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For a guy in charge of local schools, Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters generates an unusual amount of national news. This week, Walters announced a plan to create chapters of Turning Point USA, the conservative organization co-founded by Charlie Kirk, at every Oklahoma high school. Earlier this month, Walters had ordered a moment of silence in honor of the death of Kirk at all Oklahoma public schools, and now the State Department of Education says it’s investigating claims that some districts did not comply. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, who had previously appointed Walters as his secretary of education, once accused Walters of “using kids as political pawns.” State Democrats have called for an impeachment probe, and some Republicans have signed their own letter asking for an investigation of Walters. Parents, teachers, and religious leaders have sued Walters, the State Department of Education, and the State Board of Education for injecting religion into schools. And this past summer, two school-board members reported that they saw nude women on a television in his office during a board meeting. (Investigators concluded that the incident merely involved an R-rated movie randomly playing on a preprogrammed channel.) In the meantime, Oklahoma schools are ranked near the bottom for reading and math scores on the Nation’s Report Card.

In the second episode of a two-part series on Oklahoma schools, we talk to Walters about what he’s trying to accomplish in Oklahoma schools. We ask about the ideological purity test he’s announced for teachers coming from “places like California and New York.” We ask about his push for changes to the curriculum, including a requirement that high-school history students “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results.” We ask about the television incident. And we hear from two Oklahoma teachers who have taken very different paths in the face of changes under way in their state. You can listen to Episode 1 of the series here.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Ryan Walters (from KOKH Fox 25): Pornography. Pornography should not be in our schools. No parent should send their child to school and their child have access to graphic pornography.

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: In our first episode about Oklahoma public schools, we talked about the rise of State Superintendent Ryan Walters and all the changes he’s making. In this year’s new curriculum, he added dozens of references to Christianity, an instruction to high-school history students to identify discrepancies in the 2020 election—although those standards have just been paused for now by the Oklahoma Supreme Court. Walters announced an ideological purity test for some teachers coming in from out of state. And he tried to make sure that certain books were not on the shelves.

Walters (from Fox News): Hey, when we send our kids to school, we are not expecting them to be able to check out a book from the library that’s got explicit pornography in it. And unfortunately, this is a tactic we’ve seen of the far left.

Rosin: We also talked to a pair of former students of Coach Walters—that’s what they called him—who described him as an exceedingly cool history teacher. A secret Democrat, one of them had guessed.

Starla Edge: His whole thing about wokeism, I truly don’t understand, because he was woke. He was woke!

Rosin: So we went to Oklahoma City to interview Walters and try to square the circle.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. In this second of a two-part series about Oklahoma public education, an interview with Walters about what he’s up to. Also about that weird scandal we mentioned at the end of the first episode, where two State Board of Education members said they saw naked women on a TV in Walters’s office.

Turns out that it wasn’t really a scandal, but the way Walters handled it revealed maybe a bigger problem for Oklahoma public schools—the actual thing we should be calling the scandal. We’ll get into it later.

Ryan Walters: How are y’all doin’?

Rosin: Hey, how are you?

Walters: Ryan Walters.

Rosin: Nice to meet you.

Walters: Nice to meet you.

Jinae West: Hi. Jinae.

Walters: Jinae, very nice to meet you.

West: Nice to meet you.

Walters: Oh, man, that’s a nice-looking microphone right here. Is this my coffee—

Rosin: Arriving at Ryan Walters’s office earlier this summer was not like arriving at the office of a guy who’s in charge of a state school system. We were greeted by two staff members who had come from other states to work for him.

Walters has a reputation in young conservative circles as an exciting person to work for—someone who was going places. He’d already teased that he was considering a run for the governor of Oklahoma.

And despite being at the center of an awkward scandal at the very moment we arrived, Walters’s energy when he greeted us was the opposite of awkward.

Walters: I am a, like, easily a pot and a half of coffee a day.

Rosin: Pot?

Walters: Oh, yeah.  I do have my—

Rosin: Pot?

