Oklahoma Is Ground Zero in Trump’s “America First” Education Push — ProPublica

The future that the Trump administration envisions for public schools is more patriotic, more Christian and less “woke.” Want to know how that might play out? Look to Oklahoma.

Oklahoma has spent the past few years reshaping public schools to integrate lessons about Jesus and encourage pride about America’s history, with political leaders and legislators working their way through the conservative agenda for overhauling education.

Academics, educators and critics alike refer to Oklahoma as ground zero for pushing education to the right. Or, as one teacher put it, “the canary on the prairie.”

By the time the second Trump administration began espousing its “America First” agenda, which includes the expansion of private school vouchers and prohibitions on lessons about race and sex, Oklahoma had been there, done that.

The Republican supermajority in the state Legislature — where some members identify as Christian nationalists — passed sweeping restrictions on teaching about racism and gender in 2021, prompting districts to review whether teachers’ lessons might make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish” or other psychological distress about their race. The following year, it adopted one of the country’s first anti-transgender school bathroom bills, requiring students to use restrooms and locker rooms consistent with the gender they were assigned at birth or face discipline.

While he was state schools superintendent, Ryan Walters demanded Bibles be placed in every classroom, created a state Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism, and encouraged schools to use online “pro-America” content from conservative media nonprofit PragerU. He called teachers unions “terrorist” organizations, railed against “woke” classrooms, threatened to yank the accreditation of school districts that resisted his orders and commissioned a test to measure whether teacher applicants from liberal states had “America First” knowledge.

Many of the changes endorsed by the state’s leaders have elements of Christian nationalism, which holds that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and often downplays troubling episodes in the country’s history to instead emphasize patriotism and a God-given destiny.

Walters, who declined to comment for this story, resigned at the end of September and became CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, an arm of the conservative think tank Freedom Foundation that aims to “fight the woke liberal union mob.” But much of the transformation in Oklahoma education policy that he helped turbocharge is codified in the state’s rules and laws.

“We are the testing ground. Every single state needs to pay attention,” warned Jena Nelson, a moderate Democrat who lost the state superintendent’s race to Walters in 2022 and is now running for Congress.

ProPublica has reported that Education Secretary Linda McMahon has brought in a team of strategists who are working to radically shift how children will learn in America, even as they carry out the “final mission” to shut down the federal agency. Some of those strategists have spoken of their desire to dismantle public education. Others hope to push it in the same direction as Oklahoma.

Walters tapped the president of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that published Project 2025 and the blueprints that preceded it, to help rewrite Oklahoma’s social studies standards. The Legislature did not reject the rewrite, so the standards now include roughly 40 points about the Bible, Jesus and Christianity that students should learn as well as skepticism about the 2020 presidential election results and the origins of COVID-19. If the new standards survive a legal challenge, they could be in place until they’re up for review again in six years.

But while Oklahoma made these shifts, it has consistently ranked near the bottom on national measures of student performance. Scores on eighth grade reading and math in national evaluations are abysmal. Only New Mexico’s proficiency rates rank lower. The high school dropout rate is one of the highest in the country, while spending on education is one of the lowest. Only three other states — Utah, Idaho and Arizona — spend less per pupil. And in the most recent federal data about average teacher pay, Oklahoma tied with Mississippi for dead last. Many school superintendents and parents say state leaders have been fixated on the wrong things if the goal is to improve schools.

“The attention to the culture war thing means that there’s a lot of distraction from the basic needs of kids being met,” said Aysha Prather, a parent who has closely followed changes in state education policy. Her transgender son is a plaintiff in a 2022 lawsuit challenging the state’s bathroom ban. That case remains on appeal.

“The school should be the nicest, happiest, best resourced place in a community,” she added. “That’s how we show that we value kids. And that is obviously not how most of our Legislature or state government feels about it.”

