Why, of all places, Oklahoma?
In looking at the ideologies, educational limitations and legal issues involved with the movement to publicly fund religious schools, I’ve continually pondered the question: why would leaders in the movement choose my politically and culturally insignificant state when politicians in more important states like Texas and Florida have shown themselves quite willing to maul public education in an “anti-woke” death match? I assumed it was primarily a matter of Notre Dame’s Program on Church, State & Society casting about for a political structure weak enough to be bent to their needs and a politician eager to do the dirty work, and understandably settling on Oklahoma (ranked 46th in the nation in child wellbeing and 49th in education) and our egregiously terrible State Superintendent of Public Instruction.
I was wrong.
Yes, people like Richard W. Garnett and the Oklahoma bishops are certainly exploiting the state to create a legal precedent for their movement, but I mistakenly believed State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ personal role was largely a matter of convenience; he happens to hold the office and advocates positions most useful to their educational agenda, but they would have worked with anyone willing to serve their purposes. Instead, as this article will demonstrate, Walters was carefully selected, cultivated and promoted by the Catholic Church and has rewarded the Church with his service.
Ryan Walters’ Corruption and Unprofessionalism
Oklahomans are regularly reminded of Walters’ unwillingness and inability to fulfill the duties of his office, but national readers may not know the extent of his failings. These are just a few.
The most significant example involves misuse of $1.7 million dollars from Oklahoma’s Bridge the Gap Digital Wallet program, which provided low-income families $1,500 grants to purchase school supplies for the 2020–21 school year (the vendor through whom these purchases were made received a no-bid contract). Ryan Walters, who at that time was both the state’s Secretary of Education and director of the non-profit Every Kid Counts Oklahoma (about which we’ll learn more below), gave a blanket approval for purchases with the program’s digital vendor; families then used the funds to purchase televisions, gaming consoles, Christmas trees and other items. Walters has falsely claimed the vendor is solely responsible for this misuse, and also implied the mismanagement was conducted by the previous state superintendent (in fact, the state itself says his nonprofit was responsible for distributing the funds). Federal auditors demanded the state repay $652,720 of the money (this was before an audit this year discovered the amount misused was over twice that); the FBI is now investigating the mismanagement.
This is not Walters’ only problem with outside money. The former director of grant development for the Oklahoma Department of Education has accused Walters of failing to apply for any education grants, as well as failing in the continuing obligations for current grants. This individual blew the whistle after hearing Walters tell state lawmakers he had applied for a grant for which, she says, applications are not currently being accepted. Another grant writer, handpicked by Walters after these accusations, has quit after four months and similarly accuses him of refusing to meet with staff or approve grant applications. She concluded in her resignation letter, “If your physical presence is not required for leadership, then the question arises as to why the position exists with a salary attached to it.”
Combining financial problems with a refusal to meet with individuals and/or complete necessary paperwork is an ongoing issue for Walters. Dr. Katherine Curry, who replaced Walters as Secretary of Education after it became clear the legislature would not allow him to simultaneously hold (and draw salaries for) the offices of Superintendent of Public Instruction and Secretary of Education (he only grudgingly stepped down as executive director of Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, meaning he initially expected as Superintendent to draw three salaries), resigned after three months because Walters refused to submit required expense and budget reports. He has also been fined—and faces another potential fine—for refusing to submit campaign financial reports on time, in addition to refusing to disclose all donations (including $594.67 from The State Chamber who, as we shall see, played a crucial role in Walters’ rise).
These are just examples of financial corruption. There are also an ever-growing number of examples of gross unprofessionalism: lying to Congress about Tulsa public schools being connected to the Chinese Communist Party; spreading the hoax about students identifying as cats and using litter boxes; creating videos accusing teachers of being terrorists and transgendered students of being violent stalkers; engaging in a vendetta against an LGBTQ-supporting former teacher while ignoring allegations of abuse—including public nudity—against a high school football coach/principal (who has been formally charged with outraging public decency and yet remains active, with no action or comment from Walters)…the list goes on and on. He even, when inaccurately accusing his predecessor of supporting sanctuary cities, misspelled both “sanctuary” and “cities.”
