Where's My Bubble?

We just took a quick day trip with the board of directors to an amusement park, one that has become a favorite of mine after roughly 17,000 excursions there as a class trip chaperone. One small incident reminded me of one reason we are having a moment about vouchers and choice in this country.

To understand the story, let me tell you a few things about regular life for the board of directors. The twins are now 7 and get very little screen exposure. In the summer, they get one "show" each on a daily basis (less during school). They don't have devices of their own, and they don't get to share ours. They do have screen time at school. But they are used to watching shows from tv or disc. Also, they are very accustomed to hearing some version of "no." 

So. We booked a hotel room for the night before. When we're doing longer traveling, we usually have a laptop with us, which, time permitting, let's them have a daily show. But this time we didn't. All we had was the cable for the hotel tv.

They were absolutely baffled. Why could we not just watch their shows? Why wouldn't we pull up Netflix? Why was this program in the middle and what did we mean, we couldn't just go back to the beginning and start over?  

None of this was angry or entitled, but about 1 part bemusement and 2 parts frustration with the grownups who were not smart enough to make things work the way they are obviously supposed to.

We have raised and are raising generations of citizens who are used to living in a bubble, a bubble in which they control most of what goes on, how it goes on, when it goes on. 

I have used before my tales of being a band bus chaperone and the effects of technology on shared space. Ages ago, the inside of a band bus was a shared space, as exemplified by the music. Ages ago, you got whatever the driver picked up (or could pick up) on the radio. Then debates over what tape to play. The use of boom boxes to break the space into smaller spaces. And finally, we arrive at the age of walkmans and ipods, in which what was once shared space is not shared at all.

Most of our popular culture in the 20th century was shared space. If you skip Super-Bowls and political debates, all of the most viewed episodes on tv are from at least thirty years ago; an entire generation has grown up with no idea of what Must-See TV is. 

I'm not waving my old man fist at technoclouds. Things change. But I do think that sometimes we overestimate the power of deep policy decisions and the long slow game for school choice and the privatization of education and underestimate the degree to which a generation has been affected by growing up in their own individual bubbles. 

Of course, the thing about bubbles is that they're fueled by available choices, and has always been true, the number of choices you have available is directly proportional to the amount of money you have to spend on them. Bubbles favor the haves way more than the have-nots; in fact, bubbles are often about the haves keeping the have-nots out.

Nor do I think society benefits from a shortage of shared spaces. But shared spaces are at odds with the commercial, mercenary consumer mindset, a mindset that encourages us to scrimp and save and hoard the resources we need to make ourselves the best damned bubble ever. Gimme my fully furnished neo-liberal bubble, baby.

Robert Putnam in The Upswing suggests that maybe we will figure out the value of shared spaces and bounce back. And maybe we will be moved by the loneliness of tiny gods; certainly the signs are that we are feeling it. Lots of folks like to point at social media and smartphones as culprits, and I have long resisted that notion because I have witnessed what a huge connective power that social media exerts, how it allows people to stay in contact with a myriad of human beings. But it does so as part of the process of building that bubble, and I think that bubble, that lack of time spent in shared spaces, is the more likely culprit in the steadily worsening mental health of younger generations (as well as, suggests Hannah Arendt, the growing attraction to totalitarianism). 

Public schools have been one of the great shared spaces in this country, shared not only because every child goes there, but because every taxpayer participates and contributes.

Preserving them as a shared space is crucial to our collective health. Some public school defenders link public schools to democracy, both as contributor and benefactor, but I think the issue is deeper than that, more fundamental our health as human beings. We need shared space to be fully, healthily human, even if we have to share that space with people with whom we disagree. Maybe even especially if we have to share the space with those people.

How to do this when so much of the tide is sweeping away shared spaces? How to make the argument to folks whose position is a simple, dispassionate "Why should I have this particular feature in my world when I don't want to and I don't have to?" 

