Super Shameless

State Superintendent Ryan Walters has Oklahoma’s largest school districts – particularly Tulsa – in his crosshairs.

Not because Walters is so concerned that urban students aren’t getting the education they deserve, but rather because the majority-minority districts serve as a dog-whistle to his white Christian nationalist base.

See, I told you. Government schools are failing. They are woke. Indoctrination camps. Teacher organizations are terrorists. We need God back in schools, Ten Commandments posters, Bibles. True American history – we were founded as a Christian nation. No DEI or CRT.”

Oh, the humanity!

If Walters truly cared about the kids, he would be championing efforts at state and local levels to help struggling families. Instead, he is focused on a divide-and-conquer political agenda he believes will lead him to the governor’s mansion and beyond.

Walters’ indifference to the real reasons urban districts are struggling isn’t unique among Oklahoma’s policymakers. Unstable housing? Little food in the cupboard? Can’t afford child care? Too bad, so sad, sniff the Powers-That-Be. Work harder. No handouts from us.

It’s difficult, if not impossible for kids whose families were forced to suddenly abandon their home in the dead of night to focus on the day’s classroom assignments. Same for those whose stomachs are rumbling with hunger.

Oklahoma is pro-life? Hardly. It’s pro-birth. Once you’re here, you’re on your own.

Walters, naturally, insists he’s all about the kids. He’s been less hard, publicly, on Oklahoma City’s schools than Tulsa’s because, he claimed, OKC has done a better job bolstering low performing schools.

“We’ve seen Oklahoma City Public Schools get over a dozen schools off the F-list this past year, and we’ve seen a specific plan [for] how they’re going to implement that across the district,” he told the Tulsa World.

“What you’ve seen [in Tulsa] is a district, because of poor leadership, that the district itself has not been able to be successful.”

What that means, of course, is he doesn’t like Tulsa Superintendent Deborah Gist because she has the temerity to call BS on his BS.

What BS?

Remember that in early July he publicly declared teachers should tell students the 1921 Tulsa race massacre was not racially motivated: “[L]et’s not tie to the skin color and say that the skin color determined” the carnage in which rampaging whites leveled 35 blocks in the African-American enclave of Greenwood, murdering an estimated 300 Black people and burning more than 1,000 homes and businesses.

Or how about Aug. 2 when he Tweeted this:

The declaration accompanied one of his crackpot car videos in which he claimed China was funneling money into Tulsa schools “to undermine our United States government, our country. It’s unbelievable.”

“We cannot allow influence from hostile governments in our schools to undermine our institutions.”

Somewhere, Joe McCarthy grins from ear to ear.

When the World dug into the OKC-Tulsa comparison, it’s even clearer who Walters is targeting and why:

A quick Tulsa World analysis of data publicly available from the Oklahoma State Department of Education shows Tulsa Public Schools and Oklahoma City Public Schools stack up against one another like this:

As of the state’s last official count in October 2022, the Tulsa and Oklahoma City districts had student enrollments of 33,871 and 33,245, respectively.

Of those, 75.8% of Tulsa students and 91.4% of Oklahoma City students were identified as economically disadvantaged.

Districtwide rates of students meeting or exceeding grade-level standards for English, according to the most recent state report cards, is 12.9% for Tulsa and 11.7% for Oklahoma City.

The number of OKCPS school sites with an overall letter grade of F on their state report card declined from 30 for 2018-19 to 13 for 2021-22, while the number of Tulsa school sites with an overall letter grade of F from the state declined from 28 to 24 in the same time period.

Some of those Oklahoma City school sites were among the 15 that district has closed since 2019, while the same is true of some of the eight school sites closed by Tulsa Public Schools during the same time span.

The racial and ethnic breakdown of students in Oklahoma City in 2021-22 was 58.7% Hispanic, 19.6% Black, 11% white, 6.4% multiple, 2.2% Asian/Pacific Islander and 2.1% American Indian/Alaska Native. For TPS, it was 38.1% Hispanic, 22.4% Black, 21.8% White, 9.7% multiple, 5% American Indian/Alaska Native and 3.1% Asian/Pacific Islander.

Not much difference between the two, except the Tulsa superintendent fires back publicly at Walters, while OKC’s keeps a far lower profile. [I’m not calling out OKC Superintendent Sean McDaniel; I’m merely pointing out that Gist and McDaniel approach dealing with state Supt. Loose Cannon differently.]

Bottom line: Threatening the Tulsa district’s accreditation – as Walters has done repeatedly – isn’t the first step to solving a problem. It’s a handy tool to demonize the least among us.

Walters would be ashamed, if he had any.