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Testing the line between church and school is a recurring American theme. In Pennsylvania in 2004, a school board tried to introduce teaching “intelligent design” as an alternative to evolution. In 2002 in Georgia, a board tried to add a disclaimer to textbooks saying that evolution was “a theory, not a fact.”
And 2025 is, after all, the 100th anniversary of the Scopes “monkey trial,” when Tennessee put a public-school teacher on trial for teaching evolution.
But what’s been happening to American public schools lately is different: more coordinated, more creative, and blanketing the nation. Pressure on what kids learn and read is coming from national parents’ movements, the White House, the Supreme Court. “There used to be an idea that you could live in a blue state or a red state and sort of encounter the school system a little differently. That maybe if you opposed school-choice programs, especially private-school-choice programs, that you were a little bit immune from this issue if you lived in, say, New York,” says Cara Fitzpatrick, author of The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America. Now there’s “this pressure coming from the Trump administration to say we’re actually going to get very deeply involved in questions around curriculum and options for children.”
We have paid close attention to how conservatives are systematically trying to overhaul the culture at universities. A similar enterprise is unfolding at public schools. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we visit Oklahoma, where the official in charge of public schools has pushed the line further than most. State superintendent Ryan Walters recently announced an ideology test for new teachers moving to Oklahoma from “places like California and New York.” He’s tried to overhaul the curriculum, adding dozens of references to Christianity and the Bible and making students “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results.” A group of parents, students, and religious leaders has sued. And just this week, the Oklahoma Supreme Court issued a temporary stay, pausing the standards while it considers the lawsuit.
Walters may eventually lose in court on some of the details. But he’s already succeeded in helping create a new template for what public schools can be. For decades, they’ve been a proving ground for democracy, where people from a community with different views learn to tolerate one another. Walters and a larger conservative movement seem to be trying to redefine public schools as only for an approved type: “If you’re going to come into our state,” he said, “don’t come in with these blue-state values.”
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: I remember my first day in an American public school. I had just moved here from Israel. I was nervous about what was in my lunch box: pita with things stuffed inside it. But when I sat down at the lunch table, the whole place was like an international food hall: dal, dumplings, jerk chicken—you get the idea. This was P.S. 117 in Queens, one of the most diverse places on the planet.
The term of art back then to describe our situation—families of every race, configuration, and religion sitting down to eat together—was “melting pot,” which makes it sound like a smooth, warm bisque.
It was not. We were mean to each other, made fun of each other’s holidays, regularly sniffed each other’s lunches and said, “Ew, gross.” Fights broke out nearly every day on the playground.
But every morning, we all showed up and said the Pledge of Allegiance together.
[Music]
Rosin: I didn’t think about it at all this way when I was a kid, but on top of the English and math and social studies, we were absorbing another lesson that would serve us throughout our life. It was a lesson on messy democracy: how to be around people who ate and thought and believed different things than we did and that our parents did, hate them on some days, and still wake up the next morning and go to school.
To be honest, I wish I had thought about all this sooner. I wish we all had. Because this role that public schools have played—a training ground on how to live with your fellow citizens who aren’t like you—might be disappearing.
I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. This episode, we have something different.
Ryan Walters (from Oklahoma State Department of Education video): We’re excited to announce a new office here in the Oklahoma State Department of Education. It will be the Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism.
Rosin: We took a field trip to Oklahoma, where this war on public schools is probably at its most overt.
Walters: For too long in this country, we’ve seen the radical left attack individuals’ religious liberty in our schools. We will not tolerate that in Oklahoma.
Rosin: This is from a video that State Superintendent Ryan Walters of Oklahoma sent out to school administrators across the state. He told them to play it for every student in class and send it to every parent.
Inviting students to pray along with him in school is just one provocative move he’s made.
Walters: I will now say a prayer—and to be clear, students, you don’t have to join, but if you so wish, I’m gonna go ahead and pray.
Rosin: But not every move he makes comes as an invitation. As the state superintendent, Walters has the power to enact policies and influence curriculum.
