In a video recorded days after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Ryan Walters sits behind a desk, stares into a camera, and instructs Oklahoma students to join him in prayer for the president-elect.
After a preamble accusing a “radical left” of attacking “religious liberty” and “woke teachers’ unions” mocking patriotism and instilling a “hatred” of America in students, Walters, the Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction, bows his head in prayer.
“Dear God, thank you for all the blessings you have given our country. I pray for our leaders to make the right decisions,” he says. “I pray in particular for President Donald Trump and his team as they continue to bring about change to the country.”
In the video, Walters tells students they don’t have to join him. But an email to all public schools in the state says his office is “requiring all of Oklahoma schools to play the attached video to all kids that are enrolled.”
Walters, 39, is a prominent personality in a growing nationwide movement to integrate religion and the president’s brand of national conservatism into virtually every aspect of American life. Schools are on the frontline.
Since winning statewide election in 2022, Walters oversees a system in which he believes schools have developed into “terrorist training camps.” To combat what he believes is a left-wing plot to “rewrite history,” he mandated copies of the Bible and Ten Commandments in all classrooms with “immediate and strict compliance.” He labeled the state teachers’ union a “terrorist organization” and threatened to suspend licenses for “woke” teachers. He appointed far-right social media personality Chaya Raichik, who runs Libs of TikTok, to a state library committee. Under his watch, the state approved the nation’s first-ever Catholic public charter school, which the state’s highest court determined was an unconstitutional “slippery slope” infringement of the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court will now decide whether it can stand.
Last month, he ushered through sweeping changes to academic standards that introduce 2020 election conspiracy theories into school curriculums.
“It’s disturbing,” state Senate Minority Leader Julia Kirt told The Independent.
“People in Oklahoma are just in shock that we can’t do more to make him spend money appropriately, to get him to not use his office to advance his own political career,” she said. “It takes his time, it takes public money, and then we see these policies being brought forward that are not in the best interest of our schools or our kids.”
On May 7, a group of Oklahoma parents, grandparents and teachers represented by the state’s former Republican attorney general filed a lawsuit calling on a judge to nullify the new academic standards.
The lawsuit from former attorney general Mike Hunter alleges the process for approving the rules was so flawed that they might not have been legal by the time they reached state lawmakers.
The seven plaintiffs — including three parents, two grandparents and two public school teachers — argue the standards present a “distorted view of social studies that intentionally favors an outdated and blatantly biased perspective.”
The Independent has requested comment from Walters.
Born in McAlester, home of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, Walters was baptized at the local Main and Oklahoma Church of Christ. Like his parents, Randy and Debbie, Walters attended Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas, which is associated with Churches of Christ. He met his wife Katie at the university, and together they had four children.
Walters attributes his love for history and the Bible to his late grandfather Franklin “Dee” Delano Ball, who died in 2020 at age 86.
“He was kind of the history guru who really got me going down that route,” he told The Christian Chronicle last year. “And frankly … my grandfather was the one where we really started having these conversations about what happened when they took the Bible out of school.”
His father Randy Walters is a minister and mother Debbie Walters is an elementary education director for North Town Church of Christ in the family's hometown.
“Simply Christians,” the church advertises. “Are you confused by so many different religious teachings? God’s plan is simple and enjoyable to learn from the Bible. God’s Word is the only source of our teaching.”
Walters’s high school English and history teachers, whose lessons and stories “came to life” in their classrooms, inspired him to pursue teaching, he said in a 2021 video interview for Harding, which named him an Outstanding Young Alumnus.
“I just wanted to do that for young people,” he said. “I can remember being in those classes, hearing those stories, seeing the application and wanting to do that for young people.”
He returned to his hometown McAlester High School to teach advanced courses in world history, U.S. history and government, even becoming a finalist for the State Teacher of the Year in 2016.
In 2019, he left full-time teaching to become executive director of Oklahoma Achieves, a nonprofit education organization created by the state’s chamber of commerce. That group transitioned into Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, funded by national school privatization advocates including Walton Family Foundation and another group founded by Charles Koch.
After striking up a friendship with Governor Kevin Stitt through high school tennis tournaments, the governor appointed Walters the state’s secretary of education in 2020. Two years later, Walters ran for state schools superintendent, beating three Republican candidates in a closely watched primary and defeating a Democratic candidate by roughly 15 percentage points.
But in office, inheriting the ostensibly unglamorous role of overseeing a troubled public school system, Walters has been accused of ethics violations, mishandling campaign funds, and flouting open records and open meetings laws while advancing his agenda — drawing heat from both Oklahoma Democrats as well as Republicans.
