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tulsa massacre
Oklahoma Screening Teachers From California, New York for 'Radical Leftist Ideology'
"This MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage," said American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten.
Aug 20, 2025
Teachers from California and New York seeking work in Oklahoma will be required to pass an "America First Test" designed to weed out applicants espousing "radical leftist ideology," the state's public schools chief affirmed Monday.
Oklahoma—which has a severe teacher shortage, persistently high turnover, and some of the nation's worst educational outcomes—will compel prospective public school educators from the nation's two largest "blue" states to submit to the exam in a bid to combat what Superintendent for Public Instruction Ryan Walters calls "woke indoctrination."
"As long as I am superintendent, Oklahoma classrooms will be safeguarded from the radical leftist ideology fostered in places like California and New York," Walters said in a statement Monday.
Walters told USA Today that the test is necessary to vet teachers from states where educators "are teaching things that are antithetical to our standards" and ensure they "are not coming into our classrooms and indoctrinating kids."
However, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten warned in a statement Monday that "this MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage."
The exam will be administered by Prager University—also known as PragerU—a right-wing nonprofit group which, despite its name, is not an academic institution and does not confer degrees.
While all of the test's 50 questions have not been made public, the ones that have been published run the gamut from insultingly basic—such as, "What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?"—to ideologically fraught queries regarding the "biological differences between females and males."
PragerU's "educational" materials are rife with false or misleading information regarding slavery, racism, immigration, the history of fascism, and the climate emergency. Critics note that the nonprofit has received millions of dollars in funding from fossil fuel billionaires.
PragerU materials also promote creation mythology over scientific evolution and attack LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender individuals, calling lifesaving gender-affirming healthcare "barbaric" while likening its proponents to "monsters."
In one animated PragerU video, two children travel back in time to ask the genocidal explorer Christopher Columbus why he is so hated today. Columbus replies by asserting the superiority of Europeans over Indigenous "cannibals" and attempting to justify the enslavement of Native Americans by arguing that "being taken as a slave is better than being killed."
Closer to home, PragerU's curriculum aligns with so-called "white discomfort" legislation passed in Oklahoma and other Republican-controlled states that critics say prevents honest lessons on slavery, the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and enduring systemic racism.
The law has had a chilling effect on teachers' lessons on historical topics including the 1921 Tulsa massacre, in which a white supremacist mob backed armed by city officials destroyed more than 35 city blocks of Greenwood, the "Black Wall Street," murdering hundreds of Black men, women, and children in what the US Justice Department this year called a "coordinated, military-style attack."
Responding to Oklahoma's new policy, University of Pennsylvania history professor Jonathan Zimmerman told The Associated Press that "instead of Prager simply being a resource that you can draw in an optional way, Prager has become institutionalized as part of the state system."
"There's no other way to describe it," he said, adding, "I think what we're now seeing in Oklahoma is something different, which is actually empowering Prager as a kind of gatekeeper for future teachers."
Oklahoma is not the only state incorporating PragerU materials into its curriculum. Florida, Montana, New Hampshire, and Texas have also done so to varying degrees.
Weingarten noted Walters' previous push to revise Oklahoma's curriculum standards to include baseless conspiracy theories pushed by President Donald Trump that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. Walters also ordered all public schools to teach the Bible, a directive temporarily blocked by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in March. The court also recently ruled against the establishment of the nation's first taxpayer-funded religious charter school.
"His priority should be educating students, but instead, it's getting Donald Trump and other MAGA politicians to notice him," Weingrarten said in her statement.
Cari Elledge, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, called the new testing requirement "a political stunt to grab attention" and a distraction "from real issues in Oklahoma."
"When political ideology plays into whether or not you can teach in any place, that might be a deterrent to quality educators attempting to get a job," she added. "We think it's intentional to make educators fearful and confused."
California Teachers' Association president David Goldberg told USA Today that "this almost seems like satire and so far removed from my research around what Oklahoma educators need and deserve."
"I can't see how this isn't some kind of hyper-political grandstanding that doesn't serve any of those needs," he added.
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At Least 5 Killed in Tulsa Mass Shooting
The incident is the 20th U.S. mass shooting since the May 24 massacre of 21 students and staff at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
Jun 01, 2022
Tulsa police confirmed Wednesday that five people were killed, including the shooter, during a mass shooting at a medical facility in the northeastern Oklahoma city.
The Tulsa World reports the shooting occurred Wednesday afternoon in a building just south of Saint Francis Hospital. Tulsa Police Capt. Richard Meulenberg described a "catastrophic scene" at the Natalie Building at 64th Street and Yale Avenue.
Deputy Tulsa Police Chief Eric Dalgleish said that the shooter--who used a rifle and a handgun during his rampage--died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Police also said they connected a bomb threat at a home in Muskogee to Wednesday's shooter.
\u201cACTIVE SHOOTER UPDATE: We can confirm 4 people are deceased, including the shooter, in the active shooting situation at St. Francis hospital campus. \nOfficers are still clearing the building. More info to follow.\u201d— Tulsa Police (@Tulsa Police) 1654125761
Tulsa City Councilor Connie Dodson was at St. Francis Hospital's emergency room when the shooting took place.
