Whack-a-Mole
Ryan Walters is the mole of Oklahoma politics. Whack him when he buys curricular materials from a sketchy conservative blowhard, and the next thing you know he’s snapping up Bibles for classrooms. Whack him for the Bible thing and he’s threatening to take over your schools. He already demanded the head of Tulsa’s superintendent on a platter and extracted compliance in a show of brute force. The result was a sorry episode of scrambling disruption and pointless pilgrimages to appease a petty tyrant.
What he has never done is to improve the quality of education, or lead us in an exercise of serious self-evaluation. Everything seems calculated to agitate the electorate with a preening show of post-conservative orthodoxy.
The great prize for Walters seemed to be serving as a courtier in Mordor, bowing to the new administration in Washington. When that didn’t work, he burrowed his way back to Oklahoma for a round of threats against migrant children. It says a lot when Linda McMahon, the doyenne of professional wrestling and soon-to-be Secretary of Education, doesn’t want you to help gut the department she has been tapped to lead.
Governor Kevin Stitt seems to feel the same. Exhausted by Walters’ incessant grandstanding, he just dismissed three Walters partisans on the Board of Education and nominated three presumably moderate replacements. The official reason was the poor performance by Oklahoma students on a recent round of proficiency tests, but you get the feeling that this is a case of buyer’s remorse. Walters is simply too ideologically charged for even a red state electorate and the governor who chose him.
Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers are doing the right thing. Word just broke that State Senator Adam Pugh, Republican of Edmond has put forth a bill that would raise starting pay for teachers to $50,000. He says it’s a good-sense market-driven proposal, and I agree. If that’s what teachers are getting in Arkansas and Texas, we should offer the same. Other Republican lawmakers seem ready to back him. As far as I can tell, Walters has said nothing about this issue.
I don’t believe that even MAGA voters will stand for much more, and that gives me hope. There comes a time when frantic, agitated extremism loses its charm and the people begin to long for competent leadership that promises concrete gains. That’s what put President Biden in office, even if he was done in by inflation and the optics of his decrepitude. But Oklahomans are sensible people, and the relentless churn of politicians like Walters will soon lose ground to capability and self-restraint.