After Ryan Walters decided to officially leave the job he hardly ever showed up for in order to take a cushy anti-teacher union job, leaders in Oklahoma decided that maybe they would like to have someone leading the department of education who was actually interested in, you know, education.
So they tagged Lindel Fields for the job. Fields is an Oklahoma educator whose online footprint "appears strictly professional and highly focused on education and leadership" says KJRH reporter Erin Christy. Fields is a former superintendent and CEO Tri County Tech, one of the state's technology centers; Fields was at Tri County from 1999 through 2021, when he left to start Your Culture Coach. ("Elevating education leaders and transforming cultures to recruit and retain passionate, loyal team members through world class training.") He has volunteered for The United Way and is a Rotarian. He does not appear to be the kind of guy who will hire a personal publicist and spend his time running off to wag his jaw at Fox.
As Sasha Ndisabiye and Bennett Brinkman reported for NonDoc, Walters was not trying very hard to imitate a grownup:
Instead, he and others have been busy cleaning up after Walters. Given two weeks to decide if he wanted to keep Walters's Trump Bible In Every Classroom mandate, he took one day. He scrapped it. Attorney General Gentner Drummond started digging into where exactly Walters had been flinging money. And by the time Fields showed up, the state supreme court had already put a hold on Walters's beloved new social studies standards.
The standards were the center of yet more Walters drama. That's probably because they are bad. They feature everything from a mandate to teach the Big Lie about Dear Leader's 2020 election loss as well as other awesome things he has done, plus the usual ahistoric baloney and attempts to insert a particular brand of Christianity into the classroom.
I would love to say that their badness ultimately proved fatal, but in a piece of poetic justice, the standards have been thrown out by the court because Walters was always very bad at just doing his job. Here's what happened. Walter started the new year with new members on his state board of education, members hand-picked by Governor Stitt, who had finally decided, after having elevated Walters in the first place, that his favorite education dude-bro was a giant PITA who needed some grown-ups to babysit him. So Stitt canned three board members and replaced them with three people not slavishly devoted to Walters's brand of Trump Lite, and Walters was not happy.
So he took the standards that had been out there for public comment, added a bunch of stuff without saying anything, handed them to his board and told them they had to sign off on these push push push. He did not mention that he had changed stuff, and they did not realize that was the case until it was too late.
Asked after the meeting why Walters did not at least notify board members of what changed between the initial version of the standards and the final version, Walters declined to give a reason besides saying he made it clear to board members that the version of the standards given to them less than 24 hours before the meeting was the updated and final version.
“I don’t control when Gov. (Kevin) Stitt put these board members on here. That’s what he chose to do,” Walters said. “It was at the very end of the process.”
The court was unimpressed by this passive-aggressive hissy fit. Making last minute changes without notifying the board, especially when those changes result in final document that is substantially different from the document released to the public-- not a winning strategy.
So the Christian [sic] Nationalist standards are out, and Oklahoma will go back to the standards adopted in 2019.
And who knows-- maybe the state will eventually finish cleaning up after Walters. Meanwhile, his new anti-union union has enrolled almost 7,000 teachers-- which is not exactly a whopping slice of the 4 million-ish teachers working in this country.
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