When Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters isn’t busy blaming the presence of porn on his laptop on an unlimited, shadowy conspiracy to take away him from workplace, he’s busy ensuring no woke elite academics get within the classroom.
On Friday, the state kicked off the usage of an evaluation, created by the far-right propaganda machine PragerU, that might be given to academics from “woke” states solely to weed out any secret progressives. Proper now, solely elites from California and New York need to take the evaluation, however Walters says he could develop it to eight different states.
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Moreover possible being extremely unconstitutional, it’s additionally stupidly timed, as some Oklahoma colleges start on Monday. Based on Walters’ workplace, there’s a “fairly large” variety of folks from these woke states which can be looking for instructing certificates, which certain appears to be like quite a bit just like the state dragged its toes till it may make it unlikely that the doubtless woke academics would get to start out instructing Monday.
Walters had beforehand introduced this nice plan to enhance schooling within the state, however CNN obtained entry to the evaluation itself because the state started administering it. It’s precisely what you’d count on from PragerU, well-known for such traditionally correct movies as displaying Frederick Douglass defending slavery, and such good and funky issues as pushing Christian nationalism.
The anti-woke evaluation has a number of questions on “undoing the harm of gender ideology” taught and examined in California trainer coaching—which is a gross and transphobic means of describing the requirement that California academics have coaching on sources for LGBTQ+ youth. The horror. Different questions are about freedom of faith, whereas nonetheless others are weirdly about primary civics, like what the 2 chambers of Congress are known as.
No regulation permits Walters to do that. In actual fact, Oklahoma’s personal regulation on trainer licensure for out-of-state academics mentions no such evaluation nor explains that there’s a carveout for woke states. The state’s schooling web site doesn’t announce this evaluation on its dashboard of which out-of-state certifications match as much as certifications in Oklahoma, neither is it introduced wherever on the trainer certification web page.
It’s additionally possible unconstitutional. In a case a couple of California regulation limiting new residents for his or her first yr within the state to the quantity of welfare advantages they might have obtained of their earlier state, the courtroom held that the regulation discriminated towards folks based mostly on their prior residences. The state couldn’t make the quantity of a profit contingent on the place you lived earlier than.
States have the authority to control sure issues about out-of-state academics, because the state has a reliable curiosity in making certain that academics licensed elsewhere are certified to show in Oklahoma. It could be tremendous for Oklahoma to require California academics to take an evaluation masking a studying curriculum required in Oklahoma, however which California academics obtain no coaching on.
And it could be tremendous, on this hypothetical, for Oklahoma to not require Arizona academics to take that evaluation if these academics obtained instruction on that very same studying curriculum throughout their licensure. That’s not discriminatory—it’s constant.
It would even be permissible for Oklahoma to require all out-of-state academics looking for licensure within the state to take the dumb PragerU check, however there’s no authorized justification for simply saying that in case you are from a state Walters thinks is woke, you’ve a further hoop to leap via to be allowed to show within the state.
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There are, in fact, numerous metrics to rank how good a state’s schooling system is, however irrespective of the way you slice it, Oklahoma is, at finest, within the backside three within the nation. However Walters doesn’t really care about bettering schooling. He’s a stuntman, with nonsense like attempting to drive public colleges to buy $3.3 million price of Trump Bibles and ordering colleges to include instructing the Bible. In fact he was at all times going to ally with PragerU, which was ideally located to benefit from the administration’s struggle on public broadcasting, making a play to be the tutorial content material supplier to kids.
It’s labored out fairly effectively for PragerU up to now. Final month, the White Home introduced a partnership with the corporate to supply AI-slop movies which have issues like Founding Father John Adams declaring that “facts do not care about our feelings.”
Oklahoma isn’t the one state working with PragerU, although it does at present appear to be the one one utilizing their horrible merchandise to find out whether or not academics get to have jobs. Louisiana introduced a “partnership” with the corporate earlier this yr to provide classroom educational movies. In December 2024, South Carolina printed “PragerU Standards Aligned Resources” on the state’s schooling web site, which exhibits every state college customary and aligns PragerU content material with it.
It’s not simply that PragerU is an ideological nightmare, producing movies like one the place Christopher Columbus declares that “being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem.” It’s additionally not an schooling firm—it’s a media firm, not accredited in any state, and never run by folks with schooling experience.
Folks like Walters and corporations like PragerU are doubly dangerous. First, it pushes white supremacy and Christian nationalism on college students. It additionally, nevertheless, harms college students by failing to supply them with an precise schooling, as a substitute substituting conservative video rubbish. And apparently in Oklahoma, for those who’re presumed to be woke, you possibly can’t educate with out being subjected to it.