There is a big bundle of questions to solve here, and I don't take them as simple theoreticals, because my sons and my grandchildren are the people who are growing up needing the answers, who are having their shared spaces devoured out from under them, and I worry about them reaching the point when their bubble is not a preference, but a necessity. 

ICYMI: Fun Field Trip Week Edition (7/21)

The Chief Marital Officer of the Institute took a couple of days this week to adventure with me. We even took the Board of Directors on one trip (details to come). Our anniversary was this week, so we were involved in some mild adventures preparatory to vacation, which is coming up soon. 

But there are still things to read, so here's your list for the week.

Ohio Charter Schools Still Struggle

Stephen Dyer provides an update on Ohio's attempt to improve their dismal charter school performance. Spoiler alert: it's not going well.

Ohio Seems to Be Throwing Away Public Education, Arguably America’s Most Important Institution

Jan Resseger connects several dots while looking at the current threats to public education in Ohio.

Mike Miles Moved Texas School Funds To Colorado

Josephine Lee reports for the Texas Observer on some financial shenanigans by the turnaround king. 

The Impact of Diverting Public Money to Private School Vouchers in Kentucky

Kentucky Center for Economic Policy takes a look at the impact that vouchers would have on Kentucky. A warning for many states.

No cellphones in classroom? Pa.’s new state budget has funding for that

One more state tries to take a side in the cell phone debates.

Inside Ziklag

ProPublica looks into yet another Christianist group trying to work its will on education.

When Transparency Wins, Wyoming Wins 

Columnist Rod Miller writes about a Wyoming decision slapping down an education department official for spending public money on politics. (Take notes, Oklahoma)

How do you really know if data-driven policies and outcomes are accurate?

John Thompson makes a guest appearance in The Oklahoman, asking about that data-driven stuff.

The Potential for Race Discrimination in Voucher Programs in a Post-Carson World

Yes, it's an academic paper, but it's by Preston Green, Bruce Baker, and Suzanne Eckes, and it looks at some important questions about the aftermath of SCOTUS chipping away at the church-state wall. What happens when free exercise beats civil rights?

The Rich Are Pushing Right-Wing Tax Education in Schools

There's a whole new education program headed to a school near you, and it's all about teaching the youngs to see that taxes are bad and rich folks shouldn't pay them. 

School Vouchers Were Supposed to Save Taxpayer Money. Instead They Blew a Massive Hole in Arizona’s Budget.

ProPublica again, by Eli Hager. Yes, universal school vouchers aren't saving money for anyone except the wealthy folks using them.

2024-25 Florida Voucher Funding Approaches $4 Billion

Speaking of blowing holes in budget, Sue Kingery Woltanski reports from Florida on their massive private school subsidies.

How the Culture Wars Are Undermining Public Education

At Jacobin, an interview with Jennifer Berkshire, whose new book you should definitely read.

Project 2025: Politicking for Jesus.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider gives her take on Project 2025.

I am a Patriot

Nancy Flanagan on patriotism and the teaching thereof.

Republican candidate for NC Superintendent says Black men commit more than 50% of all crime in the United States

Running for the title Worst Education Chief In The US" is Michele Morrow in North Carolina, and Justin Parmenter has been patiently cataloging her awfulness. Here's just a sample.

A battle of wits between humans and chatbots

Benjamin Riley plays connections with chatbots. Some interesting outcomes ensue.

I've been busy outside of the mother blog ship. 

At the Bucks County Beacon, I took a look at Bernie Sanders report and its charges that a bunch of right wing billionaires are trying to mess with public education.

At Forbes.com this week--

* My attempt at a clear-eyed look at what Project 2025 says about education

* Some talk about the mostly impossible task at the heart of all education

* The latest news in the ongoing attempt by the Nebraska legislature to avoid letting voters have a say about school vouchers

Stay caught up with my stuff by signing up for my substack.

KY: Vouchers Would Be Bad News, Says Study

I'm not sure anyone would have expected Kentucky to emerge as one of the big voucher battlegrounds, but voucher fans have had a real uphill trek.