**Walters: —**blood pressure checked.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Pot.

Walters: That goes back to my teaching days. I would set it every morning. When I rolled in at 6:30, it was premade there, room smelled like coffee. My kids would come in for tutoring before school, and they’d go, It already smells like coffee.I’m going, It’s already made, guys. It’s ready to go.

Rosin: Speaking of Walters’s teaching days, I started by asking about his time as a history teacher. He said he doesn’t think he’s changed since then, so I was trying to figure out: Did he just have different rules back then? Like, he used to not think it was ok to talk about Bibles in class, but then he changed his mind?

Rosin: Being a Christian and a teacher, how did you manage that in public school? Did you have rules for yourself? There are things I can mention and can’t mention. I’m not gonna talk about the Bible. I’m not gonna talk about my own faith. What were the lines that you drew as a teacher?

Walters: Yeah, great question. So I taught history and government. So one of the things I always tried to make sure that the kids knew is, first of all, I didn’t ever—my kids, it was always an ongoing debate of: What is he? What is his political beliefs? And I would always tell ’em: I’m not gonna talk about mine here in school. I’m not gonna talk about those things. I’m gonna tell you: “This is what some folks believe. Here’s what other folks believe. Here’s the sources. Sort through it, and figure it out for yourself.”

Now, look, hey, we had a Bible in the classroom. We talked about the role the Bible played in American history. It was always done in an academic setting. It was always done in its historical context. I wasn’t pushing religion on the kids. I wasn’t pushing a political belief.

And, like I said, the kids always, you know, they’d: Who’d you vote for? Who’d— And I’d go, Guys, I don’t care to—I’m not trying to keep it from you; I mean, I’ll talk about it somewhere else. You’ll know if your parents talk to me out at a restaurant or something. I don’t mind that. But when we’re here, I’m talking about academics. We’re gonna talk about, “A lot of people believe different things,” and I want you guys to hear all of that, and you guys come to your own conclusion.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. And why? Why was it important not to talk about things in the classroom?

Walters: Well, now, I will say we talked about things, now, and I—

Rosin: Not to talk about your own personal belief?

Walters: I just felt like that was incredibly important when you’re talking about: Hey, we’ll talk about every political issue; we’ll talk about all of it. But I wanted them to know: You’re gonna get all sides. You’re not gonna have a teacher that’s gonna come in and go, “This is the side you should believe.” My beliefs are separate from this. You’re gonna come in, I’m gonna give you the best education I can, and I wanna see you come to your own conclusion.

[Music]

Rosin: “People believe different things.” “You’re gonna get all sides.” That is a very open-minded approach—which does not at all square with what he’s done as superintendent.

In an interview once, Walters said: “If you’re going to come into our state, don’t come in with these blue-state values.” And then right before this school year started, he announced he would administer a kind of purity test to some new teachers coming from out of state.

“Oklahoma’s schools,” he said, “will not be a haven for woke agendas pushed in places like California and New York. If you want to teach here, you’d better know the Constitution, respect what makes America great, and understand basic biology.”

Rosin: So you recently talked about—you called it either an ideology test or a certification test. What’s the purpose of something like that?

Walters: Right, yeah, absolutely. So the purpose is—listen, you know, it’s not complicated for us here in Oklahoma. There’s two genders: There’s male, and there’s female. There’s not 27. There’s not gender fluidity. That’s not something that we want left-wing activists pushing on our kids.

So when I see a state like California come out and say, Now, actually, every teacher, we’re gonna teach it that way. That’s gonna be a demand, came from the governor himself. That’s what we’re gonna teach. Okay, well, our standards say otherwise.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Walters: So if you’re gonna come into our state and teach—and we are recruiting heavily. I’ve recruited more teachers to our state than ever before in history. We had the biggest signing bonuses in the country to bring teachers here. We put teachers on a path to merit pay, where they can make six figures in the classroom, got a thousand teachers on track for that.

So we are very excited to have the top educators in the country right here in Oklahoma, but we are absolutely not gonna take left-wing activists who have been indoctrinated themselves by a radical state like California. So, listen, you gotta know the difference between male and female. You gotta agree that you’re gonna teach that in our standards. And we’re just gonna make sure that we’re not gonna invite that into the state of Oklahoma.

