Updated at 11:09 a.m. ET on September 25, 2025

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

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.

Note: Hours before this audio episode was published, Ryan Walters announced live on Fox News that he would resign as state superintendent with more than a year left in his term. Walters said he would be taking a position in the private sector as CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance (TFA), a nonprofit that describes itself as an alternative to teachers’ unions. TFA is a partner organization of the Freedom Foundation, a far-right think tank. Walters’s campaign manager and senior adviser told the Oklahoma Voice that Walters expects to step down in early October.

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.