Kentucky voucherphiles created a bill, passed the bill in 2021, and then watched as the state supreme court ruled that the law was hugely unconstitutional. The problem was that Kentucky's constitution is unusually clear:

No sum shall be raised or collected for education other than in common schools until the question of taxation is submitted to the legal voters, and the majority of the votes cast at said election shall be in favor of such taxation

Voucher thought they had circumvented the problem by using tax credit scholarships, and the attorney general led the defense of the vouchers with the old "the money is never actually in the government's hands" argument. The court was unimpressed. “The money at issue cannot be characterized as simply private funds,” they wrote, “rather it represents the tax liability that the taxpayer would otherwise owe.”

Deputy Chief Justice Lisabeth T. Hughes wrote “Simply stated, it puts the Commonwealth in the business of raising sum(s) . . . for education other than in common schools.”

So the next move for voucher fans was clear-- amend the state constitution so that taxpayer dollars can be handed over to private schools. That's Amendment 2. It's pretty simple:

The General Assembly may provide financial support for the education of students outside the system of common schools.

Pick yes or no.

Now a new report from the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy lays out just how expensive a "yes" would be.

"The Impact of Diverting Public Money to Private School Vouchers in Kentucky" is deep and thorough and with more than enough charts and graphs to warm the wonky heart. But its findings are clear and cause for alarm.

Even a modest program would cost the state $199 million (the equivalent, the study points out, of employing 1.645 public school personnel). This is before the inevitable ballooning of the program. Arizona, on the forefront of universal vouchers is also on the forefront of having their budget slammed by a voucher program. ProPublica has just released a report showing that vouchers are about to force "hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects."

The report points out that in other voucher states, 65%-90% of the taxpayer-funded vouchers go to families that already have their children in private schools, and that in Kentucky, that group has an average household income 54% higher than public school families. Even if you think the wealthy have a right to be subsidized by the taxpayers (including the less wealthy ones), that group represents an expansion in the number of students using taxpayer dollars, a dramatic expansion of education costs.

The cost of all this will hit rural and poor areas hardest, because they are the ones most dependent on state support, which will be reduced by the voucher program. At the same time, since few rural areas have private schools available, the voucher dollars will represent money leaving the community entirely.

Meanwhile, in populous counties, vouchers will increase the total cost of education in the area. Public schools will retain stranded costs (heating costs don't shrink just because you have fewer students) and parallel school systems will duplicate administrative costs. There's a reason that school districts trying to cut costs close buildings rather than opening new ones. 

The report nails the bottom line pretty effectively.

If Amendment 2 passes, it will upend Kentucky’s longstanding constitutional commitment to public education and result in legislation that diminishes public schools across the commonwealth. The amendment will widen the growing divides that are already weakening Kentucky communities and hinder education’s role in fostering the healthy democracy necessary for every Kentuckian to thrive.

Let's hope the voters of Kentucky heed the warning.  

ICYMI: Horrific Violence Edition (7/14)

If we should have learned anything else in the past couple of decades, it's that leaping in quickly with comments and reactions before the smoke has cleared is a mistake, so I try to keep my mouth shut, but I will say this-- I have no love or respect for Trump, but this was terribly, deeply wrong.

The shooting hits hard here-- Butler is in my neck of the woods, a quick 40-mile jaunt up the road. We go there for some Red Lobster now and then. It's a small city, very much the kind of place that you would not expect something like this to happen.

Meanwhile, the story I was going to lead with took place in the next county over from Butler. A teenaged trans girl was found horribly murdered; a suspect is in custody. I would not have caught the story except for a message posted by Bishop Sean Rowe (currently newly elected top bishop of Episcopal church, formerly the priest at my own local Episcopal church). It's a terrible, brutal story.

