Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma superintendent for public instruction, wants Donald Trump to notice him more than anything else in his life. In July, Walters found a new way to get himself in the news: He told CNN that if teachers from the dangerous foreign states of California and New York want to teach in Oklahoma schools, they’d have to pass a special test that “keeps away woke indoctrinators.”
Walters bloviated to any outlet that would listen that as long as he’s boss of education in Oklahoma, he would protect the state’s precious children from the “radical leftist ideology fostered in places like California and New York,” and vowed he would never let “Gavin Newsom’s woke, Marxist agenda turn Oklahoma into the same dumpster fire California has become.”
Walters explained that starting this school year, new teachers from those two not-real-America places couldn’t get their teaching certificates without a perfect score on the “America-First Assessment,” which he said the state was developing with the rightwing disinformation factory PragerU — probably in defiance of Oklahoma law.
The full 34-question test was only made public over the weekend at the PragerU website. So of course we went and took it.
Spoiler warning: It’s ridiculously easy to “pass,” as long as you remember that in Ryan Walters’s Oklahoma, transgender people simply don’t exist. And damn, do we feel like suckers for going to the trouble of making up a fake name and taking the test at the PragerU site so we could get screenshots. As it turns out, PragerU also published the full “test” as a full-page ad in the New York Times Sunday (Bluesky link).
It’s hardly a real test if the “right” answers are all out there online for everyone to make fun of. At most, if it’s actually put into use, it’s a list of 34 items people will need to memorize. No teacher from New York or California is likely to be screened out of a job in Oklahoma by this mess, unless somehow they never use Al Gore’s internet.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the test, which you can also find at the New York Post. Just keep in mind that we seriously doubt it’s anything but a publicity stunt for Walters and for PragerU.
The only reason you’d want to bother making up a throwaway email account and getting on PragerU’s mailing list might be to get a totally serious certificate of completion just like we did. It’s so official looking! Especially after PragerU fixed the first-day error that misspelled “certify” as “certifiy,” a typo of the sort you’d expect from a mere blogger.
The other thing that you get when you reach the end of the test is a moneybeg from PragerU, as well as a presumably unending stream of emails and junk snail mail, since they ask for a home address, too. Maybe “Frank Anders” will get something worth making fun of.
Again, we suspect expanding PragerU’s list of potential donors is the real point of the entire exercise. But on to the awful test!
The first question is sort of a stage-setter, just so test takers will know that Oklahoma supports “PARENT’S’ RIGHTS”:
Did you guess B? If you didn’t, the online test requires you to try again until you get it, with no penalty, so you literally can’t fail unless you collapse laughing partway through.
The test front-loads its four ideological questions aimed at preventing Wokies from teaching Okies right after that. Questions 2 through 5 are almost cartoonishly obvious in their strict enforcement of the gender binary. See if YOU can figure out the “right” — or Far Right— answers!
None of that woke nonsense about gender identity, distinctions between sex and gender, or gender dysphoria here, and never mind that trans people exist and have been acknowledged as having rights, even by the Roberts Court. People are born male or female, and that’s that, for the purpose of this test — and apparently there are no chromosomal variations in Oklahoma, either.
From there, it’s on to some ridiculously easy civics questions, with a few extra-tricky political spins on law and US history thrown in for fun, like this weirdass loaded question that’s neither fairly framed nor strictly about the law:
Isn’t that cute? The “correct” answer is D, although in legal terms, it’s a blend of A and B: Teachers have fairly broad, but not unlimited, free speech rights as private citizens, but schools and state government can limit what they say in the classroom since they’re public employees. (How much states can limit that, as with policies banning “divisive concepts,” is still being fought in the courts.) But the question as a whole is crap, with its embedded assumption that teachers are trying to “persuade students to adopt their point of view,” as if that were the only reason teachers would say what they think about something. The question is begging the question.
Other questions are similarly loaded, like Number Nine (Number Nine, Number Nine):
A is the “right” choice, and, OK, it’s part of the case Thomas Jefferson made for the separation of church and state. But only part, since it leaves out so much else, like the entire Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which does indeed impose limits on government promotion of any particular faith.
Then there’s Question 22, which seems to be here solely as a fuck-you to the 1619 Project.
The “correct” answer is C, although as we recall, the colonists came up with a whole damn list of reasons in addition to taxation. But like the gender questions, this one seems mostly aimed at screening out some imaginary wokester whom wingnuts made up just to be mad at.
Slavery shows up again as one of the definitely wrong answers to Question 26, which also throws in a cherished rightwing myth among the incorrect options, perhaps in a weird attempt to demonstrate how evenhanded the test is:
Right after that, the test skips forward a century with this highly selective version of the Civil Rights Movement:
Oooh, that DEI one is totally gonna catch the wokesters! But also notice how framing King’s cause as “racial equality” erases the context of Jim Crow and the denial of voting rights in the South. It’s fully consistent with the familiar rightwing lie — first promoted in a 1985 speech by Ronald Reagan — that King would just hate affirmative action, because he hoped his children would be judged by the “content of their character.” Perhaps King would also be offended by how Smithsonian museums are about how slavery was so bad, it’s just such a downer!
There’s also this Hail-Reagan question on slightly more recent history, which you must get right or you are unworthy of Oklahoma:
We guess the ideological test here is to make sure the applicant knows that communism always fails, although none of the “wrong” answers are even plausible.
But most of the “civics” questions simply seem to be Founders Trivia rather than anything necessary to be a teacher, in Oklahoma or anywhere else. “Who wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence?” doesn’t screen out any wokesters, and knowing it was Thomas Jefferson doesn’t mean someone will be any good at teaching geometry, chemistry, or abstinence-only sex ed. Writing teachers might like the reminder that all writing involves revision. They could even point out that the Continental Congress removed Jefferson’s condemnation of the “execrable” slave trade. Hey, is there a PragerU video about that?
What’s still not clear at all is whether this “test” is actually being used as part of Oklahoma’s teacher certification process. Walters claims that he has the unilateral authority to require it without any action from the Legislature or any other part of state government. But Megan Oftedal, executive director of the state agency that actually does teacher certification, said in a late-August email that Walters would likely be overstepping his legal authority if he actually tries to require the test.
According to the Oklahoma Education Department website, Oftendal’s agency, the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability, is “authorized by law to develop and administer” the state’s competency-based teacher tests. Oh, details, details.
As of yet, we don’t know anything at all about how actual teaching applicants are supposed to take the test. If they’re supposed to go through the PragerU site, they literally can’t fail it. A link at the Education Department site first takes you from the “oklahoma.gov” domain to a separate “oklahomateachertest.com” site, and then straight to Prager’s version. If there’s an online portal to a state-run version, we can’t find it.
Walters also hasn’t offered any information on whether anyone has actually taken the test or been excluded from teaching because of it, and who knows whether he ever will.
He might not even have anyone to take the test, since as Oftedahl explained to The Oklahoman, her agency “didn’t have data on how many certified teachers with current valid teaching certification in other states have applied to teach in Oklahoma, which is who the PragerU assessment is targeting.”
As for the 573 uncertified teachers coming to Oklahoma from out of state since 2020, only 19 were from California or New York. And this year, there was just one applicant from California, and none at all from New York. See? Walters has already gotten results!
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[CNN / Oklahoma Voice / Lit Hub / The Oklahoman]
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