Of course, he’s not the first American elected official to try and get religion into public schools—2025, after all, is the 100th anniversary of the Scopes “monkey trial,” when Tennessee put a public-school teacher on trial for teaching evolution.
[Music]
Rosin: But what’s been happening lately is different. Pressure on what kids learn and read is coming from all angles: national parents’ movements, the White House, the Supreme Court. It’s coordinated, it’s more creative, and this war on schools is spreading nationally.
Walters: I pray for our parents, teachers, and kids, that they get the best education possible and live high-quality lives.
Rosin: War, by the way, is not my lazy metaphor. In the foreground of the Ryan Walters video, on his desk, is a mug. It says Si vis pacem, para bellum, which is Latin for “If you want peace, prepare for war.”
Walters: —what makes America great and that they continue to love this country. Amen.
Rosin: Before Ryan Walters was elected, when he was still a candidate, he singled out a specific teacher who seemed to embody for him what he thought was wrong with the public schools.
Her name was Summer Boismier. It was August of 2022, and over at Norman High School, south of Oklahoma City, she was getting her classroom ready. The school year hadn’t officially started, but things were already off.
Boismier recalls that she and the other teachers were called into a meeting and reminded about H.B. 1775, a new bill known as the critical-race-theory ban. That bill forbids teaching things like, quote, “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” But that’s about as specific as it gets.
Boismier says they were told to restrict students’ access to any classroom books that could fall under the bill. But restrict how? And which books, exactly?
Summer Boismier: I remember going back to my classroom after this meeting had occurred, and I have never been more grateful for the office chair that I had.
Rosin: (Laughs.) Why?
Boismier: Because it spun beautifully. And I sat there for—I would imagine it was upwards of half an hour, just spinning. And I thought to myself, What am I going to do?
Rosin: Boismier herself had been a student in Oklahoma public schools, K–12. After she graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of Oklahoma, teaching seemed like the practical career choice—except for one thing.
Boismier: I remember thinking, I am wildly introverted, and I’m also very awkward. (Laughs.) And I’m sure you’ll find out from this conversation. But: How am I going to make connections with young people in my classes if I’m having trouble making connections myself?
Rosin: As a kid in school, Boismier was a voracious reader. She loved YA and science fiction. So as a teacher, she wanted to use her love of reading as a way to reach her students.
Over her nine years of teaching, Boismier amassed a huge library for her own personal classroom: 500 books, which the kids could read in class or check out. Most of the books she paid for herself.
And as she spun in her office chair that day, she considered what she should do: Should she remove all those books from her class, turn their spines facing inwards so students couldn’t see the titles, or maybe just cover over the bookshelves with butcher paper?
She chose C.
Rosin: Wait, you literally covered it over? That’s what people—that’s the weirdest solution ’cause I would think that the teenagers, knowing teenagers, would just be real curious, you know?
Boismier: Well, I mean, that was one of the options that was presented to me, and I had butcher paper in my room, and so why the heck not? But I remember, too—again, I’m a teacher, as well, and so I love me a good text feature—and so I added the caption Books the state doesn’t want you to read.
Rosin: Just wrote it—in black marker, biggish but not too big, and neat enough to read—right on the red butcher paper that covered the bookshelves.
Boismier: But I remember going home, thinking about my classroom library and what message that sends to students when they walk in. And I thought to myself, It’s not enough, because this is a dumb law, and it’s meant to force self-censorship. It’s meant to scare people.
Rosin: The problem for teachers? There is no official list of banned books. But lots of books have been challenged in Oklahoma. For example, in 2022, a state attorney general reviewed a list of about 50 books that included Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings—books that American kids have been reading for decades. He pretty quickly dropped the investigation, saying he would leave it up to parents and local school boards. But that left a problem: How could you possibly know for sure what was and wasn’t okay?
Boismier was upset. She cried for a good hour or two about it. And, in the end, she took the provocative route and added to her display.
Boismier: I created a QR code. I linked it to the library.