I'm not a fan of critically acclaimed shows about horrible people doing horrible things' The world doesn't really need any more of that; certainly not in real life. I am grateful that in the education biz, we mostly don't have to spend a lot of time arguing about who does or does not deserve to be murdered. Mostly.

It's Sunday and my regular promise is a reading list and not a homily, so here you go. 

Florida Department of Education includes Jane Austen novel in ‘American Pride’ recs

What happens when you just search for key words in your library listing? Maybe this.

A Failure for ‘Divisive Concepts’ Legislation Is a Victory for Education

Jacob Goodwin takes a look at an important victory in New Hampshire. For The Progressive.

A school district in Pa. says students made fake TikTok accounts to target teachers

The new technological frontier in student trolling of teachers, scaled up. If you couldn't get past the NYT paywall when this story broke, here's the NPR coverage.

The Real Targets of Project 2025’s War on Porn

Melissa Gira Grant takes a look at the anti-porn portions of Project 2025 and how it fits with the culture panic of the past couple of years.

The College Board’s FAFSA Takeover

Liam Knox for Inside Higher Ed looks at the latest fallout from the FAFSA fiasco. No way this could end badly.

PROOF POINTS: Asian American students lose more points in an AI essay grading study — but researchers don’t know why

Jill Barshay at Hechinger looks at a study I've written about before--the one where humans and AI both scored the same essays. It's mostly bunk, but this little data point that has shaken out is just so weird...

The blasphemous GOP push for religion in public schools

In the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, paster Kate Murphy has a reaction to recent attempts to shove Christianity into the classroom, including the point that needs to be made much more often:

If the governor of Florida can, by the power not vested in him, unilaterally declare that the church of Satan isn’t a religion, then he can also wake up one morning and decide that Islam isn’t a religion, or Hinduism, or Catholicism or any faith that allows women to preach or doesn’t handle snakes.

Project 2025: Ending Public Education for Students with Disabilities

Nancy Bailey looks at how Project 2025 would affect special ed services, and it's not good. 

PragerU Has Schmoozed Its Sketchy Content Into Six States, Including Louisiana

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks at how PragerU, the fake education video outfit, has managed to get a handful of states to help it out with market share.

Stunning New Report on Who Is Funding the Culture Wars to Undermine Support for Public Schooling

Jan Resseger guides us through a new report that provides new details about who exactly is funding the ongoing attempts to discredit public education.

At Forbes.com this week I took a not very sexy look at a new bill that proposes to clamp down on charter school profiteering.

Cato's Failed Argument Against Public School

Colleen Hroncinch of Cato Institute's Center for Education Freedom tried this week to plug one of the pro-public education arguments that the Libertarian think tank runs up against when pushing choice. 

Do public schools serve everyone, she asks. She does not make a convincing case for her answer.

For starters, it defies logic to think one provider of any service could “serve everyone”—or at least, serve everyone well.

The fallacy here is that public education comes from "one provider." It does not. There are thousands of public school districts in the United States, each different from the others, each owned and operated by a different group of taxpayers. 

Hroncinch's real point is that children have different abilities, skills, preferences and styles, and have parents who also have a variety of values, goals and priorities. 

No wonder that even in the top-ranked district in any state, many parents choose other options for their children. It’s unlikely they would pay twice for education—once in school taxes and again in tuition—if their assigned school was serving their children well.

Two problems here. One is that of course some parents choose private schools even when public school is serving them well for reasons as simple as status and additional features that are beyond the financial reach of public schools. Have you ever seen the library at Philips Exeter? The theater building? There are plenty of colleges that would be happy to have such facilities. 

The other problem is the repetition of a Cato favorite line--the "pay twice for education" line, But nobody in this country, with the possible exception of the very very rich, pays once for public education. The implication here is if you just give me back my tax dollars, I can go spend them on the private education of my choice. But the math doesn't hold up, and of course it doesn't, because if it did we wouldn't have school taxes in the first place. My tax dollars do not pay for my children's public education--no, not even if you count up all the tax dollars I'll pay over my lifetime. My children's public education is paid for by my taxes plus the taxes of my neighbors.