In a statement to ProPublica, the new state superintendent, Lindel Fields, said that he’s sorting through previous rules and edicts that have created “much confusion” for schools, including about the standards and the PragerU teacher certification tests. He said the public rightfully has questions about how the state Education Department changes after Walters’ tenure, but “given all these pressing tasks, we simply don’t have time for looking backward. Whether we are 50th or 46th or 25th in education, we have work to do to move our state forward,” Fields wrote. He said his first tasks are “resolving a number of outstanding issues that are hindering operations” including creating a budget for the agency.

Public school superintendents do not oppose all of the mandates from the past several years. When Walters directed schools last year to place Bibles in every classroom and teach from them, one district superintendent emailed to thank him for offering “cover” to incorporate Bible-focused lessons, according to news reports.

Another superintendent, Tommy Turner of Battiest Public Schools, said students at his schools have always had access to the Bible. The district still puts on a Christmas program and observes a moment of silence to start the day, and the school board prays before meetings.

“Christ never left the school,” he said in an interview in his office.

A lifelong Republican who works in a remote stretch of southeast Oklahoma, Turner said he is concerned about the state’s priorities and doesn’t see Bibles as the most pressing issues.

In his district, the cafeteria needs repairs even after the emergency replacement of a roof that had a gaping hole in it. Many of his teachers work second jobs on weekends because the pay’s so low. Nail heads are poking through the gym’s thin hardwood floors. The district has lost 15% of its students to an online charter school and homeschooling. Voters have rejected three bond issues in a row for building repairs and renovations.

Turner said he’d like to retire, but he loves the students and wants to protect his little district. He put on his cowboy hat, apologized for the pile of dead wasps on his office floor — the infestations barely register anymore — and walked over to the high school. He said he hadn’t even read the new social studies standards.

“I don’t have time to chase every rabbit,” he said. “I’ve got a school to run.”

Patriotism and Jesus

The changes to Oklahoma’s curriculum rules don’t just touch on national issues around race and gender. Here, teachers aren’t supposed to tell students that the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 — a defining incident of racial violence in Oklahoma history — was perpetrated by racists.

State social studies standards for years have included discussion of how white Tulsans murdered as many as 300 Black people. But once the 2021 state law that restricted teaching about race and gender passed, some teachers avoided the topic.

The law prohibits teachers from singling out specific racial groups as responsible for past racism. It specifies that individuals of a certain race shouldn’t be portrayed as inherently racist, “whether consciously or unconsciously.” In addition to teachers’ licensure being on the line, repeated failure to comply would allow the state to revoke district accreditation, which could result in a state takeover.

When educators questioned how to teach about a race massacre without running afoul of the law, state legislators and the Tulsa County chapter of the conservative parent group Moms for Liberty weighed in to say that white people today shouldn’t feel shame and that the massacre’s perpetrators shouldn’t be cast as racists. A Moms for Liberty chapter representative did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

At a speaking engagement at the Norman Public Library in 2023, Walters suggested teachers present the facts about the murders but should not say “the skin color determined it.” Even two years after the law went into effect, news reports said teachers were still treading lightly on the race massacre, wary of the state suspending or revoking their licenses for exposing students to prohibited concepts. Those fears are not hypothetical; the state has revoked at least one teacher’s license and suspended two others’.

Other historic episodes that reveal racism also are getting a new look in Oklahoma through the state’s partnership with PragerU Kids, which creates short-form videos to counter what its founder believes is left-wing ideology in schools.

Teachers in the state aren’t required to use the videos, but some like them and show them in class. The videos align with conservatives’ push to teach a positive view of America’s past and with the state’s rules on teaching about race and gender. For instance, PragerU Kids’ version of Booker T. Washington’s story is a cheery lesson in self-sufficiency and acceptance. Once freed from slavery, Washington toiled in coal mines, worked as a janitor in exchange for formal education and became a great American orator and leader of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

The video does not linger on his being born into “the most miserable, desolate and discouraging surroundings” or, as he wrote in his autobiography, that slavery was “a sin that at some time we shall have to pay for.”

