Oklahoma’s public schools superintendent, Ryan Walters, announced that any applicants from California and New York who want to teach in Oklahoma must pass a test administered by Praeger U before receiving state certification. Educators are evaluated on their understanding of “American Exceptionalism,” the biological differences between male and female, and why freedom of religion is important to America’s identity.
The left has cried foul, denouncing the exam to guard against radical leftist ideology as a “MAGA loyalty test.”
Yet, tying teacher certification to the teaching of ideology is a page from the left’s own playbook. Not only are California and New York actively teaching Marxism, but other Democrat-run states as well. Illinois law requires that teachers must teach action civics to maintain their license. “Action Civics,” which is disguised as American civics, uses the public classroom for community organizing and recruiting a Marxist student army. Teachers are required to support and teach progressive viewpoints and perspectives, including all the lies about race and sex, and they must actively discriminate against white heterosexual Christians.
The hypocritical left supports linking the teaching of these views to getting and keeping a license. Yet they fly into a hysterical rage if conservatives stand up for our founding values and refuse to allow teachers to indoctrinate students in leftist ideology.
President of the National Council for the Social Studies Tina Ellsworth worries that the Oklahoma requirement poses a threat to our “great democracy.” “State boards of education should stay true to the values and principles of the U.S. Constitution….Imposing an ideology test to become a teacher in our great democracy is antithetical to those principles.”
State Rep. and Oklahoma Democrat party chairman John Waldron, denounced the test as “political posturing.”
Although Oklahoma can expect to see this mandate challenged in the courts by Democrats, this is a battle they will lose. This is not an issue about a teacher’s right of freedom of speech in the classroom. As long as they are employed by the state and paid with taxpayer dollars, they do not have the right to use their classroom as a bully pulpit for personal ideological views. In America, taxpayers still have the legal right to decide if they want their dollars to pay for radicalizing their children.
Americans have allowed the left to steadily move our constitutional republic toward full-blown communism. If liberal states can force teachers to promote leftist ideology in violation of the U.S. Constitution and over the protests of parents, then conservative states must take a bold step and refuse to license those who want to use the public classroom for their own ideological platform.
Texas is taking control over school districts that are failing because they have abandoned the traditional school model that, for decades, successfully educated our future voters. Already we have seen the historic academic transformation in just two years in Houston ISD, where teachers are required to focus solely on academic content without politicizing.
With this incredible success in reform that is inspiring other states, Texas should take the next step to “take back its schools.” It should require an assessment of teacher applicants from all states, including those from Texas, to determine if they are sufficiently aligned philosophically with our nation’s founding values to be entrusted with the education of the next generation of Texans.
Carole Hornsby Haynes, education policy consultant, historian. www.drcarolehhaynes.com
Image: Public domain.