OKLAHOMA CITY — The most exciting thing about Lindel Fields, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction, is how boring he is.
Sitting in a state education office conference room recently while his office was under renovation, Fields described his work as “building a foundation” for a strong public education system. “And the foundation of a house isn’t sexy, right?”
He hopes that, once students’ literacy scores improve and school districts adequately support and retain teachers, people “will forget who built the foundation.”
It’s a sharp contrast to Ryan Walters, who stepped down as state superintendent last September after 33 months. Walters, who had a falling out with Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and riled state board of education members, left to lead the Teachers Freedom Alliance, formed by the conservative activist Freedom Foundation to challenge existing teachers’ unions. Stitt then appointed Fields. The new superintendent is finishing Walters’ term and not running for the position in November, an election considered key to Oklahoma’s educational future.
Walters’ MAGA-style edicts — calling for Bibles in classrooms, book bans, anti-diversity measures and ideological tests for teachers coming from blue states — drew national attention, spurred lawsuits and protests and plunged Oklahoma public education into chaos. (Through a spokesperson, Walters declined to be interviewed or respond to a list of detailed questions.)
Educators “still experience some PTSD,” said April Grace, a former school superintendent and member of the Choctaw Nation who in 2022 lost to Walters in the Republican primary for state superintendent. During Walters’ tenure, “there was a lot of fear,” said Grace, now the executive director of the nonprofit Oklahoma Public School Resource Center. “People were concerned about being targeted.”
The question now: How do you make public education normal again?
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Around the country, schools have become ideological battlegrounds. Amid efforts to address foundering academic achievement, the deluge of extremist laws, orders and policies, some say, distracts from actual learning.
“We needed to be about the business of literacy and math and career education,” said Grace, noting Oklahoma’s poor national test results. The state ranks near bottom in national test scores for fourth and eighth graders in reading and math. “We just kind of wasted 2 1/2 years,” she added. “And we didn’t have 2 1/2 years to waste.”
There are costs to public schools of political turmoil, said John Rogers, director of the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access at the University of California, Los Angeles. Rogers and colleagues tallied direct expenses of responding to “culturally divisive conflict,” including increased security, communications and consultants, finding that it cost some $3.2 billion across the U.S. during the 2023-24 school year. In addition, they saw “lots of time and energy being taken up” by such conflict, with superintendents saying it detracted from work on school improvement and educational advancement.
Oklahoma is not the only state where schools have been hit by political turbulence. State legislatures are still jammed with controversial bills that shape what students learn, what teachers can say and what pronouns educators can use to address students.
Utah recently passed a law requiring Bible passages be taught in social studies starting in third grade. In Texas, the Board of Education moved to create a list of mandatory books all schools must teach beginning in 2030 that includes Bible materials. A U.S. appeals court recently ruled that Texas can require schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms; a similar law was upheld in Louisiana, but recently struck down in Arkansas.
This is not just a red state matter. California, among others, has jumped into the political waters, with laws preempting book bans and protecting students’ gender presentation. The Supreme Court recently blocked California’s law banning automatic parental notification if a student changes pronouns or gender expression at school. At the federal level, Congress continues to debate “parental rights” bills around student gender expression, and the U.S. Department of Education recently affirmed the “right to pray” in public school.
The political environment under Walters in Oklahoma became so disruptive that educators feared each state board meeting and what might transpire, said Kate C. White, whose firm provides counsel for the Oklahoma Education Association, the largest state teachers union. “It was chaos,” she said. “Paranoia is the perfect way to say it.”
Regan Killackey, an English teacher at Edmond Memorial High School in Edmond, a suburban school district north of Oklahoma City, recalled that after the passage of a law forbidding instruction around “divisive concepts” on race and gender, his district told teachers “to refrain from or try to avoid using terms of diversity and white privilege in class.” The problem is “that’s, like, half my curriculum in Advanced Placement Language and Composition.” After all, Killackey urges students to consider “your own identity, your own hidden biases” to craft strong arguments.
Now, under Fields, said White, “there’s an open line of communication. We can talk about the issues.” Whether that continues come November is a question: Seven Republicans and two Democrats, representing a broad political spectrum, are running for the post, with primaries June 16. Given Republicans’ dominance in the state, the June election is likely to be decisive.
“It’s pretty consequential,” Deven Carlson, a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma who studies education policy and politics, said of the vote. Part of the election, he said, is about the state’s poor academic performance “and are we going to do anything about that?”