Rosin: So if Walters thought that way about gender, how was he gonna handle sexuality?

Rosin: Now,  I’m gonna ask in a pretty simple way: Let’s say I’m a gay parent, and I don’t have any particular ideology. I’m a parent. I’m married to a same-gender person.

Walters: Sure.

Rosin: I have a child in the schools. Am I welcome in Oklahoma schools?

Walters: Absolutely. Every child of every background, every parent of every background is welcome in Oklahoma schools. Our goal is to give every single child the best education possible. It doesn’t matter your political leanings, doesn’t matter your views on anything. It doesn’t matter—we want you to have the best education possible. That is, you know, we want every kid to feel welcome. We want every kid to be supported. We want every single child to succeed.

Rosin: But do you understand how a parent wouldn’t feel that way if you, the state superintendent of education, saying, We want people with red-state values in our public schools? Do you see how a parent would feel unwelcome in a school like that?

Walters: No, I don’t. We’ve been very clear of what the vision is. The vision is— everyone should agree on this. And I do. And I get people all across the political spectrum—I had Democrats grabbing me all the time on the campaign trail. They may not agree with school choice. They might not agree with everything. But they go, You’re a hundred percent right. We should get schools back to teaching the basics. We should all be able to agree on that.

And it is unfortunate that we’ve got one party that says—the Democrats have said, Schools are a weapon to be used to push our ideology on kids. They have a political agenda. Our goal is to take that political agenda out. That is what red states, that’s what red governors have been doing. And that’s what we’ve been leading the charge on, to say, No, this is the vision. Everybody should be able to agree on this, frankly.

Rosin: So in your view, it’s exclusively the left that has politicized the schools?

Walters: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Rosin:  Interesting. I mean, there was a whole period of when there was a Republican agenda to take over state school boards and think about schools—

Walters: Sure.

Rosin: —but to you, that was all responsive, the way you think of it?

Walters: Absolutely. The teachers’ unions have run our schools, the federal Department of Education have run our schools since 1979. They’ve weaponized the federal government to push an agenda. And listen to the Republican position—it has been: Get back to the basics. Get back to teaching a love of the country’s values.

It’s always with a critical eye. It’s always a Hey, we want you to do a deep dive into everything. Again, you notice everything—if you look through our standards, we added more about what happened to the Native Americans. We added more about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Hey, we want kids to know the times we didn’t live up to our values. That’s very, very important. And frankly, as a history teacher, you learn from American greatness and those exceptional times throughout our history; you also have to look at the times we didn’t live up to those things, and you have to look at that with an honest eye—

Rosin: And you mean that sincerely?

Walters: Yeah, I mean, absolutely—

Rosin: That is not, to you, a kind of stain on American exceptionalism?

Walters: Well, what do you mean by that?

Rosin: I just mean, this is the heart of the controversy, sort of how you teach about America—

Walters: Yeah.

Rosin: —what America’s founding was.

Walters: Sure.

Rosin: It’s a very varied view. It’s a very varied view.

Walters: Well, yeah, let me address that. So we live in the greatest country in the history of the world.

Rosin: That’s also a specific view.

Walters: It is. But, I mean, if you’re—

Rosin: Like, if you’re teaching world history and you’re teaching many countries’ perspectives—

Walters: Yeah, but if you—I mean, look, as [Benjamin] Franklin said, This is a republic, if we can keep it. And part of the central goal of our education system is to keep the republic, keep an informed citizenry that understands American history, understands American exceptionalism, and understands that if we’re not actively involved as citizens, if we don’t understand our history, if we don’t understand those values—I mean, history, also, to your point, when you look at world history, we know what happens when countries don’t abide by some central values, central principles: that it won’t be good for the next generations. And that’s part of what I believe is so important when you talk about education holistically but, specifically, history in education.

[Music]

Rosin: So do you even think of yourself as controversial? Do you understand why people describe you that way? Because you are controversial, but you seem to—

Walters: Yeah.

Rosin: —think of yourself as neutral.

Walters: Look—here’s what—I don’t, you know—

Rosin: Like, a person in your position doesn’t often have enemies and backers and allies and detractors. I mean, are you—

Walters: Yeah, sure.