Rosin: When you scanned the QR code, it took you to a Brooklyn Public Library program called Books Unbanned, which offers free library cards to teens who may live in places where books are challenged or banned.
Boismier: And I printed the QR code and slapped it up around the room on those same shelves that bore the caption Books the state doesn’t want you to read.
Rosin: Summer, I gotta say, you’ve described yourself as shy and awkward—this is a bold-ass plan. This is a plan that you—I don’t know if you were this certain in the moment, like, in the day, or if this certainty is kind of two years down the road, but I’m just noting that, and I’m curious about that.
Boismier: I remember thinking to myself—and again, I have grown up in Oklahoma, I know Oklahoma education, and I knew what this could cost me.
TV anchor (from KOKH Fox 25): Welcome to the Fox 25 debate between Secretary of Education Ryan Walters and former Teacher of the Year Jena Nelson, your Republican and Democratic nominees for state superintendent.
Good evening—
Rosin: Around the same time, Ryan Walters, then 37, was running for office. He was already secretary of education—he’d been appointed to that position by the governor—and he supported the critical-race-theory ban. But that position is largely symbolic. In Oklahoma, it’s the state superintendent who has the real power to change the schools.
Walters was running against a woman named Jena Nelson, who generally talked about school stuff: career readiness, teacher retention, child and food insecurity. Oklahoma public schools have consistently ranked near the bottom for reading and math scores on the Nation’s Report Card. In a recent national survey, the state came in 48th in education overall. But Walters, in a debate with Nelson, he talked a lot about war.
Walters (from KOKH Fox 25): What we are seeing right now in the state of Oklahoma is a civil war that’s being fought in our schools.
Rosin: And there was one topic in particular that he kept coming back to.
Walters: Pornography. Pornography should not be in our schools. No parent should send their child to school and their child have access to graphic pornography. I mention—
Rosin: What Walters is referring to are a couple of books that conservatives often bring up in these kinds of debates.
Walters: Well, I’m gonna tell you what a radical position is. Her position that pornography, Gender Queer and Flamer, these books should be in every public school library and should be in our classrooms, that’s a radical position. What parents want—
Rosin: Okay, Gender Queer includes pages with a picture of a vibrator and two guys naked, making out. It’s meant for a 16-plus audience, so it seems legitimate to question whether it should be on a bookshelf easily accessible to kids younger than that. But it seems less legitimate to pretend that the book is definitely on bookshelves all over your state.
Walters (from Fox News): I began hearing from parents all over the state going, 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. They are pushing—
Rosin: So it was while Walters was out on the campaign trail talking about these so-called pornographic books that Boismier put up the QR code. And on the first day of school, a parent complained. The parent told a local news station that she had scanned the QR code and saw a reading event for Gender Queer from the Brooklyn Public Library.
Boismier was called into a meeting at the district office. She wasn’t fired, but later that day, she chose to resign.
[Music]
Rosin: And that was that: Boismier was no longer teaching in Oklahoma public schools.
Because of the news, she’d caught the attention of the Brooklyn Public Library, and she was deciding what to do next with her life—like, maybe she would leave the state, try living in a big city. And one day, she got on a Twitter Live—remember those?
Boismier: I was actually in one of those with some folks from Brooklyn Public Library, talking about the library’s initiative and the benefits therein, when I started to, kind of suddenly, as we were in the middle of this conversation, get all kinds of text messages and calls. And no one ever calls me, except my mom.
Rosin: Mm-hmm.
Boismier: But suddenly, I have reporters from all over the OKC area who are texting me saying, Have you seen the letter?
TV reporter (from KOCO 5 News): This tweet Secretary Ryan Walters posted this morning saying, quote, “Sexualizing our classrooms will not be tolerated.” Now he asks—
Rosin: On August 31, 2022, Walters, who was still campaigning for state superintendent, tweeted a statement about Boismier. It read, quote, “In light of recent events involving Norman High School English Teacher Summer Boismier, I am asking the Oklahoma State Board of Education to revoke her teaching certificate immediately.”
Rosin: As you’re scanning the letter, were there any words that jumped out at you—his letter?
