During Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s stop in Oklahoma this week for her “Returning Education to the States Tour,” she attended a bill signing and toured a local public charter school with Gov. Kevin Stitt and other state officials. One person was noticeably missing: State Superintendent Ryan Walters — the conservative firebrand in charge of the public education system there.
McMahon toured Dove Science Academy, a public charter school that Republicans in the state have touted as a success story for their school choice legislation. Walters in particular has been a big advocate for school choice, specifically for giving families more access to religious and conservative schools.
But he was nowhere to be found on Tuesday — and that was by design.
According to three sources familiar with the matter, McMahon and her team specifically asked Oklahoma officials not to include Walters on the trip, fearing his presence would be a distraction.
Earlier this month, Walters publicly claimed that the Department of Education had given the state the required waiver to eliminate end-of-year testing in public schools. He even went as far as to release a statement touting the overhaul.
“We went to the Trump administration and they said they were all for it,” Walters said on the right-wing channel Real America’s Voice about his order eliminating end-of-year testing on August 11.
But the administration hadn’t approved it, and one of the sources cited the incident as a reason McMahon’s team did not want Walters at the event. McMahon had to publicly dispute Walters’ comments at the Oklahoma event.
“The waiver has not gone through all the different steps that it needs to, but I can tell you that we are very happy to sit down with any state. We want to give them the most flexibility we can, that we can give them to operate within their state,” McMahon said.
When asked by local reporters if she plans to meet with Walters while she was in town, McMahon said, “I don’t believe that’s on my schedule today.”
Walters’ office told reporters that he was out of town on a previously scheduled trip during McMahon’s visit.
Walters and a spokesperson for him did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for the Department of Education declined to comment.
This rebuke from a cabinet secretary in the Trump administration does not bode well for Walters’ potential gubernatorial bid as he tries to occupy the MAGA lane in a primary.
He has routinely attempted to force schools to adhere to a strict conservative ideology, angering many Republicans in the state. Oklahoma ranks near the bottom of the country in nearly all education statistics.
Walters has attempted to force teachers to include resources from the conservative PragerU in their curriculum, and he attempted to make teachers display the “Trump Bible” in classrooms.
Most recently, he announced that teachers coming from the blue states of California and New York would be forced to take an assessment created by PragerU that would weed out “woke” teachers.
While he has yet to officially announce his intentions for 2026, it is widely speculated that Walters will enter the governor’s race. Currently, the top two front-runners are Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond and former Speaker of the Oklahoma state House Charles McCall, who joined McMahon and Stitt on their tour of the charter school.
Walters was also recently embroiled in a scandal where members of the Oklahoma State Board of Education accused him of displaying a naked woman on his office television during a meeting. However, an investigation by the Oklahoma state House found that the most likely scenario was that the television accidentally began playing a movie with explicit content.
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This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and Oklahoma Watch.