As Julie Couch says, “The State Supt. for Public Instruction has formal duties…from his ragged start, it appears Walters is not up to those duties…Walters is now the State of Oklahoma’s problem and it’s a problem with dollar signs.”
I somewhat belabored this point to bring us to an obvious question: how did someone this corrupt, this unprofessional and—as his spelling-challenged attack video demonstrates—this inept wind up in a position where he could become Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction? The answer is that the Catholic Church, to achieve its goal of a publicly funded Catholic school, needed a politician in their pocket who has little in the way of ethics or integrity and is willing to ignore policies and regulations, to misrepresent both his actions and those of others and finally, should these things be politically or legally risky, be incapable of fully understanding what he’s doing. The Church needed a corrupt tool to manipulate a corrupt system to pursue a corrupt agenda.
So they began cultivating and promoting Ryan Walters years before applying for a publicly-funded Catholic virtual charter school.
And this is how they did it.
The Rise of Ryan Walters as a Catholic Tool
Despite the point of this article being the Catholic Church’s role in Ryan Walters’ political career, his initial jump into politics came via The State Chamber, a statewide business advocacy group in Oklahoma. The State Chamber ran an initiative from 2013–2020 called Oklahoma Achieves, which presented itself as supporting education for workforce development but primarily advocated for school choice. In 2019 Oklahoma Achieves hired Walters—who until that year had been a relatively well-liked history teacher at McAlester (OK) High School—as their executive director. Fred Morgan, then-president and CEO of The State Chamber even said, “Ryan’s real-world education and reform-minded leadership will help make us a top ten state in education” (I’ll give a moment for readers to finish guffawing and slapping your knees). We’ll return to Oklahoma Achieves and Walters shortly.
In December of 2016 Brett Farley, who had just stepped down as head of the Oklahoma GOP due to his disgust over Donald Trump’s “Grab ’em by the pussy” quote, started a nonprofit organization named Upward Oklahoma whose purpose was to engage in “various charitable, educational, and scientific activities in the state of Oklahoma.” The organization’s incorporators included Farley, Jason Reese (then a partner for an Oklahoma City legal firm) and Cordon DeKock (then VP of political affairs for The State Chamber). In 2017 the organization added Janet Carter (former chief of staff for the highly-controversial previous Superintendent of Public Instruction Janet Barresi) and Kyle Beauregard (an accountant) as incorporators.
Upward Oklahoma does not appear to have been active, so it is difficult to say precisely what Farley, et al, intended for the organization (“various charitable, educational, and scientific activities” covers a lot of ground), but there are several facts that give us hints. Farley, Reese and Beauregard were all conservative Catholics (I am unaware of DeKock and Carter’s religious leanings). Farley, Reese and Carter were also highly active in school choice activities. For example, Farley and Reese tweeted about attending a national school choice event in 2012, and in 2017 Farley maliciously celebrated the Oklahoma Department of Education’s approval of a charter school by tweeting, “Educrats at the OK blob took a direct torpedo hit today. Big score for school choice.” Carter similarly caused a minor scandal in 2011 by tweeting that public school officials who oppose school choice are “dirtbags.” With all of this we can reasonably assume Upward Oklahoma was created with an eye toward advocating for school choice with an emphasis on religious schools.
This agenda became much more obvious in 2020, and it is here that we have the direct link between Oklahoma Catholics and Ryan Walters. On March 30, 2020, Upward Oklahoma was renamed Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, with Farley, Reese and DeKock once again listed as incorporators. Remember that DeKock was a VP for The State Chamber, because on May 14, 2020, Every Kid Counts Oklahoma offered Ryan Walters—then executive director of The State Chamber-affiliated Oklahoma Achieves—a CEO position paying $100,000 per year, with a 20 percent raise after the first year (an investigation revealed the Walton Family Foundation and a Koch-affiliated group are major donors). On June 26, 2020, Oklahoma Achieves merged with Every Kid Counts Oklahoma.