Boismier: I think what stands out to me, and I think what hit me the most—not only just because it is patently false, but because of the implications—the word pornographic.
Rosin: The statement from Walters continued: “There is no place for a teacher with a liberal political agenda in the classroom. Ms. Boismier’s providing access to banned and pornographic material to students is unacceptable and we must ensure she doesn’t go to another district and do the same thing.”
Boismier said she started to get threatening messages. One message called her a “pedophile.” Another listed her apartment number. At one point, she even called the police.
Boismier: I mean, what we’re talking about here—this isn’t a job; this is a career. And I am one person in a small state in the middle of the country, and there are accusations featuring the word pornographic on state letterhead with my name in the same paragraph. That is something that, regardless of what happens with any of this, that is something that doesn’t go away.
[Music]
TV anchor (from KJRH 2 News): The current Oklahoma secretary of education, Ryan Walters, with 57 percent of the vote. Again, the projected winner here over Jena Nelson, a longtime teacher—
Rosin: Walters easily won the seat in November 2022. For a guy who was pretty new to politics, occupying a meat-and-potatoes-type position, he was remarkably good at building a national brand.
Basically, as I see it, he borrowed some influencer tips on growing your audience: Start beefs, often and loudly. Make friends with people who have way more followers than you do. For example, several months into office, Walters shared a video from the Libs of TikTok account. I know you should never try and explain a TikTok, but it featured a Tulsa librarian lip-synching to Ludacris and seemingly admitting to pushing a “woke agenda.” She was probably kidding, but Walters apparently did not read it that way.
For about a week, the librarian and the school received bomb threats. Walters publicly said he actually got bomb threats too. The whole thing was an early hint of how noisy Walters planned to be. Oklahoma state Democrats called for an impeachment probe, and Walters leaned in harder.
He named the Libs of TikTok account founder, Chaya Raichik—who, by the way, is known for using the term groomer, as in gay people infiltrate schools to groom children—to an Oklahoma state library advisory committee.
Chaya Raichik (from video played at Oklahoma state school-board meeting): We’re going to remove porn from the schools, and you can’t stop us.
Rosin: Walters also took a no-mercy approach towards the teachers’ unions.
Walters (from an Oklahoma House of Representatives video): The teachers’ union—I don’t negotiate with the teachers’ union. They’re a terrorist organization that has continued—
(Crowd noise.)
Man: Members. Members.
Rosin: Another time Walters got a lot of attention was when he said teachers could cover the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, where white Tulsans slaughtered hundreds of Black people, but they should not, quote, “say that the skin color determined it.”
Walters accused the media of twisting his words. He said the events that day were, quote, “racist, evil,” and “inexcusable.” He also said that “kids should never be made to feel bad or told they are inferior based on the color of their skin.”
The Onion weighed in with this headline, quote, “Oklahoma Schools to Teach Students That Tulsa Massacre Was Crime of Passion From Loving Black People Too Much.”
[Music]
Rosin: In the early 2000s, I covered the religious right as a reporter for The Washington Post. Back then, the religious homeschooling movement was booming. I wrote a book about it. Their motivating idea was that they had lost the culture war and needed a kind of “quarantine,” as conservative activist Paul Weyrich put it, to protect their children from infection by a culture hostile to Christianity. And so religious families had to create a parallel and protected zone of education for their kids.
Now many of those same religious families are joining forces with Trump. Instead of avoiding public schools, some religious parents are pushing to remake them in their own image. And Trump is on board, vowing to end what he calls, quote, “radical indoctrination” in K–12 schools, threatening to pull funds from schools that teach about gender identity. And he’s made it a priority to expand school choice nationwide—which, in many places, is the catchphrase for “creative ways to shift funds from public schools to private and religious schools.”
Jonathan Hunt (from Fox News): Let’s bring in Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters, always an interesting voice on matters education-wise. Ryan—
Rosin: A generation ago, someone like Walters would be a fringe state official pushing religion in schools. But now he’s at the center of the action.
