OK: Ryan Walters has Resigned For Cushy Anti-Union Gig

Ryan Walters announced Wednesday night that he was resigning as Oklahoma's Dudebro-in-chief for Education. He made the announcement, of course, on Fox. 

His new gig is right in line with his work over the past couple of years. He will be the new CEO of Teacher Freedom Alliance, whose aim, Walters says, is to dismantle teachers’ unions and align school curriculum with “American exceptionalism.”

Teacher Freedom Alliance is yet another of those anti-union groups for teachers. They just launched in March of this year, and the special guest was Ryan Walters himself. 

TFA (they really should have checked to see if the acronym was taken) is a project of the Freedom Foundation. Who are they? Well, their website gives us a good introduction to them:

The Freedom Foundation is more than a think tank. We’re more than an action tank. We’re a battle tank that’s battering the entrenched power of left-wing government union bosses who represent a permanent lobby for bigger government, higher taxes, and radical social agendas.

Their language when approaching teachers and other members of public sector unions is a lot about liberating public employees from political exploitation. Their language in spaces like fundraising letters is a bit more blunt:

The Freedom Foundation has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation ... we won’t be satisfied with anything short of total victory against the government union thugs.

Destroy unions and defund the political left. And they work hard at it, too. They have put an army of foot soldiers out there going door to door in hopes of turning an entire state blue. In one example, they sent activists dressed as Santa Claus to stand outside government buildings, where they told workers they could give themselves a holiday gift by exercising their right not to pay that portion of union dues that goes to political activity.

The foundation was launched in 1991 as the Evergreen Freedom Foundation by Lynn Harsh and Bob Williams. These days Harsh is VP of Strategy for the State Policy Network, the national network of right wing thinky tanks and advocacy groups founded in 1992 (it appears that the foundation may have helped with that launch). Her bio says she started out as a teacher and went on to found two private schools. Williams was a Washington state politician and failed gubernatorial candidate. He went on to work with SPN and ALEC, the conservative corporate legislation mill before passing away in 2022. SPN started giving out an award in his name in 2017.

The foundation is not small potatoes operation-- the staff itself is huge, and the foundation operates out of offices in five states (Washington, Oregon, California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania).

Longtime CEO Tom McCabe is now the Chairman of the Board, and he has been pretty clear in his aims. “Labor bosses are the single greatest threat to freedom and opportunity in America today,” he wrote in one fundraising letter. The current CEO is Aaron Withe, the guy who headed up the door-to-door campaign the get Oregon union members to quit their unions. Presumably he didn't go door to door with the same smarm evident in his company bio pic.

The foundation gets money from a variety of the usual suspects, including the Koch family foundations, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Donors Trust, Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, and the State Policy Network. The have gotten small mountains of money from the Bradley Foundation, which also heavily funds the anti-union Center for Union Facts.

Many of these same folks helped fund the Janus lawsuit that did away with Fair Share, and the Freedom Foundation was one of the groups that immediately started to work to get teachers to leave their unions.

The Freedom Foundation has tried various pr stunts to get teachers to quit the union, like the time they sent out Halloween mailers exhorting teachers to "Stop these money-sucking vampires and TAKE BACK YOUR PAYCHECK TODAY"

So what is TFA offering? For one thing, culture panic:

We are a group for teachers and by teachers, ready to change the direction of public education, returning us to traditional, American values. Excellence, not ideology.

On the website, that's in all caps. I spared you the shouting.

Turns out the "by teachers" part is a stretch. In addition to Withe as "president" the three members of "the team" include Rachel Maiorana is the Director of Marketing and Advocacy; she is also the former Deputy National Director of the Freedom Foundation after serving as California Outreach director since 2021. She was also a Campus Coordinator for Turning Point USA, after doing "brand ambassador work for Coke and serving as a cheerleading coach. Coms degree from Cal State Fullerton.

Director of Member Programs Ali Abshire joined the program in December 2024. Before that she was a Behavioral Health Specialist at Cincinatti Children's, a program officer at the Reagan Ranch, a nanny, a kitchen team member at Chick-fil-A in Lynchburg, and a manager at Zoup! Eatery! Her BS in psychology is from Liberty University in 2022.

Executive Director Eloise Branch came from the Director of Teacher Engagement post at Freedom Foundation, after a couple of years as curator at Young America's Foundation (a campus conservatives outfit) and teaching for two non-consecutive years at The Classical Academy. She got her BA in History from Grove City College in 2017. GCC is about 30 minutes away from me, and it has fashioned itself into a small Hillsdale College of PA.