But Carlson said it is also about tone: “Do we want a combative Ryan Walters-esque kind of state leadership around public education, or do we want a more, you know, Lindel Fields, quieter, the kind of traditional state department of ed where if anyone knows the name of the state superintendent it’s surprising?”
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Like many Oklahomans, Fields is Republican and religious (he’s Catholic). But as a dad to a grade-schooler and retired superintendent-turned-education consultant, he struggled with Walters’ dictums. “I’m like, gosh, this doesn’t feel right,” he said of the state’s poor test scores and attacks on educators, particularly in Tulsa where he lives.
His first moves as superintendent after being sworn in last Oct. 7 were undoing actions Walters had taken. Among them, Fields rescinded mandates for Bible instruction in schools and the requirement that there be a Bible in every classroom. The mandate originally favored two Bibles endorsed by Donald Trump and his family, and Walters attempted to purchase 55,000 of them for the state until the criteria were changed. Walters had requested $3 million for Bible purchases, but Fields said the state spent $25,000. The Bibles now sit in a basement storage room.
While Fields recognizes that “Oklahomans love their Bibles,” he said there are plenty of opportunities to access religious instruction outside of the public schools.
Fields also halted Walters’ social studies curriculum; the state Supreme Court then struck down the standards and called for new ones. (Walters also created an Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism to protect the right to pray in school. It still exists.)
But the biggest change was Fields’ drive to, he said, “set a tone of decorum.” Whereas Walters reminded some critics of Voldemort, the dark wizard in “Harry Potter,” Fields could cosplay Mister Rogers. He tells staff that, “If you wouldn’t say it to your neighbor’s sixth grader, don’t say it, right?” and has shifted the Department of Education’s focus from compliance to, he said, declaring “that we are a customer service organization.”
This has contributed to what educators describe as a reprieve from the fear, animosity and surveillance state Walters fed as he sought to elevate his national profile. Teachers, whose licenses were targeted for revocation, felt the brunt of it. Summer Boismier, a Norman high school English teacher, got national attention when the state revoked her license after she shared with her students a link to the Books Unbanned project at the Brooklyn Public Library. The state argued that Boismier violated H.B. 1775, the state law that restricts teaching about “divisive concepts” around race, gender and history. She has filed a federal lawsuit.
The law, versions of which have been adopted by more than a dozen states, faces challenges. A U.S. district court in 2024 blocked some aspects of it, citing vague language. The Oklahoma Supreme Court last year ruled it did not apply to higher education. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver heard arguments in March and is expected to rule soon.
Walters, however, raised the stakes around compliance by encouraging anonymous write-ups of teachers through the “Awareity” reporting system (created in 2022 to field concerns about school safety and bullying).
“Walters was a bully. He didn’t care about due process,” said Joe E. White Jr., a lawyer who also represents the teachers union. “He didn’t care about what a person went through to become a teacher.”
Under Walters, White said his office, which typically handles one teacher certification case a year, juggled 30. “It was all hands on deck. We were moving trials down in district court to accommodate all these hearings we were having in the state Department of Education.”
The firm represented Killackey, the English teacher at Edmond Memorial High School. He learned just before the 2024-25 school year that the state was seeking to revoke his teaching license. Killackey emits an edgy vibe — he sports oversized black frames, a miniature harmonica on a chain around his neck and displays a copy of “Animal Farm” on his coffee table. He is also a decorated and respected educator.
In addition, he is a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging H.B. 1775, which he believes made him a Walters target. According to the Oklahoma State Board of Education administrative complaint, the department got a tip on July 17, 2024, about an Instagram post from 2019, by then nearly 5 years old, that “depicted Killackey and members of his family fictitiously stabbing fake presidential candidate Trump.”
The offending photo, taken in a Halloween store, shows Killackey with a shocked expression as fake samurai swords surround a Trump mask. Killackey’s daughter Scout, valedictorian of her high school class, said it was her idea to don the Trump mask “as a joke” to scare her Dad and brother during their annual goofball Halloween store outing.
The case was dropped in August 2025, just before the start of this school year, but not before Killackey feared his career was over. On April 27, Killackey filed a federal lawsuit against the state, the Department of Education and the state board — as well as Walters himself — alleging defamation, abuse of process and emotional distress.
Kate C. White, who represents Killackey, said the threats to teachers’ livelihoods have been wrenching. She hopes whoever is elected “can continue what Superintendent Fields is doing,” she said.
“Teachers want to go to school. They want to trust their administration, and administrators and the teachers want to trust the state Department of Education.”