In June of last year, he directed all Oklahoma public schools to teach the Bible. And in an appearance on Fox News, Walters talked about displaying the Ten Commandments.
Walters (from Fox News): What we’ve seen in America are the Democrats, the teachers’ unions have driven God out of schools, and Americans, Oklahomans, President Trump want God back in the classroom. The reality—
Rosin: That one got Trump’s attention. He posted on Truth Social, quote, “Great job by Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters on FoxNews [sic] last night. Strong, decisive, and knows his ‘stuff.’” And then in all caps: “I LOVE OKLAHOMA!”
Speaking of Trump, Walters wanted to spend millions of dollars in state money to purchase 55,000 Bibles. And the Oklahoma Department of Education put out a bids request that specified the Bibles must be the King James Version and must include a copy of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and “must be bound in leather or leather-like material.”
One of the only Bibles that meets that criteria is the “God Bless the USA Bible,” endorsed by Lee Greenwood and President Trump. It sells for $59.99.
[“God Bless the U.S.A.,” by Lee Greenwood]
Rosin: The Education Department later changed some of those requirements and denied that they were meant to cater to one particular Bible. And the Oklahoma Supreme Court has paused the Bible plan for now.
[Music]
Rosin: But Walters still was not deterred. And what anyone who tracks public education could see is that if there was ever a time to push the limits, it’s now.
Jake Tapper (from CNN): The court sided with a group of religious Maryland parents who want the option to keep their elementary-age children out of lessons involving books with LGBTQ content.
Donald Trump (from ABC 7 News – WJLA): I think the ruling was a great ruling, and I think it’s a great ruling for parents. It’s really a ruling for parents. They lost control of the schools. They lost control of their child.
TV anchor (from KOAA News5): The U.S. Supreme Court, they’re gonna hear oral arguments today in a case over the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school in Oklahoma. At the heart of the case is whether public funds should be allowed to support a religious entity. So let’s go live—
Rosin: That Oklahoma case, which proposed using taxpayer funds to operate a religious school, is especially significant. The court was split 4–4, and it likely only failed because Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself.
It’s a case one education expert told us would have been unimaginable a few years ago. But right now, public schools are shaky for lots of reasons. Parents have been moving kids to charter or private schools. In the last few years, two-thirds of traditional public schools have lost enrollment. School systems in Florida, New Jersey, Tennessee, and dozens of other states have had to hire consultants to encourage parents to enroll their children in local schools.
And in the public schools that do remain, teachers have to be extra careful, lest they trigger a viral parents’ rights moment.
[Music]
Rosin: All the moves that Ryan Walters was pulling—the prayer in schools, the Bibles, the civil war, and pornography in the classroom—it struck some people as odd. Because a lot of people knew Walters as someone different: a public-school teacher who taught AP history, who’d been a finalist for Oklahoma Teacher of the Year, whose students loved him.
Starla Edge: I thought he was a closeted Democrat. Raised to be Republican, but I thought he was kind of coming out of it, you know what I mean? The people who are so close. You’re so close to getting the big picture here. I thought that was him.
Rosin: That’s after the break.
[Break]
Rosin: What is the first memory either of you have of—what did you call him in school, Mr. Walters?
Edge and Shane Hood: (Speaking simultaneously.) Coach Walters.
Rosin: Coach Walters, great. Okay, what’s your—
Edge: I wasn’t in sports, but he was still Coach Walters.
Hood: It is pretty common in McAlester school—if they coach a sport, that’s what they’re called.
Rosin: This is Shane Hood and Starla Edge, both 23. We’re meeting with them in Starla’s living room in Oklahoma City, where her cats are hiding, but the many stuffed animals are in full view.
Like Ryan Walters, Shane and Starla grew up in McAlester, Oklahoma, a place that Starla describes as the biggest city in the middle of nowhere.
Edge: I’d say up until kind of recently. We just got a new Starbucks. We’re getting a Five Below and a T.J. Maxx, and that’s all brand new.
Hood: Very rarely do people who are born and raised in McAlester actually stay there—if they can help it.