Nobody who is sending their child to a private school is paying for their education twice.

Hroncinch's other point here is that the public system doesn't serve all students well, and a mountain of ink has been spilled examining to what extent this is true and why and what can be done about it. But what the public system has that a voucher does not is a legal obligation to at least try. The challenge for any education system is to educate students who, for a vast panoply of reasons, are hard (and expensive) to teach. As Robert Pondiscio put it in his book about Success Academy, “A significant tension between public schools and charter schools is the question of who bears the cost and responsibility for the hardest-to-teach students.” Public schools do not always solve the issue well, but voucher schools solve the issue by simply washing their hands of those students and sending them on their way to find solutions on their own. Public schools do not have that option; that's what their defenders mean by saying that public schools take everyone.

Hroncinch cites Baltimore's test scores as proof that they are not serving all students well. The irony here is that if they were all private voucher schools, they could bring those numbers up by simply refusing to serve low-scoring students at all. Not sure that would be an improvement.

Hroncinch spends a chunk of her piece citing examples of parents who got in trouble for finding ways to get their kids into a public school outside of the district in which they lived. The aggressive prosecution of this kind of stuff is inexcusable, but it's not proof that the public system does not serve everyone. Every one of those parents had a place reserved for their child in a public school; they just didn't want it. But again-- if they were trying to get away from the school set up to serve their child and they wanted to go to a private school, that school wouldn't have to pursue them through legal means. It could just reject them.

Hroncinch does address this part of the argument, sort of.

What about the argument on the flip side that private schools don’t serve everyone? It’s absolutely true. No individual private school can serve everyone—just as no public school can. But in the private sector, no provider claims to do that.

This is a false comparison. It's true no individual school of any sort can serve all students, because any individual school has finite space. But a public school system does promise to serve all students, and a voucher system makes no such promise. 

Hroncinch lists a whole list of various "private education providers," arguing that surely somewhere in all that families can find what they're looking for, that parents can "customize their children's learning experience." But that doesn't really address the issue.

No school, public or private, can serve everyone—just as no restaurant, grocery store, doctor, or car dealership can.

That's a pretty good analogy. Because these sectors of the economy don't serve everyone. Some people get to eat at upscale restaurants and some get to eat at McDonalds and some don't get to eat out at all. Some people get to shop at a big beautiful grocery store, some shop at a lousy little one, and some live in food deserts. Some people get top of the line health care, some get bare minimum care, and some die because they can't afford health care at all. Some people drive a new Lexus, some drive a used Kia, some ride public transit if they can, and some walk. 

None of these sectors serve everyone. None of these sectors are a model for how the public school system would ideally work.

Now we arrive at Hrincinch's final sentence.

The best way to “serve everyone” is to enable each individual student to have options.

Well, yes. But. A voucher system doesn't really get the job done. The major obstacles to education choice remain discriminatory policies of private schools and the cost. While vouchers pretend to address cost, they're too meager; either taxpayers have to foot the (very high) bill of paying the cost of students attending the school of their choice, or individual families have to do it themselves, which really isn't any better than telling poor families they can exercise choice by buying a more expensive house in a wealthier community.

That's before we even get to the taxpayers' stake in oversight and transparency of a voucher system, in not paying to send students to sub-prime pop-up schools that produce under-educated members of society. 

Voucher policies change the fundamental nature of the education system, turning K-12 into a younger version of our post-secondary system, where some folks go to great schools, some go to mediocre ones, some go to terrible ones, and some don't go at all. Some can afford it, some borrow huge amounts of money, and some don't go at all. 

Most of all, the voucher system eliminates any promise by society that we'll get your child a decent education. Certainly it's fair to argue that we have not always done a good job of fulfilling that promise, but deciding to just stop making the promise, to tell parents "You're on your own now, good luck"- that's a huge shift in how we do education as a nation, a shift that guarantees a tiered education system that reinforces socio-economic class even more than the public system we've got. 