“America was one of the first places on Earth to outlaw slavery,” a cartoon version of Washington tells two time-traveling children in the PragerU video, so “I am proud and thankful.” (The U.S. did ban importing slaves in 1808, but it did not enforce that law and did not outlaw owning people altogether until 1865, after Britain, Denmark, France and Spain had done so.)

The Washington character says in the video that he devoted his life to teaching people “the importance of independence and making themselves as valuable as possible.” And when one child says she’s sorry that he and other Black Americans faced segregation and discrimination, Washington thanks her for her sympathy but assures the child, who is white, that she’s done nothing wrong.

Echoing a conservative talking point, the cartoon Washington says, “Future generations are never responsible for the sins of the past.”

Jermaine Thibodeaux, a historian at the University of Oklahoma, said he is familiar with the PragerU videos and considers them an ideological tool of a “reeducation project nationwide” that can be misleading.

“I don’t think that’s something Washington necessarily uttered,” he said of the quote about future generations.

The value Washington placed on independence, Thibodeaux added, was “predicated on the notions of self-sufficiency post-slavery, when there was little help coming from the government.”

A spokesperson for PragerU declined to comment for this story.

Pressure to keep squeezing social justice and LGBTQ+ issues out of classrooms has been intensifying since 2021, when Republican state lawmakers began pushing “dirty book” legislation that would censor school libraries. One bill, which didn’t pass, called for firing school employees and fining offenders $10,000 each time they “promoted positions in opposition to closely held religious beliefs of the student.” That was the backdrop when the state accused Summer Boismier of “moral turpitude” and then revoked her teaching license last year.

The English department at Norman High School near Oklahoma City told Boismier and her colleagues they needed to pull titles that might be considered racially divisive or contain themes about sex and gender. Or they could turn books around on the shelves so students couldn’t see the titles.

“I remember just sitting in my seat shaking. I had colleagues in the room who were in tears,” Boismier said. Given the choice to purge books or hide their covers, Boismier did neither. She wrapped her classroom’s bookshelf in red butcher paper and wrote “books the state doesn’t want you to read” on it in black marker. She added a QR code linking to the Brooklyn Public Library, where students could get a library card and virtual access to books considered inappropriate in Oklahoma, then posted a photo of it all on social media.

Boismier, who resigned in protest of the 2021 law, challenged the license revocation in court, and the case is ongoing. She said she does not regret taking a stand against a law she views as unjust. The state has argued the revocation is valid.

“I am living every teacher in Oklahoma’s worst nightmare right now,” she said. “I am unemployable.”

In the Battiest district, where Turner is superintendent, an elementary reading teacher told ProPublica that just to be safe, she removed books about diversity and including others who are different. She said that was uncomfortable; half of her students are Native American, and so is she.

Adopted this year, the state’s new social studies standards provide even more specifics about what should be taught. They include the expectation that students know “stories from Christianity that influenced the American Founders and culture, including the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (e.g., the ‘Golden Rule,’ the Sermon on the Mount),” to second graders. A state court last month issued a temporary stay on requiring schools to follow the standards while a lawsuit against them plays out.

In addition, the new standards accept Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. They dictate that ninth graders learn about “discrepancies” in election results including “the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters” and other unsupported conservative talking points. The Trump campaign and supporters filed at least 60 lawsuits covering these points; nearly all were dismissed as meritless or were decided against Trump. The election skepticism standard has left the superintendent of a roughly 2,000-student district north of Tulsa confused. He said he and other superintendents are unsure how they would navigate those but are hopeful that “standards rooted in fact prevail.”

“There comes a point where curriculum cannot be opinion,” said the superintendent, who didn’t want to be named because he feared retaliation. “I’m not trying to get involved in conspiracy theories.”

Fear and Resistance

The push by state leaders to embed more Christian values in schools isn’t what keeps many superintendents in the rural parts of the state up at night. They say the Bible has never left their classrooms.