Rosin: Yeah.

Walters: But what I will say is, look, I’m unapologetic. The teachers’ unions have been one of the most negative forces in recent American history. I’ve never seen anything like it—the ideology they’ve pushed on kids. It’s unfathomable to me that they did that.

So, yeah, I went to war with a group that has an unlimited amount of money, nearly an unlimited amount of political power, that had bought off so many elected officials, that have bought off so many different interest groups. And we took on an education establishment of administrators, school-board associations, teachers’ unions.

I mean, it doesn’t surprise me. I think it’s unfortunate that the left has become so radicalized, but it doesn’t surprise me.

Rosin: There are a lot of parents who came to feel the same way Walters does about schools. The so-called parents’ rights movement has exploded since the pandemic. Their origin story goes something like this: During the pandemic, when our kids were doing school from home, we discovered some of the stuff they were learning, and we were outraged.

Now, conservatives were talking about taking over school boards back in the ’90s, but the more recent parents rights’ movement rocketed their momentum. And it wasn’t just Christian conservatives in red states.

In a recent Supreme Court case, the court sided with Maryland parents who wanted to opt out of LGBTQ lesson plans that included books that were similar to the ones Walters complains about: books that mention gay or trans kids. And that was led by Muslim, Catholic, Orthodox Christian, and Jewish parents in a school system with a large immigrant population about 20 minutes from where I live in D.C.

So the parents who don’t want what Walters calls the “radical gender ideology” pushed on their kids are everywhere—and they’re winning. The difference is: Walters is notjust a parent. He runs an entire school system. And his vision is a radical rewriting of what public school in America is and has been for decades.

Rosin: I mean, there is an idea, totally apart from this warfare that you’re describing, that public schools are an engine of American democracy precisely because they are a place where people who believe wildly different things—people who are atheists and don’t believe in God at all—

Walters: Sure, sure.

Rosin: —and people who are evangelical Christians and go to church every day, and people who are Muslims, and people who are Jewish, and people who are gay, and all these different things—are in school together. And that is the teaching ground. Do you not believe that? I mean, is that not an important value for you?

Walters: It is. Everything—is there anything I’ve said today that would go counter to that? Because again—

Rosin: Oh, yeah. Yes.

Walters: —what I would say is—you think there is?

Rosin: Absolutely.

Walters: How?

Rosin: Absolutely. Absolutely. Because you define what sounds to me like a specific view as the only view, as the universal view: There’s a universal view. I mean, our Founding Fathers were influenced by lots of different ideas.

Walters: Sure.

Rosin: Some of them were Christian; some of them were deist. It just seems as if you’re defining a pretty specific idea as an idea for everybody—like saying that we wanna welcome people with red-state values to our school, that seems specific. That seems exclusive.

Walters: And I’ve defined those values for you. The values are: We’re going to teach the basics. We’re gonna teach academics. We’re not going to have this left-wing agenda forced on our kids. It doesn’t matter what your beliefs are. You walk into a school; you teach kids this—we should all be able to agree on that.

Rosin:  You recently added—this might be your most controversial thing—that students should be taught about discrepancies in the 2020 election results. Why did you decide to add that?

Walters: How do you teach about the 2020 election without that? I mean, notice how the standard was written. They’re gonna look at graphs, data charts, everything else, show—look, there were discrepancies. You had more people vote in that election than ever before, and then they went away. What’s the reason for that?

Kids are gonna come to their own conclusion. We’re gonna talk about COVID. We’re gonna talk about mail-in ballots. They’re gonna look at the data. They’re gonna look at the statistics. They can draw their own conclusion on what happened with that election. But you’re not gonna go teach 2020, one of the most controversial, the most controversial election in American history, and pretend like, Oh, there was no controversy. There was nothing about—we teach the 2000 election very similarly; we teach the 1824 election very similarly.

Rosin: However, you didn’t say, “Identify if there were discrepancies.” That seems to me like that would be open-ended questions. You said,“Identify discrepancies in election results.”

Walters: Yeah.