It's the Friedman dream, the dream of a country in which education is a private commodity and not a public good, a personal issue and not a shared responsibility. It has been a persistent dream for some folks for years. I don't think very much of this dream, but the very least we can do as a society is have an honest discussion about it.

The Free Market Won't Save Public Education

It's been an article of faith since Milton Friedman first started fantasizing about getting government out of education and replacing it with a voucher system.

Competition will spur excellence. Free market schools will save students from failing schools in poor districts. Free markets will stave off inequity. 

Folks keep saying it. And yet there isn't a shred of evidence that it's true.

Name a single free-market sector of the economy that serves all citizens with excellence. Automobiles? Restaurants? Technological tools? 

None of them, because what the free market excels at is picking winners and losers. The free market says these folks over here can have a Lexus and these folks over here can have a used Kia and these folks over here can take the bus (if there is one) and these folks over here can just walk. 

What the free market excels at is sorting people into their particular tier, their particular socio-economic class. If you want to move up a level, then show some hustle and grab those bootstraps to prove that you deserve to move up the ladder. Otherwise, we'll just assume you're right where you belong.

There's no version of our free-ish market that is about lifting every single citizen up to a decent level, no function of the free market that says, "Let's get every single person in this country behind the wheel of a Ford." The free market doesn't like the poor. 

Economist Douglas Harris laid out a solid explanation of why education is a lousy fit for the free market, and there's one more problem-- the free market and the public education system don't want the same thing. The free market wants to sort people out, put them at the top, bottom, middle-- and then provide them with what they deserve. The US public school system, however imperfectly, promises to provide every student with a quality education, without ever asking if one child deserves something different from another. 

For some free market fans, inequity is not a bug but a feature; it's a way to sort people into their proper place. Equity for them means "equal chance to prove that they belong in a particular tier." The social safety net is disruptive and wrong because it "rewards" people with stuff they haven't proven they deserve. 

Some free market fans believe that the free market will provide equity and even things out. Hell, Friedman appears to have believed that the free market would fix segregation and not, say, give rise to segregation academies. But the notion that free market mechanisms will bring greater equity than we now have in education is silly. Your ability to vote with your feet will always be directly related to your wealth.

But more to the point, we know that the free market will not correct the inequities of the education system because it is the free market that cemented them there in the first place. The primary mechanism for creating public school inequity is the policy of linking school funding to the housing--one more free market where winners and losers are sorted out. The free market was instrumental in giving us educational inequity; how can we possibly imagine that the free market would help get rid of it?

Well, that's not really a free market, free market fans will complain; it's a market that has been hampered and hamstrung by various government policies. But that's all markets. To start with, money is just made up stuff, and it takes government policies to maintain the illusion. Nor is there some pristine natural economic playing field that exists naturally; all economic playing fields are created, maintained, and regulated by governments. "That's not a true free market" just means "that playing field is not tilted the way I want it to be." 

There are playing fields more severely tilted than others, markets more free-ish than others. I'm actually a fan of our free-ish market system. And some free-ish markets are excellent at handling some sorts of commodities, companies and customers. But education is not a commodity, and no free-ish market is going to help us create a more equitable system fir universal education of young humans in this country. 

OK: Ryan Walters and Project 2025

Ryan Walters, the education dudebro-in-chief of Oklahoma, has made a national name for himself with a flurry of christianist nationalist policies (most recently requiring every classroom to include the Bible), which has helped distract from, the trouble he has getting along with legislators and doing his actual job. His rise has been swift and well-funded and bad news for Oklahoma education; as a modestly-paid state employee he was actually making the big bucks thanks to Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, yet another of those Koch & Walton privatization groups.

While Walter talks a big game of cultural warfare, he's not actually very good at his job, to the point that even like-minded conservatives have walked away from him. But Walters has the super-power of being super well connected. From his adoption by Governor Kevin Stitt. through his patrons at EKCO to his national profile courtesy folks like Fox News.

