Walters' edicts will vanish? Gee, thanks for making that clear now
Finally resigning late Tuesday afternoon, Ryan Walters executed one last dick move over the state that elected him, the students and teachers who could never count on him, Democrats who’ve long opposed him and, most of all, Republicans who allowed themselves to be held hostage by him.
It was a week ago today Walters took to Fox News to announce he’d be taking over a thing called the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a sort of anti-union teachers’ union created by the Freedom Foundation, whose website remains fronted by four white men in suits surrounding Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Most in Walters’ position would have resigned on the spot, taken a week off to spend with the fam, play a golf course or three, go on vacation, fish, catch up on their reading, something.
Not Walters.
Not with one more dick move to play, holding up the process of naming his replacement, freezing whatever should have been happening at the department of education in its tracks, making who knows how many lives needlessly more difficult than they otherwise would have been.
Not for very long, no, and still one day is too long when the whole point is pettiness, the one constant trait you can count upon from small, empty-suited men like Walters.
So, finally, he’s really gone.
And, some hours before he was, there was this headline in Tuesday morning’s Oklahoman, front page, top-right corner.
I first saw saw it displayed on Facebook early in the day:
“Official: Walters mandates to vanish.”
I later saw it when I came across the actual paper in the afternoon.
Upon first glance I thought, “Well, good, as they ought to.”
The second time around I was mad at myself for not realizing the first time around what was hitting me once I’d seen it again.”
Because of course they’re vanishing. How could they not be vanishing? He never had the statutory power to issue or enforce them in the first place. They were empty all along.
What he might have been able to do before Kevin Stitt abandoned him and stuck him with four state school board members who could think for themselves was threaten or take action via the board, and though that surely cost a few teachers their jobs and made thousands uneasy, it still failed to get the state’s largest districts to fall in line.
In the story under that headline, education reporter Murray Evans wrote this from the top:
The chair of the Oklahoma Senate’s education committee says mandates for Oklahoma made by outgoing state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters — such as those about teaching from the Bible, starting Turning Point USA chapters, paying for school lunches for all students and immediately ending high-stakes standardized testing — effectively will disappear once Walters leaves office.
State Sen. Adam Pugh, R-Edmond, said such mandates had no statutory authority anyway, so they wouldn’t be in effect even if Walters, his fellow Republican, remained as Oklahoma’s top education administrator.
So, great, right?
That’s one reaction.
The other one is this:
Seeing as how Walters’ edicts had no authority behind them in the first place, why wasn’t Adam Pugh screaming it from the rooftops in the first place?
Why wasn’t attorney general Gentner Drummond, no fan of Walters to begin with, who, to his credit, stood between Walters and tyranny many times over the last three years, nonetheless getting way out in front of Walters every day if that’s what it took to quell the fears of students, teachers and administrators throughout the state.
Why wasn’t the governor holding press conferences in which he made it very clear each of Walters’ do-it-or-else directives held no weight.
Why weren’t the speaker of the house and the senate president pro tem making stinks?
Why were teachers, administrators and districts across the state allowed to be placed in impossible positions by Walters time and time again?
Because what’s more important, education and our kids or politicians who tell themselves they’re in it for the greater good but never speak or vote as though they are, too frightened of an even more whackadoodle foe then themselves issuing a primary challenge?
It’s not a left-right, Republican-Democrat thing, but a do-good, leadership thing.
It just so happens those who sat quietly during Walters’ reign of terror, who propped him up in the first place only to become cowards when he needed reining in, were overwhelmingly Republican.
Instead, it took the district’s themselves to exercise civil disobedience by not going along, taking Walters on directly, holding down the fort, drawing lines in the sand.
In that same story, Pugh offered this:
“Nothing happens, because nothing was going to happen, because there wasn’t statutory authority to do it. I’ve always maintained that position, because we have to be able to say, ‘What is the administrative authority to do something?’ It’s only what you’re given by law to do.”
He, and so many others, could have maintained that much more frequently, much more loudly, much more publicly.
They didn’t.
It was all so unnecessary.
But that’s supermajority Republican politics in Oklahoma.
Try to remember that when it’s time to vote again.
Try exercising your power.
Keep writing. We need your voice! I have no doubt this state will give us lots more to comment on.
They are afraid of their primary voters, many and probably a majority, think Walters was doing a good job.