Rosin: That is not universally agreed upon by American courts. That’s a specific political position.

Walters: No, no, that’s a fact. More people voted, and trends were dramatically different in that election. Now, there’s a lot of explanations for that that people can give. We never had an election with dramatic changes in mail-in ballots. Okay, well, that’s something to look into, right? Why were there so many mail-in ballots? COVID. Election strategies changed on that. Of course they did, right? Now you can get people to mail in their ballots, so the deep dive is into the discrepancies on the vote totals in that election. Kids are gonna come to their own conclusion. That’s why we were very particular with that of: Give ’em the sources—let them study that.

Rosin: So if a kid concludes there were no discrepancies, does that kid fail? Is that kid wrong?

Walters: (Laughs.) If a kid—okay, so kids are going to see the election totals, the vote totals. They’re gonna look at the numbers. They’re gonna look at the comparisons between others. That’s what they’re gonna be sure to study so that they understand it was a unique election. There is absolute—that’s undeniable. It was a unique election with the—

Rosin: It’s denied by many, many courts.

Walters: That it was a unique election? That we’ve never—

Rosin: Oh, that it was unique—

Walters: Yeah.

Rosin: —but we could say, “Talk about how the 2020 election was unique.” That’s different.

Walters: Well, what does that mean?

Rosin: Oh, that can mean—that’s a very open-ended question.

Walters: That’s right. Our standards are there so that parents are ensured: “What do you mean? What are we learning about?” They’re gonna learn about the vote totals. They’re gonna learn about bellwether states. They’re gonna learn about the amount of people that voted. They’re gonna learn about the amount of mail-in ballots. And they’re gonna come to their own conclusions on that.

[Music]

Rosin: By the way, just weeks into the start of the school year, the Oklahoma Supreme Court issued a temporary stay, pausing Walters’s new standards as the court considers a lawsuit challenging them.

Okay, back to the interview. When the press secretary chimed in to say we had only eight minutes left, I finally had to address the elephant in the room.

Rosin:  Okay, so I’m gonna ask you about the news.

Walters: Sure.

Rosin: There were board members who say they saw the nude pictures on TV during the board meeting.

Rosin: It would have been truly perfect justice: a politician who endlessly complains about porn caught up in a porn scandal. But it turned out to be trifling. After an investigation, the Oklahoma House speaker concluded that the naked women the board members said they saw were likely from a newly installed TV randomly playing a preprogrammed channel—more specifically, the 1985 R-rated film The Protector,starring Jackie Chan, which has a 44 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Trailer (for the movie The Protector): He’s a cop with his own way of enforcing the law.

Rosin: We know that now. We did not, however, know any of this at the time we were in his office. Back then, Walters could have said he himself was confused, that it was a new TV, or “no comment.” Instead, the day we interviewed him, he chose this path.

Walters: Yeah, they’re outrageous liars.  And we’re about to be able to show that; we just had two independent investigations to show that. So it shows you the lengths at which they will go.

Rosin: They, meaning two board members who said they saw the naked women on the TV, both of whom were appointed by Republican Governor Kevin Stitt, who’s recently been at odds with Walters. So preexisting beef.

Walters:  This whole concoction was done to try to stop a board meeting where we were approving a new private school that has American values that they tried to stop in the board meeting. They then tried to hijack the board. They tried to hijack the agenda, the vote, everything else. It became this huge disruption. And then they concocted this, to come up with it the next day, to try to further disrupt the work we’re doing here.

Rosin: So, wait, you’re saying there was no pornography on the TV. Or just that you don’t know how it got there?

Walters: It was on a cable TV channel.

Rosin: And it was just randomly—

Walters: It was on a cable TV channel, and that is verifiable.

Rosin: Now, all evidence suggests that therewere actually nude women on the TV. It was a comedy of errors. But because local schools are the latest live battlefield in our ongoing civil war, we got flamer language, investigations, and a fight over nothing. And at the first state school-board meeting since all this happened, back in late July, Walters was a no-show.

But you know what? There was actually something kind of scandalous that happened on that day. And it had nothing to do with nude women.