"They locked it down without announcing anything, but then people heard the large presence of police and responders in the area and were getting alerts on their phones," she told the World. "There were approximately 30 people in the ER at the time, but everyone was calm and watching the activity outside and live reports on the TV."
\u201cShootings unfolding simultaneously right now in America: At a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma; a Walmart in Pittson, Pennsylvania; and a high school in Los Angeles, California.\u201d— Shannon Watts (@Shannon Watts) 1654126149
\u201cBy the way, THIS IS TOTALLY FUCKING LEGAL in Oklahoma: "Police received a call of a man walking with a rifle near a medical office."\n\nA good guy with a gun in Tulsa until he opened fire. #okleg \n\nhttps://t.co/iveGIqAyZA\u201d— Shannon Watts (@Shannon Watts) 1654127023
According to the Gun Violence Archive, the incident is the 20th U.S. mass shooting--defined as acts in which at least four people are shot--since the May 24 massacre of 21 students and staff at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
It was also the second mass shooting in Oklahoma this week. One woman was killed Sunday and seven others were injured when a gunman fired more than 40 rounds during a Memorial Day festival in Taft, near Muskogee.
The Oklahoma shooting occurred on the 101st anniversary of the second and final day of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, in which scores and possibly hundreds of Black residents of the city's prosperous Greenwood District, popularly known as "Black Wall Street," were shot, burned, beaten, and bombed to death by racist mobs of white people, at least 10 of whom were also killed.
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It's Been Two-Hundred Years, Not Twenty: Targeted Repression in the US Started Long Before 9/11
There is a terrible theme that runs throughout the story of the United States: when a group of people are seen as a threat, state power has been used to oppress them.
Sep 24, 2021
What comes after the anniversary of a tragedy? Earlier this month, many of us participated in memorials and retrospectives on the changes to American society in the two decades since the attacks of 9/11. We were among the many American Muslims who wrote about the impact of 9/11 on civil rights. As co-executive directors of Muslim Advocates, we were asked to document how the Patriot Act enabled mass surveillance and profiling of Muslims by local and national government, how a Bush-era immigrant registration program (NSEERS) effectively created a Muslim registry, and the many ways that the stereotype of Muslims as terrorists has fueled decades of anti-Muslim hate crimes and bullying. So what comes next?
Profiling, surveillance and over-prosecution of marginalized populations in this country are nothing new.
After 9/11, we were part of a group of Muslim lawyers who helped create a Muslim legal advocacy organization because we knew that things could get much worse for American Muslims. We knew and took seriously the way this country has discriminated against Black Muslims and other marginalized communities.
Simply put, profiling, surveillance and over-prosecution of marginalized populations in this country are nothing new. Trump's frenzy about an "invasion" of gangs across our southern border was not all that different from Democratic politicians' warnings about "super predators" during the passage of the 1994 crime bill. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were just two of many civil rights leaders under constant FBI surveillance, and the Black Panthers were targeted with the blunter, more violent end of that stick. Many in our families were alive when Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps upon zero evidence of wrongdoing. Anti-German sentiment led to bans against teaching the German language and COINTELPRO and the McCarthy hearings painted anyone with communist beliefs as an enemy of the state. Even further back in our history, the Chinese Exclusion Act explicitly banned an entire race from emigrating to this country, and Jim Crow laws did everything short of slavery to control non-whites. And of course, all of this took place on the land of the many Native peoples who were killed or forcibly removed from their homes over centuries of repeated falsehoods and betrayal by the United States government.
So, yes, it has been twenty years since 9/11. But it has also been 77 years since Korematsu, 100 years since the Tulsa massacre, 131 years since the massacre at Wounded Knee, 139 years since the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act and 199 years since the Denmark Vesey rebellion. In other words, we need to see the bigger picture. We believe something much more transformative is possible if we demand that post-9/11 reflections are connected to the rest of American history and that we learn from all of it.
There is a terrible theme that runs throughout the story of the United States: when a group of people are seen as a threat, state power has been used to oppress them. More specifically, political interests have built and solidified their power by ramping up fear--not just stoking a fire, but creating it. American communities are thus pitted against each other, and eventually there is public support for government overreach that is outrageously outsized to the supposed threat.
Monuments and memorials should help us learn about our history and grow from it. When we were asked to opine about all the ways American Muslims suffered in the aftermath of 9/11, we knew it wasn't enough. We want to also talk about what this means for today. What does this mean for oppression in all its forms right now? And then the really difficult question: are we complicit in any of it?
Abuse of power hurts not just the abused, but also the abuser. Everyone needs to heal from these past harms, so we all must ask these questions. We could start on anniversaries. What if every commemoration of every atrocity was a step on a path toward truth and reconciliation? Maybe, then, we could see our way out of this dangerous cycle, heal the fractures in our society, and finally write a new American story.
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