2020 was a pivotal year for Walters, Farley and Reese (at this point Cordon DeKock leaves our story—he is currently the executive director of the Oklahoma Veterinary Medical Association). Ryan Walters was now head of Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, and on September 10, 2020, was appointed by Governor Kevin Stitt to simultaneously be the state Secretary of Education. Brett Farley was the executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma (he started in 2017, shortly after creating Upward Oklahoma), and Jason Reese—who had been working as a policy writer for the Catholic Conference—became Governor Stitt’s general counsel. To understand how the Catholic Church, Ryan Walters and Oklahoma education are inextricably intertwined, let’s begin by looking at July 17th of that year (and thus only 3.5 months after Every Kid Counts Oklahoma was legally incorporated, and just over two months after Brett Farley offered Walters the CEO position).
On July 17, 2020, Kevin Stitt announced a $30 million education plan including the aforementioned Bridge the Gap Digital Wallet, Learn Anywhere Oklahoma (funding online educational content, including AP courses) and our focus here, Stay in School Funds to “stabilize the educational system.” The Stay in School program provided $10 million—one-third of the total education plan—to provide private school tuition assistance for low-income families. The Stay in School program was riddled with problems: as I discuss in an earlier article five schools—three of them Catholic—were allowed by Ryan Walters to apply early for the program and given enrollment exemptions, and these schools received almost $1.9 million of the $10 million allocated for the program. This nearly $2 million was merely part of $6.5 million in questionable spending: for example, 1,000 students whose families reported no economic hardship received funding from the program, while 650 eligible low-income students received no funding.
We’ll put the pieces together. Brett Farley and Jason Reese were working for the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, where a central concern is finding ways to direct public money to Catholic schools. Devising a strategy for achieving this through a COVID-related plan they knew was in the works, they offered a $100,000 position (with a soon-coming $20,000 raise) to Ryan Walters (undoubtedly promoted by their co-incorporator Cordon DeKock), who was almost immediately put in charge of academic funding programs for the state which he used to direct hundreds of thousands of dollars to Catholic schools.
Then, in August, 2022, Oklahoma’s then-Attorney General, John O’Connor (a staunchly conservative Catholic appointed by Governor Stitt following the sex scandal-induced resignation of the previous AG) filed a lawsuit against the Florida vendor to whom Walters awarded the no-bid Bridge the Gap Digital Wallet contract in an attempt to remove responsibility for the debacle from Walters; the current AG, Gentner Drummond, dropped the suit for being “almost wholly without merit.” While unsuccessful, Catholics were nonetheless once again deeply involved in supporting Walters’ political career.
O’Connor followed this in December with a formal opinion—rooted in his belief that America must be a “God-based country”—claiming that forbidding public funding for religious schools violates the First Amendment (Drummond has since withdrawn this opinion). Interestingly, Brett Farley responded on the same day that the Catholic Church had ready an application for a Catholic virtual charter school. This, of course, was not coincidental: the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma was clearly working with O’Connor (or at least being kept informed about developments) and, even though O’Connor would soon cede his office to Drummond, the Catholics now had their man Ryan Walters elected as Superintendent (just over three weeks before O’Connor’s ruling) to advance the cause.
Hypocrisy Behind the Movement
It is easy to point out some of the ethical and moral problems of leading figures in this story. For example, the fact that Brett Farley could arrange financing for a six-figure salary to offer to Ryan Walters raises the question: if $120,000 is an amount small-enough that Farley would offer it to someone else rather than keeping for himself as head of his self-created organization, then exactly how much are the Catholics of Oklahoma (of whom I am one) paying him to pillage our public education system? Just how much money is the Catholic Church spending to force the public to fund a Catholic school?