Rosin: Shane and Starla have known each other since middle school, but they were not friends back then. Starla came out as queer. She was head of the Gay-Straight Alliance, or GSA, her junior year. Shane, meanwhile, signed a petition to end it.
Hood: It’s not prohibited to be open-minded, but it’s very, very much frowned upon. And so if you did hear me talk about the queer community, LGBTQ—which, at one point in time, I just called them the “alphabet soup” and refused to learn the letters—it was almost never positive.
Rosin: Mm-hmm.
Hood: It was hateful, and I’m sorry about it.
Rosin: But even back then, Shane and Starla did share one thing in common: Coach Walters was one of their favorite teachers.
Rosin: How would you compare him to other teachers in the school? How would you place him in the teacher hierarchy?
Edge: He had an aura about him, that’s for sure. So he wears tight suits. He also wore the shoes, you know, just dress shoes.
Hood: Very distinct.
Edge: Yes.
Hood: It was a very distinct sound. You could hear it about—it started about 90 feet away, but it was clear. And here’s—
Rosin: Wait, what’s the sound? It’s like click—how—
Hood: You ever hear a heel hit a hardwood floor?
Edge: It sounds like high heels. It really did.
Hood: Yeah, it sounds like high heels. And we actually referred to him as “High Heels” ’cause it was hilarious.
Rosin: Did he know that people called him “High Heels”?
Edge: Yeah. Oh, yeah. So that’s another reason why he became one of my favorites before I even had him as a teacher. He would do little roasts on Twitter. Like, you know how—it was at the time of, like, when Jimmy Kimmel was doing the reading-mean-tweets thing. And he would do that about himself.
Walters (from YouTube): —about me, so I’m gonna go onto my Twitter account right now and read some of them and see what my really nice students have said about me on Twitter.
Rosin: This is from a video that one of the students recorded of the roast.
Walters: “Coach Walters, your pants are so tight, they ripped at the basketball game.” “Coach Walters, is your beard a pumpkin Halloween festival? Because it’s patchy.” (Laughs.)
(Students laugh.)
Walters: That’s pretty good. That’s pretty good.
Hood: We had an in-person roast. I remember staying up all night, writing about 20 jokes. And then she wrote a parody of a Taylor Swift song and sang it.
Edge: Ian wrote the lyrics. I performed it—
Hood: Oh, yeah.
Edge: —and did the chords—figured out the chords and everything.
Hood: “Teardrops on My Scantron” was the name of that parody.
Edge: Yeah.
[Excerpt from a video recording of “Teardrops on My Scantron”]
Edge: “He says we seem depressed; he’s finally got it right / I wonder if he knows the quizzes that keep me up at night / I sign up for your class every year, don’t know why I do.”
Rosin: I mean, there’s a lot of love that goes into that specific a roast, you know? (Laughs.)
Hood: It was. There was legitimate admiration between whoever took his class and him. Nobody I ever knew personally had a problem with him, which was weird because everybody had something, at least one thing bad to say about every other teacher in that high school. He was the only one that we saw was universally loved.
[Excerpt from a video recording of “Teardrops on My Scantron”]
Rosin: Starla picked Walters as her homeroom teacher because he let her leave to get coffee as long as she brought one back for him. Starla says her girlfriend was in the same class, and they sometimes walked in holding hands. She said she and Walters would sometimes have coffee together and talk—about school things and life things.
Around that time, Walters was named a finalist for Oklahoma Teacher of the Year. Starla and Shane remember he taught world religions and kept a Torah and a Quran in his classroom and that he skimmed through Christianity because this is the Bible Belt, they recall him saying.
Edge: And that’s what he said. He was like, You guys know about this. If you wanna know more, go to fricking church. I’m pretty sure he said that.
Hood: We had the history of Judea covered from his lectures. But after that, getting down to the principal beliefs of Christianity? It was not necessary to discuss that with students at McAlester High School in Pittsburg County, Oklahoma.
Rosin: Do you recall him ever using the phrase American exceptionalism? Do you recall him ever using the phrase or talking about the idea of American exceptionalism?
