Opinion - Oklahoma ramps up Trump’s war on education with a teacher political loyalty test

Desmond Milligan · August 20

In President Trump’s White House, scandals compete with each other for oxygen. Deported American citizens are bumped from the front pages by sprawling ICE raids. Leaks at the Pentagon wrestle with the salacious drip-drip-drip of details about Trump’s relationship to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. It’s exhausting.

Trump’s chorus of noise and distraction isn’t strategic, but chaos doesn’t need to be strategic in order to paper over MAGA Republicans’ less visible horrors. Just ask Oklahomans, who just awoke to a world where out-of-state teachers are now required to pass an “America-first exam” meant to test their loyalty to the GOP’s nativist “anti-woke” ideology. If you don’t pass, you don’t teach.

Oklahoma’s effort to conform to Trump’s far-right politics comes as the state faces a near-record teacher shortage. That hardly matters to state Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters. In Walters’s view, a statewide teacher brain-drain is preferable to hiring a “woke indoctrinator” who used to live in New York City. Oklahoma’s schoolkids will pay a terrible price for their state’s cynical stunt.

The state’s new exam brings to life one of Republicans’ biggest imagined grievances against the left — that Democrats and other shadowy forces are indoctrinating our children by injecting radical politics into their education. Yet Oklahoma Republicans are now relying on a loyalty exam created in part by conservative media outlet PragerU, an unaccredited “university” whose founder has openly called for using schools to “indoctrinate” children into conservative ideology. Walters must appreciate irony.

Teachers moving to Oklahoma from California or New York will now be required to agree with Republican-revised state history standards that falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by Democratic trickery. They’ll also need to teach the discredited theory that COVID-19 was the result of a “lab leak.” Meanwhile, units on racial history have either been sanitized or completely removed.

For a state that ranks a dismal 48th in education quality, MAGA’s takeover of Oklahoma schools will mean students fall even farther behind their peers. That’s a loss students can’t afford — not when Oklahoma’s college enrollment rates have already declined 20 percent over the last decade and only about one-third of high school graduates go on to attend college. That number will surely drop now that Oklahoma students will graduate with a master’s in MAGA and little else.

Oklahoma may be the first red state to surrender its schools to the church of MAGA, but it won’t be the last. Walters’s actions are just the Republican Party’s first effort to implement Trump’s executive order “Ending Racial Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” on the state level. That order escaped heavy media coverage because Trump quickly lost interest, but conservative state lawmakers are picking up the slack ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Oklahoma’s rotten loyalty test now serves as the blueprint for future state efforts to turn educators into partisan evangelists.

Trump’s order baselessly accused teachers of “Imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful and false ideologies in our nation’s children,” offering Republican lawmakers a fabricated reason for swinging back against those so-called “false ideologies.” For the millions of Republicans who believe discussing America’s racial history is tantamount to hating the country, forcing teachers to shut up about all that history sounds like a blessing.

The implication, of course, is that Trump’s MAGA nativism is America’s one true ideology and always has been (though it’s apparently an ideology so weak it can only stand on its own when all competing ideas are banned). It’s an ideology that uplifts the vague idea of “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” while stripping away all the details about what King believed or why he was assassinated, as Texas schools have. It’s American education reduced to comforting fairy tales.

That isn’t education.

Those simplified myths of American history might comfort the insecure MAGA hordes, but they set our children up for failure in a modern world that depends on actually understanding what’s going on. How can we cultivate prosperous citizens, let alone competent political leaders, if we are denying them even a basic understanding of their own national reality?

A free society should recoil at the idea that educators must pass a political loyalty test in order to teach math and science. In their rush to score political points with the White House, Oklahoma’s Republicans are on the verge of setting their children back by a generation. If that’s what passes for American exceptionalism in the Age of Trump, our country is in for a brutal wake-up call.

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.

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