“I am smack-dab right in the middle of the Bible Belt,” said the leader of a tiny district on the western side of the state. “We are small, but we have seven churches. You’re talking ‘Footloose’ here.”

While she doesn’t disagree with everything the Legislature and Walters have done, she said she feels like some of their actions undermine public schools and could “shut down rural Oklahoma.”

She and other leaders of public school districts worry that the state’s expanded school choice program, which allows families to get tax credits if they attend private and religious schools, will draw away students from their districts and, ultimately, erode their funding. Congress passed the first federal private school tax credit in July.

It’s just the second year of the statewide tax credit program approved by the Legislature that allows students to use public funds to attend private and religious schools. The credits cost the state nearly $250 million in tax revenue this school year and subsidizes almost 40,000 students. That money, superintendents say, is desperately needed in their districts.

The state also has encouraged the growth of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run and subject to fewer regulations. Last year, the state’s third-largest district, behind the Oklahoma City and Tulsa districts, wasn’t a traditional one. It was EPIC, a statewide online charter school. Walters and Gov. Kevin Stitt supported St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in its efforts to become the country’s first religious charter school. The Supreme Court blocked it from opening.

Even communities with few private schools feel threatened by the state’s push toward privatization. At Nashoba Public School, in a rural part of southeast Oklahoma where there’s little else but timber and twisting roads, the roughly 50 kids who make up the elementary and middle grades are taught in split-grade classrooms. Like hundreds of other Oklahoma districts, more than three-quarters of which are rural, it’s not just a school, it’s the school; there are no private schools in Pushmataha County.

When students enroll in charter schools, they often take funding with them while districts have to maintain operations as before.

“You starve your public schools to feed your private schools and charter schools,” said Nashoba Superintendent Charles Caughern Jr. “Our foundation was set up for a free and appropriate education for all kids. All kids!”

Caughern fears students with disabilities will suffer as public schools are weakened. Private schools don’t have to admit students with disabilities, and many won’t, he said.

Erika Wright, a parent who leads the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition, which advocates for public schools, said the state’s deep-red politics might lead outsiders to think Oklahomans support state leaders pushing education far to the right. But that’s not the case, Wright said.

“They don’t understand what’s happening,” Wright said. “They just assume that public schools are always going to be there because they’ve always been there in their lifetime. I think the average Oklahoman does not understand the gravity and complexity of what is taking place.”

That’s not to say there isn’t resistance. A group of about 15 parents and public school advocates that Walters derided as the “woke peanut gallery” goes to State Board of Education meetings — a visual reminder that people care about education policy and public schools. A suburban Oklahoma City district is devising plans to deliver all of the Bible lessons contained in the new social studies standards on the same day, giving parents an easy way to have their children opt out. Court challenges to some of the state’s right-wing policies are pending.

Some are hopeful that Oklahoma will recalibrate the more extreme policies that marked Walters’ tenure. The State Board of Education last week decided not to revoke the licenses of two teachers who Walters wanted punished for their social media posts about Trump. The new superintendent said he would drop Walters’ plan to distribute Bibles to every classroom.

But many of the significant changes in classrooms came out of the Legislature, which has continued this year to propose bills to rid schools of “inappropriate materials” and proclaim that, in Oklahoma, “Christ is King.” A lot of damage already has been done to public schools, said Turner, the Battiest superintendent.

He was only half-joking when he said some parents have been “brainwashed” by right-wing TV news and Oklahoma leaders’ talk of liberal indoctrination to think the district is teaching kids to be gay or converting Christian kids into atheists.

A couple of years ago, one mom stopped him in the parking lot at school to say she was withdrawing her child from the district because its teaching didn’t align with her values. The superintendent was floored.

“That’s the power of the rhetoric,” Turner said.

He said he used to sit a couple of pews behind that mom in church every Sunday.