Edge: I don’t know what that means.
Rosin: Okay.
Hood: American exceptionalism is a school of thought that—and it’s a mechanism that they’ve used in schools forever. But the best way I can describe it is that America is exceptional in everything it has ever done ever, so—
Rosin: Was chosen by God.
Hood: Was chosen by God. So—
Edge: No, because he would show us things that would prove that America was not this all-great country.
Hood: We had weeks-long discussions on Reconstruction and how it went awful. It was: Here’s what you’ve been told. Here’s what actually happened.
Rosin: Really?
Hood: Pretty much. The first full-length discussion about Reconstruction and its failures, we had in the Walters classroom.
Edge: His whole thing about wokeism, I truly don’t understand, because he was woke. He was woke! (Laughs.) He was a woke teacher.
Hood: No other teacher would’ve taught us about Emmett Till. That would’ve never have happened. Basically, if you took a class like that about Jim Crow–era South, it was almost certainly like: Here are the Black Codes. Here’s how they overcame them. And we’ve had racial equality ever since the Civil Rights Acts. Basically, you get a summary like that.
In Ryan Walters’s class, we actually get to see pictures of a open-casket Emmett Till funeral. Here’s what happened in between them. So you never got a discussion like that. I don’t remember the specifics, but I remember learning about Emmett Till, specifically in his classroom. And we would talk about the psychological horrors of segregation. I learned about the baby-doll experiments from him, where, basically, it found that Black children would wanna buy white dolls because they were “better.” You didn’t get that discussion anywhere else.
Edge: I don’t know if he has ever explicitly said this but how there is a thing where people think you go off to college and it brainwashes you and makes you liberal and everything. I would say that Ryan Walters’s class was the closest thing I ever had to something like that in high school. (Laughs.)
Hood: Yeah. It would’ve made you more moderate, at the very least, to sit through one of his lectures.
[Music]
Rosin: Walters had gone part time and then fully left McAlester High School during Shane and Starla’s senior year. Starla says she mailed him a graduation announcement, but it was returned to sender.
Soon after they graduated, Walters’s political career was in full swing. He was still in a suit, still in those clickety-clack dress shoes. For what it’s worth, Walters has said he’s the same guy who taught them history—he hasn’t changed. But to them, he was unrecognizable. Shane compared it to how you’d feel about your dad if he remarried a woman you didn’t like.
[Music]
Rosin: English teacher Summer Boismier did not stick around to see Walters’s overhaul of the public schools. She had taken what was the monumental personal step of moving away from Oklahoma, away from her mom and her sisters, and all the way to her own apartment in Brooklyn.
She was working with the Brooklyn Public Library in 2023 when a hearing officer in Oklahoma concluded that she had, in fact, not violated H.B. 1775, the critical-race-theory ban. The hearing officer recommended that Boismier’s teaching certificate not be revoked, which would mean that she could one day, if she wanted, go back to teaching.
Walters (from video played at Oklahoma state school-board meeting): I think we’ve got a quorum here, so if we can go ahead and I’ll call us to order. If you can do a roll call—
Rosin: But Walters and the Oklahoma state board ignored those recommendations and instead put it up to a vote.
Walters: This is possible action on the findings of fact and conclusions on the case of Summer Boismier.
Rosin: Boismier watched the proceedings from her laptop in New York.
Boismier: I remember I was sitting on the floor of my Brooklyn studio apartment, kind of watching the state school-board meeting unfold.
Woman 1: I make a motion to authorize the chair of the board to sign off on the proposed order for Summer Boismier.
Woman 2: I’ll second that.
Boismier: My name was finally on the agenda, after years of stops and starts and things of that nature, and I remember that a vote was taken.
Walters: So we have a motion and a second. Do we have any further discussion?
Boismier: There was practically no discussion. It was: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Walters: Ms. Terrie, can you call roll for us?
Terrie Cheadle: Mr. Burdick?
Donald Burdick: Aye.
Cheadle: Ms. Lepak?
Sarah Lepak: Aye.