Walters was there advocating for this private school he mentions, the one he says has “American values”—that, by the way, has a partnership with PragerU, the same media organization that helped develop Oklahoma’s purity test for teachers.

Why is the state superintendent, who is the leader of public schools, advocating for some online private school?

[Music]

Rosin: If all this noise gets in the way of whatever is needed to make Oklahoma schools better—because, remember, they’re still ranked near the bottom of America’s schools. If it makes it harder for Oklahoma teachers to do their jobs, then that’s the real scandal.

Coming up, we’ll hear from one of those teachers.

Michael: Honestly, I think the debate just comes down to: Is me compromising, in my view, certain levels of my integrity a couple of times a year worth doing the job that I love?

Rosin: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: Every school year, there’s something new for teachers to master: new faces, new names, new textbooks. This year, perhaps the most notable were the changes in the curriculum. And in the summer, when we visited, which was before the court had issued its temporary stay, teachers were working out how exactly they would talk about them.

Michael:  These are the ones that were added in by Ryan Walters, were: “Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.”

And then the other one is: “Identify the source of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Chinese lab and the economic and social effects of state and local lockdowns.”

Rosin: Ooh, that’s real specific, both of those.

Michael: Yeah, yeah. They are—I mean, correct me if I’m wrong—they are the things that the MyPillow guy talks about.

Rosin: Or at least some of the things he talks about. Anyway, this is Michael, a social-studies teacher at a public high school in Oklahoma. We’re only identifying him by his first name because he loves teaching, and he wants to keep his job. And that’s the problem.

Remember Summer Boismier, the teacher from Episode 1 who put up a QR code to the Brooklyn Public Library? Like Boismier, Michael was also concerned when the state started auditing books in the classroom a few years ago. But whereas Boismier resigned and ultimately had her teaching license revoked, Michael chose to bite his tongue and stay.

Michael:  I was definitely stressed about it. It’s one of those things where I didn’t wanna be sensational or overly dramatic, but the conversations I was having with certain colleagues were like*, I mean, this is the first step. This is a slippery slope. We start doing things like this, then what’s to stop them from pushing further?*

These standards and things that we’re talking about in Oklahoma, they were really worried about this “woke left-wing indoctrination” of America’s children, and it’s one of those things that it’s like, okay, sure, you could maybe point to a couple of places that that might be happening. None of them are gonna be in the state of Oklahoma. Every county has voted red for every presidential election since ’08. That thing’s not happening here.

Rosin: In 2016, Michael was teaching at a mostly Latino school. After Donald Trump won his first presidential election, Michael says he could feel that his students were suddenly more wary of him. So Michael decided to say this: I would never vote for something that would bring harm to you. Which, he said, put them at ease.

Michael:  I felt okay being human in that moment, right, where these are kids who are sad and confused and angry and already don’t like going to school, and the first person they see is someone who looks like me, who statistically, on paper, voted for this guy.

Rosin: Looking back, maybe it was a little risky to hint at his personal beliefs. But he did it back then because he is a real hustler when it comes to connecting with students. But given everything that’s been going on in Oklahoma these days, Michael says he would never say anything like that now.

(Music plays.)

Michael: There you go. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Thanks.This is your class?

Michael: This is my classroom, yup.

Rosin: Will you give us a little tour—

Rosin: Towards the end of the summer, we meet up with Michael in his classroom, where he’s busy setting up: moving around desks, putting up posters. There are flags for sports teams, flags from every nation, quotes from pop stars, drawings from former students, and right near his desk is a wall of famous figures from history, each with a quote—pretty standard fare for a high-school history class. But here? Possibly dangerous.

Michael:  I feel like having anybody who’s too involved with the civil-rights movement right now is also something I gotta worry about, even though I shouldn’t have to be, everything like that. I have a friend who gave me a framed poster of a quote from John Lewis as well, and I worry about bringing that and hanging that up, kind of a thing. I just worry about getting pegged as “woke” or something like that. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Michael: Just for having certain decorations and things, so.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.Is there anything that you didn’t put up because you thought, Oh, don’t risk it?

