OK: The Legislature Puts Ryan Walters In A Box

Ryan Walters was a spectacularly bad choice for Oklahoma State Superintendent, but the voters elected him anyway. Now the legislature--including and especially some fellow Republicans--are putting a leash on him. 

Walters established right off the bat that the new office would not reduce his affection for petty political anti-public ed antics. Just in the last week he decided to order that the portraits highlighting the Oklahoma Educators Hall of Fame be removed from the Oklahoma State Department of Education building. It pissed a lot of people off.

The stated reason was to remove the Hall of Fame in order to put up pictures honoring parents and students, though nobody seems to believe that there's some kind of critical shortage of wall space. And Walters, always willing to add gasoline to a fire, issued a statement:

All the photographs will be sent to the local teachers’ unions. When my administration is over, the unions can use donor money and their lobbyists to take down photographs of students and parents and reinstall the photographs of administrators and bureaucrats.

Walters has also proposed a new rule barring any school districts from having books with "sexualized content" in libraries K-12. This would go beyond the usual "pornography" definition into vague territory, but the rule would be used to downgrade a district's accreditation because of "willful noncompliance." 

"Downgraded accreditation as a violation for vague rules" is a touchy subject in Oklahoma, a state where two school districts had their accreditation reduced because of alleged violation of Oklahoma's spectacularly vague anti-CRT law which allows for such downgrade without anything resembling due process by the state board that is now loaded with Governor Stitt appointees.

And the new sexualized content rule was only one of Superintendent Walters's bright ideas. He has also formally proposed a rule to require school staff and teachers to out children to their parents, disclosing “any information known to the school district or its employees regarding material changes reasonably expected to be important to parents regarding their child’s health, social, or psychological development, including Identity information.”

So a whole bunch of new rules that could be used to threaten a school district's accreditation.

All of which was enough to push some Republican lawmakers to slap a legislative leash on Walters.

Calling it a direct response to the newly proposed rules, Rep. Mark McBride proposed a bill to defang Walters and the state board.

“The Legislature, and not just the state superintendent and a board that has no common education experience, should have input on schools’ accreditation status,” McBride said.

HB 2569, as amended, declares "a moratorium on additional accreditation rules approved and imposed upon school districts by the State Board of Education without specific legislative statutory authorization." In other words, no more sudden knee-jerk rule changes from you or your rubber stamp squad without legislative approval.

As reported by Rep. John Waldron (co-author of HB 2569) on the Twitter machine today, the House Education Committee landed pretty hard on Walters. I'm going to paste some of this thread here for your edification.

Further down the thread, after a poster says it's great that McBride recognizes "how dangerous and destructive Walters is to education," Waldron replies, "We all do." 

It's not the biggest victory ever, but it is a nice reminder that not everyone is 100% all in on the Stitt-Walters program to disrupt, defund, and dismantle public ed. Just, you know, 87% or so. Stay tuned.