponent of expanding access to charter schools and private school vouchers with a public push for religious charter schools, but the Supreme Court rejected the advance.
During a state board of education meeting earlier this summer, Walters was accused of playing inappropriate material on the television in his office. Most recently, Walter directed schools to observe a moment of silence in the middle of the day in honor of Charlie Kirk, who was killed on Sept. 10 in Utah. However, several districts decided not to follow the directive, stating that they already observe moments of silence every morning for student reflection.
The Teacher Freedom Alliance was founded in 2025 by the Freedom Foundation, a conservative group that seeks to limit the influence of public sector unions. This group, now led by Walters, would help teachers who hoped to stop paying union dues due to their support of the “liberal” politics.