Michael: Not yet. Like I said, I’m still debating about bringing that John Lewis one up ’cause it’s really big, and it’s about, oh, you know, in times of—If you see something that’s not right—it’s actually the quote that’s over there. That’s a smaller version of it there.

Rosin: Oh, can we read it?

Michael: Yeah.

All right: “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something.”

[Music]

Rosin:  Okay. So let’s say that you were faced with a situation where, maybe, a student brings it up—like, COVID comes up or the 2020 election comes up. How would you actually go about this? How would you handle this as a teacher?

Michael: I would say, “The state standards say that this is the case, and that’s what the state standards say.” And if they—

Rosin: You would? That’s how you would do it?

Michael: I feel like I would try to convey, yes, that this is what—I would say, “I’m required by law to tell you that this is what this says,” and then just kind of leave it at that. ’Cause if I hesitate, if I say, at least in the point I’m in right now—like I said, I’m still kind of probationary, so one slipup means I can lose my job. Once I get career or tenure, I’ll be good. But I think this next year, if something like that comes up, that’s gonna be how I have to handle it. And again, I’m being muzzled and hamstrung in kind of doing this, but—and, I mean, I’ll lose sleep over it—but this is what I gotta do to keep doing what I wanna do, even if it goes against everything I feel.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. So how does that feel?

Michael: Awful.

Rosin: Yeah.

Michael: Yeah. I mean, just really stressful. And I don’t know, I pride myself on being an honest person. I pride myself on being transparent and not really lying and definitely all kinda stuff, and this feels like a cop-out. And it feels—it is. It doesn’t—sorry, it doesn’t feel like it; it is. And that feels bad. And, at a certain point, I’m going to have to have the conversation with myself: Is that worth it?

Rosin:  Do you think you have—I mean, it sounds like you’re really thinking about this, and you’ve made your compromise for the moment. Do you have a line or a rule for yourself where it’s like, Michael, you can’t do this anymore. Have you ever, in your head, played out a scenario where, like, This and no more?

Michael: I try not to ’cause I know there’s going to be—I think it’s only a matter of time until there is going to be something. I genuinely think that might be, if I find myself saying this too many times, I feel like that’s gotta be it for me.

[Music]

Summer Boismier: Hi.

Rosin: Hi.

West: Hi.

Boismier: Come on in.

West: This is Hanna.

Boismier: Nice to meet you.

Rosin: I’m Hanna.

Boismier: Nice to meet you. Hi, Hanna.

West: Hi. Jinae.

Boismier: Hi,Jinae.

West: Nice to meet you.

Boismier: Nice to meet you as well.

Rosin: In case you missed the first episode in our Oklahoma education series, Summer Boismier was a high-school teacher who, unlike Michael, made the decision to quit rather than censor herself. And, as a result, it’s a couple of weeks before school starts, and Boismier has nothing to do and nowhere to be. Summer Boismier is stuck in eternal summer.

After the State Board of Education voted to revoke her teaching license, Boismier moved back home to Oklahoma, to her mom’s house—which is so neat. Like, even a pile of paper napkins from Jersey Mike’s—takeout a few weeks ago—is stacked on the kitchen counter with military precision. Signs, painted on wood, hang over everything: This house is a home. Bless this kitchen. Let all that you do be done in love. They are relentlessly upbeat.

Boismier is not.

Boismier: I guess the best way I would describe it is: It’s a bit of a lost feeling. It’s just—I don’t know. I feel like a guest kind of in someone else’s space, even though this is my home. This is where I lived before I went to New York, for example. It still feels very temporary, very strange. I have not unpacked.

Rosin: Boismier says she’s applied to more than 300 positions—with zero offers. Unclear why. It could be because of the way she lost her teaching certificate, all that controversy. She calls herself “educational kryptonite” in the state of Oklahoma. She’s asked a judge to restore her teaching certificate, but that’s just more waiting.

So Boismier spends most of her days pacing around her mom’s house, sleeping in the guest bedroom with a broken TV and a useless winter coat hanging on a hook. Everything else from her entire adult life is still in boxes, nearly all unopened: dishes, towels, silverware.

Boismier: —unpacked. Everything else is still pretty solidly encased, and I’m a little scared to touch it. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Why are you afraid to open any of them?

