RINOs align with teachers’ unions to muzzle the fight for parental choice

Uniparty Republicans and teachers’ unions in Oklahoma recently concocted a new plan to sabotage the fight for educational freedom — silencing the state’s Department of Education. But their efforts failed.
Make no mistake, their efforts weren’t about silencing me — they were about silencing parents in the fight for school choice in the Sooner State.

Going up against the education cartel and standing up for students, parents, and educational freedom is a great way to find yourself on a political 'wanted' poster.

I wish I were exaggerating, but I’m not. RINO Republicans in the Oklahoma legislature recently cut a deal with the union to silence my department. The language in the budget bill said the "Department of Education shall not be encumbered or expanded for the purpose of securing media interviews, public relations, or other public promotional purposes."

It would have required my office to fire our communications staffers and barred me from even sending an official email, all because I spoke out against wokeness in Oklahoma’s public schools.

This was all because the teachers’ union cartel had finally decided it had enough of our success with taking on its agenda. Union lobbyists convinced enough lawmakers that it was time to stop our efforts by any means necessary. They got tired of losing the information war over our education system, so they put a political bounty out on my head and my department, which resulted in the legislative gag order.

From day one, I made it my mission to improve Oklahoma’s school system, and a big part of that was shining a spotlight on what was really going on in our schools, all while making the case for educational freedom. The talented men and women on my team have been wildly successful at doing this, so we got under the union lobbyists' skin.

When I entered office, Sooner State parents were completely fed up with the way our public schools were being run. They were tired of seeing politicians, bureaucrats, and union bosses prioritize putting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” over real education. They were tired of finding out about pornographic materials in school libraries. They were tired of curricula being dominated with radical progressive ideologies like critical race theory that denigrate the country they love and the founding principles and values that make it great.

That is why I ran for superintendent of education in 2023. With a clear mandate from the voters, my team went to work exposing what was wrong, expanding educational freedom through K-12 scholarships and charter school expansion. And, yes, we were unashamed to communicate these successes to the public.
And, as it turns out, going up against the education cartel and standing up for students, parents, and educational freedom is a great way to find yourself on a political “wanted” poster.

Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) on Friday used his line-item veto to strip this targeted language from the budget bill. But if he had signed it into law, my communications staffers would have been immediately unemployed, and the voters who gave me this job would no longer have had a voice for parents and students. And that’s really the biggest problem here.

Speech is a critical part of representative government, at least in a real and functioning one that derives its mandate from the consent of the governed. The thing about a republic is that all citizens are equal, as created by God. No man has a right to impose his will upon another without consent. So, we communicate with one another. We campaign and make speeches. Yes, we write op-eds, and we do interviews with the media to get our message out there. That’s how we persuade our fellow citizens that our position helps advance the public good.

While some may write off this part of the job as merely “political,” it is essential to maintaining healthy public debate and keeping up the connection between hardworking citizens and the public officials to whom they entrust the responsibility of government. It naturally follows that to muzzle duly-elected public officials from doing that part of the job is to rob them of their voice in the process in a big way.

If this attempt to silence parents can happen in one of the most conservative states in America, it can happen anywhere. When you refuse to settle for the status quo and the lousy “this is how we always have done it” attitude, people will put a target on your back. They don't like change, even if it’s a good change. I’m going to keep fighting for students and parents regardless of what a bunch of union bosses and RINO Republicans in Oklahoma City say or try to do. We have come much too far to be turned back and stopped now, and the stakes are far too high.