by Jennifer Smith Richards

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The future that the Trump administration envisions for public schools is more patriotic, more Christian and less “woke.” Want to know how that might play out? Look to Oklahoma.

Oklahoma has spent the past few years reshaping public schools to integrate lessons about Jesus and encourage pride about America’s history, with political leaders and legislators working their way through the conservative agenda for overhauling education.

Academics, educators and critics alike refer to Oklahoma as ground zero for pushing education to the right. Or, as one teacher put it, “the canary on the prairie.”

By the time the second Trump administration began espousing its “America First” agenda, which includes the expansion of private school vouchers and prohibitions on lessons about race and sex, Oklahoma had been there, done that.

The Republican supermajority in the state Legislature — where some members identify as Christian nationalists — passed sweeping restrictions on teaching about racism and gender in 2021, prompting districts to review whether teachers’ lessons might make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish” or other psychological distress about their race. The following year, it adopted one of the country’s first anti-transgender school bathroom bills, requiring students to use restrooms and locker rooms consistent with the gender they were assigned at birth or face discipline.

While he was state schools superintendent, Ryan Walters demanded Bibles be placed in every classroom, created a state Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism, and encouraged schools to use online “pro-America” content from conservative media nonprofit PragerU. He called teachers unions “terrorist” organizations, railed against “woke” classrooms, threatened to yank the accreditation of school districts that resisted his orders and commissioned a test to measure whether teacher applicants from liberal states had “America First” knowledge.

Many of the changes endorsed by the state’s leaders have elements of Christian nationalism, which holds that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and often downplays troubling episodes in the country’s history to instead emphasize patriotism and a God-given destiny.

Walters, who declined to comment for this story, resigned at the end of September and became CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, an arm of the conservative think tank Freedom Foundation that aims to “fight the woke liberal union mob.” But much of the transformation in Oklahoma education policy that he helped turbocharge is codified in the state’s rules and laws.

“We are the testing ground. Every single state needs to pay attention,” warned Jena Nelson, a moderate Democrat who lost the state superintendent’s race to Walters in 2022 and is now running for Congress.

ProPublica has reported that Education Secretary Linda McMahon has brought in a team of strategists who are working to radically shift how children will learn in America, even as they carry out the “final mission” to shut down the federal agency. Some of those strategists have spoken of their desire to dismantle public education. Others hope to push it in the same direction as Oklahoma.

Walters tapped the president of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that published Project 2025 and the blueprints that preceded it, to help rewrite Oklahoma’s social studies standards. The Legislature did not reject the rewrite, so the standards now include roughly 40 points about the Bible, Jesus and Christianity that students should learn as well as skepticism about the 2020 presidential election results and the origins of COVID-19. If the new standards survive a legal challenge, they could be in place until they’re up for review again in six years.

But while Oklahoma made these shifts, it has consistently ranked near the bottom on national measures of student performance. Scores on eighth grade reading and math in national evaluations are abysmal. Only New Mexico’s proficiency rates rank lower. The high school dropout rate is one of the highest in the country, while spending on education is one of the lowest. Only three other states — Utah, Idaho and Arizona — spend less per pupil. And in the most recent federal data about average teacher pay, Oklahoma tied with Mississippi for dead last. Many school superintendents and parents say state leaders have been fixated on the wrong things if the goal is to improve schools.

“The attention to the culture war thing means that there’s a lot of distraction from the basic needs of kids being met,” said Aysha Prather, a parent who has closely followed changes in state education policy. Her transgender son is a plaintiff in a 2022 lawsuit challenging the state’s bathroom ban. That case remains on appeal.

“The school should be the nicest, happiest, best resourced place in a community,” she added. “That’s how we show that we value kids. And that is obviously not how most of our Legislature or state government feels about it.”

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