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Trust, of course, is hard to come by. And not just in Oklahoma. According to the 2026 iCivics Teacher Survey of 2,197 K-12 teachers, 52.7 percent said teaching civics concepts now feels difficult and 58.7 percent fear backlash for teaching something the “wrong way.”
Although Oklahoma is 72 percent white and predominantly evangelical Christian, the state has significant Native and Black populations whose history includes devastating attacks by white Americans. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history, destroying a thriving Black community known as “Black Wall Street” as state officials and law enforcement failed to intervene. Before statehood, Native people were driven from their lands. In the 1920s, whites killed Osage Nation members for their oil wealth.
At Millwood High School, located in the predominantly Black Millwood school district in Oklahoma City, high school English teacher Anthony Crawford feels compelled to address literature in ways that speak to his students.
“We’re doing ‘Othello,’ which is the only black character in Shakespeare,” he said as students strode into his AP English classroom on a weekday this spring. “So, I chose this book for obvious reasons.”
During the class, along with one that followed in which students discussed George Orwell’s “1984,” a book that is frequently banned in schools, Crawford waltzed among desks in track pants, sneakers — and a provocative intensity. Students even spoke over one another in apparent eagerness to contribute to the conversation.
Crawford prodded them about a juicy topic — jealousy — then about the crude and racist language the character Iago and others use to refer to Othello. “Hey, do you all see the correlation between how they use propaganda to paint a certain image of Othello,” he asked, “and how they paint certain images of Black men in today’s society?”
Crawford, who is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging H.B. 1775, does not purposefully flout rules, he said. As a father of two, if asked to limit what he says, he will because he needs his job. But he also wants to raise issues that resonate with his students.
“Black and brown kids need to understand society and the things that are already working against them in society,” he said. A dozen students who gathered for an after-class interview said Crawford’s class was one of few that engaged them.
“He opens our minds to reality, and he doesn’t keep our eyes and ears closed,” said David Salas, an 18-year-old senior. Some teachers, he said, can seem too careful, “like they are scared to lose their job.”
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Educators around Oklahoma may be taking a breath, but few are relaxing. With Fields not a candidate in the election for state superintendent of public instruction, there is uncertainty about what’s next. Sixty one percent of likely Republican voters were undecided as of May 14, and no candidate had a meaningful lead, according to polling by Pat McFerron, a Republican political consultant in Oklahoma.
Among those running is state Rep. Toni Hasenbeck, a Republican who recently sponsored a bill mandating time in school for prayer and reading religious texts. Hasenbeck has been fighting hardball: She sought to disqualify another candidate, Republican Sen. Adam Pugh, contending that he was ineligible to run for technical reasons, but the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled in April that Pugh could stay on the ballot.
Pugh, a former Air Force officer and chair of the state Senate Education Committee, is pitching “practical, student-focused education reform” and “NO DRAMA, ONLY SOLUTIONS.” Carlson said that Pugh is “more of a successor to Lindel Fields” while Hasenbeck “is probably more on the Ryan Walters side of things.”
Another Republican candidate, John Cox, a rural superintendent, is vowing to “Make Education Great Again” in the state. Robert Franklin, also a Republican, is a veteran Tulsa educator whose tagline is “44 years in education. Not one day in politics.” The two Democrats running are Craig McVay, a former district superintendent who vows to “undo the disgraceful legacy of Ryan Walters,” and Jennettie Marshall, a pastor and former member of the Tulsa Board of Education.
“Some people think we can get back to normal because Ryan Walters is gone,” said Erika Wright, director of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition and community education organizer with Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, a nonprofit legal group. But, she said, “we are in a very precarious time.”
Wright was speaking as she helped her teens, Charlie and Vivienne, pack lunches and get ready for school. The family lives in a stylish, airy home they built during Covid in rural Noble, where Wright grew up. Her children were plaintiffs in the lawsuit opposing Walters’ Bible mandates before Fields’ repeal made the case moot.
She is Republican and religious — and notes that her community is, too — but says people thanked her for opposing the mandate. “It’s just not the government’s business to teach my kids religion. That’s a family’s job,” she said.
Now, as part of a “Better Outcomes for Oklahoma Kids” effort, she is working to bring focus to issues like improving student performance, limiting class size, increasing teacher pay and support, getting more resources for mental health, and providing free meals for all students.
This June moderate Republicans need to go to the polls and independents “might want to rethink” being independent, because they are ineligible to vote in the Republican primary, she said, adding that low turnouts mean outcomes are decided by few votes.
The stakes are high. Christian hard-right fundraisers who favor a Walters-style candidate remain involved. As Wright put it: “The people who got him elected are still here.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about Oklahoma schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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