Cheadle: Ms. Quebedeaux?
Katie Quebedeaux: Aye.
Cheadle: Ms. Wesson?
Kendra Wesson: Aye.
Cheadle: Mr. Archer?
Zachary Archer: Yes.
Cheadle: Superintendent Walters?
Walters: Yes. Motion passes. Let’s take a look there at Item G.
Rosin: In August of 2024, two years after Boismier resigned from her teaching position at Norman High School, the board voted unanimously to revoke her license.
A year after that, she was back in Oklahoma, back at her mom’s house, talking to us about that moment.
Rosin: So once it all sunk in, then how did you feel?
Boismier: There’s a part of me that feels and that felt and still does feel very angry. It feels inherently unjust, and there’s a part of me that feels incredibly sad and infuriated for my students. But I can also say that there was a sense of pride, in a way. My teaching certificate being unanimously revoked by that state board of education in Oklahoma—if I could put that at the top of my résumé, I would. It will always be a point of pride for me that that board chose to revoke my certificate.
Rosin: Why did you go back to Oklahoma?
Boismier: I went back to Oklahoma because, in all honesty, I was experiencing some very severe health issues. And it had been a very kind of fast—and what people need to understand is it was, in the blink of an eye, really, everything was different for me. And it was so much change, and it was so quick. And so much of it, I really had to handle on my own, but I did not do the best job of that. And it got to a point where I really needed to be—I could not care for myself, and I needed to be with people who could.
And so that is something that I am still struggling with because I am, full disclosure, I’m not back here in Oklahoma of my own accord. I’m back here because I didn’t—because I want to live, and this is the way I ensure that happens.
[Music]
Rosin: In Oklahoma, Boismier had family who could support her and keep her safe.
Rosin: Okay, Summer, I understand. I mean, it sounds like intellectually, in terms of your convictions, you didn’t really regret anything you did. You did it very quickly. You weren’t that ambivalent about it. But the cost was huge.
Boismier: Yes.
[Music]
Rosin: This school year, students started off with Ryan Walters’s fingerprints all over the curriculum. For example, for high-school students: “Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information.” And: “Identify the source of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Chinese lab.”
But then, just this week, the Oklahoma Supreme Court issued a temporary stay, pausing the standards while it considers a lawsuit challenging them. In that lawsuit, a group of parents, teachers, and religious leaders argued, among other things, that the standards require teachers to present biblical passages as historical facts.
In a statement, Walters called the Oklahoma Supreme Court “embarrassing” and “out of step with Oklahomans.” But Walters can, for now, press ahead with an ideology test for new teachers. Any teachers moving in from “places like California and New York” will have to take an exam designed to guard against “radical leftist ideology.”
[Music]
Walters: How are y’all doin’?
Rosin: Hey, how are you?
Walters: Ryan Walters.
Rosin: Nice to meet you.
Walters: Nice to meet you.
Rosin: In our next episode, we talk to Walters.
Walters: Oh, man, that’s a nice-looking microphone right here. Is this—
Rosin: Walters explains what he’s trying to do in Oklahoma schools—and whether he is the same person who taught high-school history to Starla and Shane. And, an awkward one, he addresses a scandal—like, a weird incident—that took place only a few days before we got there. It involves something that Walters himself has brought up a lot.
TV anchor (from Fox23 News Tulsa): Tonight, Fox23 talked to and confirmed with two members of the Oklahoma State Board of Education that they saw sexually explicit images of naked women on a screen inside State Superintendent Ryan Walters’s office yesterday. Thanks so much for joining us—
Walters: Yeah, they’re outrageous liars. And we’re about to be able to show that, so it shows you the lengths at which they will go.
Rosin: That’s next time.
[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 and Luis Parrales. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
If you’re an Atlantic subscriber or you become one today, you can listen to Episode 2 in this series now in Apple Podcasts. You can subscribe at TheAtlantic.com/listener.
For nonsubscribers, Episode 2 will be available next Thursday.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
The post Is Oklahoma Breaking Public Schools? appeared first on The Atlantic.
