There are signs that sanity might be returning to Oklahoma schools after the disastrous tenure of now-former state school Superintendent Ryan Walters.
In one of his first actions as Walters’ successor, new Superintendent Lindel Fields announced he’s abandoning Walters’ signature initiative to put Donald Trump-endorsed Bibles in every classroom and require every teacher to teach from them.
Fields announced he plans to seek dismissal of a lawsuit filed by a coalition of pastors and parents, who sued arguing that forced religion in public schools violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion and the separation of church and state (which it pretty obviously does).
“We plan to file a motion to dismiss, and have no plans to distribute Bibles or a Biblical character education curriculum in classrooms,” Fields wrote in a statement.
That effectively ends the effort to divert $3 million of the state’s educational funding to Bibles, which the state Supreme Court had put on hold pending the outcome of the lawsuit.
No word yet on what the state plans to do with the 500-plus “God Bless the USA” Bibles that Walters already bought to send to Advanced Placement history classrooms across the state.
They probably could get some of that back if they put them on eBay. New ones sell for $60 each, of which Trump gets a cut through name/image/likeness fees for his endorsement of the business venture.
Fields’ decision to drop the classroom Bible mandate marks significant progress — though it’s also the low-hanging fruit when it comes to undoing the damage that Walters did during his time in office.
His 2½ years were a reign of terror, marked by a KGB-style purge of Education Department staff and threats against teachers who didn’t share his Christian nationalist agenda for public schools.
Most recently, he announced that he was going to decertify 70 teachers who made what he considered disparaging comments about Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk after he was shot to death during a public appearance in Utah.
Walters also announced that the Education Department was investigating 12 school districts that didn’t comply with his orders that all 750,000 Oklahoma schoolchildren and teachers participate in a moment of silence for Kirk, and three districts that didn’t follow his orders to fly their flags at half-staff in honor of Kirk.
Fields ought to end that witch hunt too, before it turns into another legal morass like the Bible mandate.
Fortunately, Fields appears to be the right person in the right place at the right time to right the ship.
A career educator before starting his own consulting firm, he was the superintendent of a Bartlesville technical college that won the Malcolm Baldrige Award for quality programming while also being listed in Fortune Magazine’s Best Places to Work.
In other words, he’s the opposite of Ryan Walters, who left behind a school system ranked between 48th and 50th in the nation (depending on the rating body) and that has earned a national reputation as the last place in America anybody would want to be a teacher.
Walters left behind that trail of wreckage to become the CEO of the so-called “Teacher Freedom Alliance,” a political group fighting unions and the “liberal, woke agenda,” in schools.