So not exactly a deep bench of seasoned and experienced educators here. What benefits do they offer?

Well, there's "dignifying professional development." And when it comes to that Big Deal that everyone frets about-- liability insurance-- their offer is novel. You get a chance to piggy back on the liability coverage offered to two other "alternative" teacher unions. You can choose the Christian Education Association (you can read their story here) or the Association of American Educators (more about them here). Both are longstanding non-union unions, with CEA very Christ-in-the-classroom emphasis and AAE more aligned with the Fordham-AEI axis of reformsterdom. Neither is large enough to provide credible support for a teacher in a big-time lawsuit, nor am I sure how hard they'd try to defend someone accused of reading Naughty Books or doing socialist DEI things.

There's a third benefit offered, and that's "alternative curricula" which includes "alternative curriculums and teaching pedagogies ranging from the science of reading to classical mathematics to explicit instruction to the Socratic Method" which may lead one to ask "alternative to what?"

If you can't already guess based on the source of these folks, the website drops more hints about what these folks consider "alternative."

We exist to develop free, moral, and upright American citizens.

The launch party was attended by 50 whole educators and a bunch of Freedom Foundation staffers.

Also worth noting-- the Center for Media and Democracy reports that Freedom Foundation tried this on a smaller scale in the Miami-Dade district, where they backed another faux union and, aided by Governor Ron DeSantis-backed anti-union legislation. They promised that they would "bring the nation's third-largest teachers union to the brink of extinction." They did not-- teachers voted 83% to 17% to stick with their existing AFT affiliate.

TFA is mum on one other union function-- negotiating contracts. At the launch party, Withe promised that TFA would “provide benefits and resources that are far superior to anything that the teachers unions do.” He even made an emphatic gesture on "far." That's another piece of the free market fairy tale-- the free market will just pay teachers a whole lot. This is a silly argument. First of all, the free market doesn't work quite the same when you're talking about people paid with tax dollars. Second of all, the notion that people are just dying for the chance to pay great teachers a whole lot more, but that darned union is holding them back is unsupported by any reality-based evidence. You'll occasionally find young teachers declaring that left to their own devices, they could negotiate a far better deal than the union, and, oh, honey. What kind of leverage do you think you have. But even if you could, the finite pot of money that schools work with means that you would be negotiating against all the other teachers. Maybe teaching Thunderdome would be fun, but I doubt it.

People don't pay teachers much because A) they can't afford to and B) they don't want to. And C) they especially don't want to spend a lot on education for Those Peoples' Children. And this is especially true of folks like the Freedom Foundation, who do not want to end unions for the teachers own good but because A) ending the unions would hurt the Democratic party and B) without unions, it would be even easier to pay teachers bottom dollar.

At that same launch party, Ryan Walters said, "The Freedom Foundation-- it sounds too good to be true. I promise you it's not." I suspect he's right both times-- it's not too good, and it's not true.

But now he gets to steer this anti-union cultural warboat. 

Meanwhile, Gentner Drummond, the conservative GOP state attorney general who has been a thorn in Walters' side has offered his own "don't let the door hit you" thoughts on the departure:

Ever since Gov. Stitt appointed Ryan Walters to serve as Secretary of Education, we have witnessed a stream of never-ending scandal and political drama. From the mishandling of pandemic relief funds that resulted in families buying Xboxes and refrigerators to the latest squabbling with board members over what was or wasn't showing on TV [porn, probably], the Stitt-Waters era has been an embarrassment to our state...

It's time for a State Superintendent of Public Instruction who will actually focus on quality instruction in our public schools. Gov. Stitt used to say he would make us Top Ten, but after seven years we are ranked 50th in education. Our families, our students and our teachers deserve so much more.

Spoken like a man who A) has found Walters a constant pain in the ass and B) is running for governor.

Walters was a culture warrior for christianist nationalism who could be found more often trying to raise his national profile than in his office actually doing his job. His departure is good news for Oklahoma (though it's Oklahoma, so I expect a pretty conservative replacement). As for TFA, their website proudly boasts a whopping 2,733 teachers signed up for their anti-union union, so if they're meant to be a big national player, Walters has his work cut out for him, but he may just be the unserious man for this unserious job.