Last year, then-Republican state Rep. Mark McBride, an outspoken critic of Walters, requested that Joe Biden’s administration and Oklahoma’s attorney general investigate the superintendent.
Walters has turned the education department into “a staging ground for his next campaign,” McBride wrote in a recent column for The Oklahoman, the state’s largest daily newspaper.
“These aren’t the actions of a leader focused on students — they’re the moves of someone chasing national political ambitions on the public’s dime,” McBride wrote. “Oklahomans aren’t willing to sit idly by while the superintendent rides off into the sunset chasing his political dreams at the expense of Oklahoma taxpayers.”
In a move that signals national political ambitions, Walters hired a Washington, D.C.-based public relations firm, and he maintains a team of political consultants on the state’s payroll. He speaks glowingly of Trump in his regular Fox News appearances, and has written at least nine columns for the right-wing media company’s website.
For some, Walters is merely a higher-profile and media-savvy symptom of a vastly larger issue. Republican officials nationwide, including within Trump’s administration, are leveraging moral panics and civil liberty fears to portray public education — a cornerstone of democracy — as leftist indoctrination, laying the groundwork for its dismantling and privatization.
Before Walters entered office, state lawmakers and Governor Stitt approved HB 1775, criticized by civil rights groups as an “educational gag order” that attempts to restrict school speech around issues related to race, sex and gender, and used as a cudgel against public education broadly by threatening to revoke teachers’ licenses if found in violation. Dozens of similar bills were filed across the country as schools and libraries emerged as a battleground for politics and special interest groups during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2022, teacher Summer Boismier, who taught primarily high school-age students for a decade, was alarmed by the “environment of fear” that HB 1775 created for teachers, parents and students, she told The Independent.
In her classroom, she shared a QR code that provided students’ access to the Brooklyn Public Library’s Books UnBanned program. She received complaints from parents hours later. She then resigned in protest.
Walters accused her of breaking the law, and the Oklahoma State Board of Education revoked her license in 2024.
“What happens in Oklahoma is a bellwether for what can, and will, happen in other places,” Boismier told The Independent. “We should all be concerned when we look at the state of public education in Oklahoma and the way that the far right is asserting and inserting bigotry into the very fabric of what public education is intended to do.”
Last month, a federal judge tossed out her defamation lawsuit against the superintendent. Walters called the decision a “big win” against “political indoctrination.”
His agenda and legislation like HB 1775 force teachers “to hold students at arm’s length and to approach parents, guardians and caregivers with caution and suspicion, and that is not a recipe for a quality meaningful public education,” Boismier said.
Last month, newly proposed academic standards backed by Walters and loaded with Christian doctrine and alluding to political conspiracy theories went into effect after the state’s Republican-dominated legislature effectively did nothing to stop them.
Students will now be required to “identify discrepancies” in the 2020 presidential election, appearing to amplify a baseless narrative that the election was fraudulent. Students will learn about “the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps” and “an unforeseen record number of voters,” appearing to repeat unsupported claims that bolster bogus conspiracy theories surrounding election results.
Walters also announced that the number of mentions of the Bible in the new standards increased from two to nearly 50.
Public school students as young as six years old will learn about the Ten Commandments and David and Goliath, and by the time children finish middle school, they will have received several lessons about the Bible’s influence on the Founding Fathers. High school students will learn about early Christians and the history of Christianity.
Oklahoma educators — already facing too-large class sizes with not enough resources to support them — are now staring down new curriculum standards they are not prepared to teach, according to Senator Kirt, the mother of an eighth grader and an 11th grader in Oklahoma schools.
“The kind of conversations that parents are going to have with their kids to try to focus on facts and focus on critical thinking is going to be extra challenging with these new standards,” said Kirt, adding that she fears more teachers will leave the job because of them.
After the end of the legislative session, Walters hailed the passage of “the most unapologetically conservative, pro-America social studies standards in the nation.”
Faith leaders in Oklahoma are also warning against figures like Walters using Christianity to advance a certain political ideology.
“When we think about religion in schools, and specifically the angle of Christian nationalists, what they’re really trying to do with religion is co-opt culture,” according to the Rev. Dr. Shannon Fleck, a native Oklahoman and director of Faithful America, a social justice-driven Christian coalition.
“They’re doing that by utilizing the language of Christianity, but warping it,” she said. “The hope is that they then have the power and control to shape what moral thought is, to shape what moral behavior looks like, and, inevitably, what we know as morality will disappear because the real morality is being taught in our schools and preached from our White House lawn.”