It's those connections we want to note. Now that everyone is finally catching on to the anti-liberty mess that is Project 2025, we should note that Walters is very tight with the Project 2025 crowd.

We can start with the PR firm that Walters has hired to boost his national profile. 

The firm is Virginia-based Vought Strategies, They seem like a great fit. Their website includes a testimonial from Jim DeMint calling the firm's founder, Mary Vought, "one of the best conservative communicators and public relations specialists in the nation." Mary Vought has been at it for a decade; previously she did coms work in the US Senate and House of Representatives, working for folks like Ron Johnson and Mike Pence; she's also a senior fellow for the far right Independent Women's Forum, and the executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, an outfit that endorses the likes of Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Rick Scott. And she cranks out pieces like this one for the Daily Caller in which she writes "as a parent" (not a conservative PR operative) that she doesn't want her daughter reading naughty books. Or slamming NIH for Fox News. Or noting a Wall Street Journal profile of Walters, saying "we proudly stand beside our clients as they fight to protect our children and parental rights."

Mary Vought is also the vice president for strategic communications at the Heritage Foundation.

The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 to push conservative business-friendly policies, and has developed into one of the most influential activist right-wing think tanks in DC. They are politically agile; they developed and promoted a health care proposal, then opposed it when it was adapted by the Obama administration as the Affordable Care Act. Their reaction to a Trump candidacy was to call him a “clown”, then once he was in office, they became a major voice in staffing; CNN said that “no other Washington institution has that kind of footprint in the transition.”

They have worked to push critical race theory bans, praised Florida’s dismantling of public education, and repeatedly argued for education funding to be voucherized. They even once tried to argue that school vouchers would increase the birth rate.

And, of course, they took point on the development of Project 2025.

A partner group for Project 2025 is the Center for Renewing America ("For God. For Country. For Community.") This group was created by Russ Vought, a Project 2025 project leader and Mary's husband. He previously served as Donald Trump's OMB director. He's one of the people accused of interfering with the Biden administration's transition; he is also among those who defied a Congressional subpoena during the Trump-Ukraine scandal. He's considered a likely candidate for Trump's next chief of staff. He has said we are in "post-Constitutional" times and wants to staff federal agencies with true believers who will bring the culture war to DC. He is a self-described Christian Nationalist, and argued way back in 2021 that Christian nationalism was "benign and useful."

Walters is also linked to Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage. He appeared on Kevin Roberts podcast in an episode teased with "The entrenched woke elites within our education system aim to dismantle the innocence of our children, erode parental rights, and undermine community authority over schools. Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters has boldly confronted them—and he's winning." Walters opened up by listing his struggles against the terrible media and the awful teachers' unions (he does not mention that much of his opposition has come from other GOP politicians) and he offers this:

The Heritage Foundation has been an incredible partner to help us develop what the plans are for the state, for our schools, for our education system

And praises them for sitting down with him and walking through the plan.  

Project 2025 is soaked with christianism and high level of culture panic. If you wonder what it looks like in action, looking at Ryan Walters in Oklahoma gives you just a small peak, because Walters tied toi the project and the ideology behind it. 

And this news just dropped-- Walters has tapped Kevin Roberts to lead the committee rewrite Oklahoma's social studies curriculum. The committee will also include fake historian Dennis Prager.

In a document obtained by the Washington Examiner, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters announced a “complete overhaul” to the curriculum with the goal to “inspire in students a love of country and a proper understanding of the American founding,” as well as completely eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology from schools.

“Teacher’s unions have been rewriting history, teaching students to hate America. But not under my watch,” Walters told the Washington Examiner. “Our goal is to give Oklahoma students an education that focuses on history, not indoctrination. The executive committee that we’ve assembled are experts in American exceptionalism, our Founding Fathers, and historical documents like the Bible. These things are essential to understanding our history.”