Jason Reese’s situation is less a matter of ethical gray areas (as is Farley and the Church’s financial dealings) and more a standard case of moral hypocrisy. Reese is a Catholic integralist—frequently expressing his appreciation for books by leading integralist Adrian Vermeule—who at the same time not only resigned his position as Governor Stitt’s general counsel after nine months (reportedly due to an affair with a married lobbyist), but also lost his 2018 State House race after submitting a campaign expense report seeking reimbursement for payment to the website “Hotwife Chloe Needs to Be Punished.”
I normally would not comment on an individual’s private life and relationships, and only reluctantly do so now. There are nonetheless two reasons why Reese’s situation is significant for our discussion. First, both of these instances involved his official responsibilities to the state: his reported extramarital affair while the governor’s general counsel was with a lobbyist, which could have created serious political and legal complications for the state. Secondly, and more importantly for this examination of the Oklahoma Catholic Church, Reese was writing policy for the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma after the payment to “Hotwife Chloe” was revealed. It is notable that Brett Farley can supportively retweet a link to an article promoting school choice as the best way to protect children from “gender ideology and critical race theory,” but is nonetheless untroubled by pursuing this school choice with an individual who sought reimbursement for a bondage porn purchase. As many people have pointed out, it is difficult to take seriously claims that publicly-funded Catholic schools are necessary to “protect children” and instill “traditional values” when the institution and people involved take such a flexible approach to their own standards and behavior.
Such hypocrisy, while eminently regrettable, is also regrettably common; what is less common is Ryan Walters’ fervent support for a cause he openly despises. It seems to be surprisingly unknown that Walters, while fully invested in opening a publicly-funded Catholic virtual charter school, has expressed contempt for both Catholicism and virtual schooling.
In a strongly-worded tribute to Martin Luther, Walters fiercely criticizes “the injustices of the Catholic Church,” comparing what he sees as the abominations of medieval Catholicism to those of modern liberalism. In Walters’ schema, orthodox Catholic opposition to personal biblical translation and interpretation is similar to liberal opposition to “offensiveness;” the “ruling class of bishops and priests” imposing their “monolithic” religious interpretation upon helpless individuals is similar to modern liberal “indoctrination;” similarly, the “exclusive group of clergy who thought they knew better than the rest of society” are analogous to the “bureaucratic state.” Ironically, Ryan Walters seethes with hatred for the exact society the integralist Catholic public school movement is working to reconstruct.
Still more, Walters doesn’t merely hate the St. Isidore part of the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School—he also has problems with the virtual part. On January 7, 2021, Governor Stitt tweeted, “I agree with @sec_walters and so many parents who feel that virtual learning is not effective for young students” (@sec_walters was the previous username for Walters’ professional Twitter/X account; he now uses @RyanWaltersSupt). Walters so strongly supports this point that he retweeted Stitt’s post from both his personal and professional accounts.
Think about this: Ryan Walters detests Catholicism (at least the version cherished and promoted by the integralist Catholic public school movement) and believes virtual learning is ineffective for young students, and yet he is willing to run roughshod over the U.S. Constitution and state law to create a publicly-funded Catholic virtual charter school. He is determined to foist upon the public something he himself has argued to be harmful merely because doing so benefits him—and he doesn’t seem to care who he has to hurt, or what he has to break, to get all those benefits for himself.
A Symbiotic Relationship
We have seen that the relationship between the Catholic Church and Ryan Walters is entirely symbiotic: Walters has received money, political and legal support from the Catholics, and in turn the Church has also received money and, with the possibility of a publicly-funded Catholic virtual charter school, the potential for significantly more money in the future. The Church put Ryan Walters into a position in which he can lay down the tracks so that the educational gravy train can chug-chug-chug along…and, as I argue elsewhere, potentially more “First Amendment-protected” trains can roll down the same financial tracks in the future.
Image: Ryan Walters speaking to the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce in September 2023 (Source).
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