EXCLUSIVE — Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters accused the Biden administration of stifling education success and pushing liberal propaganda.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Walters, the elected head of Oklahoma schools, said the Biden administration has attempted to leverage its power to force his state and others to conform to its progressive policy goals.
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First elected to his position last year, Walters, a former history teacher, has made waves as he has pushed education policy in Oklahoma in a decidedly conservative direction. Under his watch, the state Department of Education approved a charter school application from a local Catholic diocese and approved curriculum content from PragerU for use in the state’s schools.
“You’ve got a bureaucracy [at the Department of Education] that’s so far out of control so far, spun up into a left-wing mission, that they have tremendously hindered our states from really taking back education and owning it,” Walters said.
The superintendent explained that education departments at the state level often feel like they are at the mercy of the department, which provides funds through grants but then will use letters to pressure states to enact certain programs such as diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Walters said the the federal department was requiring states that applied for a math grant to explain how they would use the grant to advance DEI.
“This doesn’t make any sense to us,” Walters said. “Instead of us focusing on math, we’ve got to focus on how our math programs meet these levers of diversity, equity, inclusion. It’s absurd.”
The Oklahoma superintendent said the Biden Department of Education has “continue[d] to push an ideology” that is geared toward “creat[ing] little social justice warriors.”
“The way that they view an education system is that we want to create our own cultural revolution inside our schools,” Walters said. “They’ve done it with the media, they have done it with pop culture at large, and they’ve been pushing it in education.”
Walters also criticized the department for hamstringing schools from implementing effective discipline policies, which he said creates an expectation among schoolchildren that they are not responsible for their own actions, which leads to disorder in the classroom.
“The Biden administration is trying to roll back any kind of discipline policies in schools,” he said. “What we should be doing is bringing order back to the classroom and, frankly, bringing order back to society, but that’s got to start there with your kids.”
Despite the antagonistic relationship with the federal department, Walters vowed that states like Oklahoma are going to continue fighting against the administration’s policies.
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“We’re gonna fight the Biden administration every step of the way,” Walters said. “We’re not going to let the federal government slow us down on this.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Department of Education for comment.