Boismier: That’s a great question. I think, for me, if I open the boxes, it means that I’m finished. And I think that scares me, that sort of voice in the back of my head of: I need this to matter. And to me, I’m at a spot where I’m not sure that it does.

Rosin:  Where are all your books? ’Cause you had described having 500 books. Where are they?

Boismier: My books are currently boxed up, just as they’ve been since 2022, in the back of my mom’s storage shed.

(People getting into a car.)

Rosin: So we go to the shed. Boismier tells us that she shares the shed with her mom, who mostly keeps holiday decorations in there, and her sister, who’s also a teacher. That sister has been busy getting her school supplies out of the shed because, remember, school’s about to start.

(Shed door being opened.)

Rosin: Whoa.

Boismier: All right.

Rosin: So give us the audio tour guide of what is here.

Boismier: Sure. So pretty much everything at the back of the storage shed, so all these boxes that go almost all the way up to the ceiling, that’s my classroom.

Rosin: The storage unit is crammed with sparkly wreaths and smiling elves. And there’s a small path to the back.

Boismier: Let’s see if I can climb back in here a little bit.

(Items shift around.)

Boismier: This rocking horse is not in a great spot.

Rosin: And then, there they are: the 500 books that used to live in her classroom—The Fault in Our Stars,The Hate U Give, the Twilight saga—which might or might not be on some banned-books list that doesn’t exist, or offend someone’s parents.

Rosin:  I almost feel like there’s too much symbolism in this space. There’s too much symbolism.

Boismier: You unpack a lot more than boxes here.

Rosin: Yeah. This storage shed is one giant metaphor, truly.

Boismier: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Do you feel like—I don’t even know how to say it. If these books stayed in here forever, what would that mean to you?

Boismier: If the books were back in a classroom, but—

Rosin: No, no. I mean, forget the books.

Boismier: —or if they stayed here?

Rosin: All of it.

Boismier: Oh, if it didn’t change anything? So I can’t undo what I did or did not do. But at the end of the day, if I’m really, truly being honest, I hope it matters. I hope it makes a difference. But I don’t regret it. I just regret that I had to do it at all.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. It’s interesting ’cause I feel like you—I mean, even seeing this has brought it home for me. You keep saying, I’m suspended. I don’t know where I am. I’m suspended, which suggests that you’re waiting for something. And the something is, like, it could be just a job; it could be a teaching certificate. But it’s gotta be something.

Boismier: Yeah.

Rosin: Something has to happen.

Boismier: I say that to myself every day when I wake up: Something has to happen.

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Boismier: I really hope it does.

(Shed door being shut.)

Boismier: All right, where did I put the—oh. All righty. (Locks door.) All right.

[Music]

Rosin: Oklahoma kids started school a few weeks ago. So far, Michael says things are going well, that his students this year are extremely polite, which he says is a nice surprise and a little weird. Boismier is still at her mom’s house—no job offers.

Last week, Ryan Walters ordered that all public schools observe a moment of silence in honor of the death of Charlie Kirk. The State Department of Education says it’s investigating claims that some districts did not comply. And then just a couple of days ago, Walters announced a plan to create chapters of Turning Point USA—the conservative organization co-founded by Kirk—at every Oklahoma high school.

That ideology test for teachers that Walters promised, it came out in late August, and right at the top: “What is the fundamental biological distinction between males and females?” “Why is the distinction between male and female considered important in areas like sports and privacy?”

The test questions in general got a lot of press—unlike the kind of questions that Walters’s opponent raised in the state-superintendent race: about teacher retention, career readiness, and food insecurity.

[Music]

Rosin: Here’s a question for the purity test: Is public education guaranteed in the Constitution? The answer is “No, it’s not.” Schools are an example of civic institutions that evolved in a democracy over centuries, towards the consensus that they should be free, open to everyone, and secular.

But as we’re learning lately about those institutions, they can be gone faster than you can fall asleep in civics class.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West with help from Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Jonathan Menjivar and Claudine Ebeid. Original music and mixing by Rob Smierciak. Fact-checking by Will Gordon. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

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