In this insightful episode, Priscilla Rahn is joined by Ryan Walters, CEO of Teacher Freedom Alliance, to discuss the current challenges within the education system. They delve into the roles and impacts of teachers unions, highlighting the struggle to return control to teachers and parents from what they describe as an overpowering bureaucratic system. Ryan provides a firsthand account of his journey from classroom teacher to a national advocate for change, aiming to dismantle union dominance over education. Together, they explore the launch of Excalibur Classical Academy, an institution pledged to uphold classical education while respecting parental involvement and
Welcome to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. She’s a master educator and author leading the conversation to restore the American mind through wisdom, virtue, and truth.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to Restoring Education in America. I’m your host, Priscilla Rahn. Thank you so much for joining the conversation today. You know, the Colorado State Legislature is well into submitting some bills and they are not really friendly. to those of us on the conservative side, but I have some really great news that there is a new private school opening in Centennial this fall. It’s Excalibur Classical Academy, and their mission and vision is restoring America’s heritage by developing servant leaders who are keepers and defenders of the principles of freedom, for which our founding fathers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. And we are going to invite you to go to their website. It’s ExcaliburClassicalAcademy.org for all kinds of information. And here’s the good news. If you’re looking for a private school with an environment where teachers are not indoctrinating your kids… and they are going to educate them in the classics in a way that is honoring and respectful and supportive of parents, then Excalibur Classical Academy is for you. But on that note, you guys know that I am a full-time teacher in Denver. I want to talk more about what’s going on in the classroom. So I’m going to invite my special guest to the stage, Mr. Ryan Walters. Hi, Ryan.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I’m really excited to get into the conversation, but before we do, I’m gonna share your bio with our listeners. Ryan Walters is CEO of Teacher Freedom Alliance and former state superintendent of public instruction in Oklahoma and former secretary of education. A classroom teacher who was born and raised in Oklahoma, Ryan saw firsthand how union mandates and federal bureaucrats turn classrooms into political battlegrounds. Teachers were silenced, parents were pushed out, and students were fed ideology instead of truth. As Oklahoma superintendent of public instruction, Walters tore out DEI programs, exposed waste, and ripped the curtain off an education establishment that thought it was untouchable. He brought transparency, accountability and parental rights back into the classroom. Now he’s taking that fight national through Teacher Freedom Alliance, a movement built to dismantle union control and restore truth in education. TFA gives teachers the protection, resources and courage to walk away from the unions for good. Ryan’s message is, the classroom belongs to parents and teachers, not a government apparatus that cares more about lining the pockets of the radical left than the children. Walters is leading the national movement to restore faith, family, and freedom to America’s schools. And I have my hat from last summer’s Teacher Freedom Awards.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, love it.
SPEAKER 03 :
It says, free, moral, and upright. So… I actually, okay, so Ryan, I wore this hat on the plane back from DC and I forgot I had it on. I forgot what it said. And someone on the plane turned around and he said, free, moral, and upright. What does that mean? And I was like, okay. So I got to actually share the gospel of Jesus with him. And that’s what ended up happening. But I’m so excited that you’re on. Let’s get into the conversation because you have been called the left’s worst nightmare, a classroom teacher who refused to submit to union politics. Okay. So what made you stop playing defense and going on the offense?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, I think it 1st started, you know, I was a public school teacher, you know, and I absolutely love teaching. It was a dream job. I loved working with the kids. You know, the only problem was. The way the education system was set up, you know, and I would talk to other teachers and see their frustrations. I started asking questions. I was young, I was new to teaching and didn’t really understand, why don’t good teachers make more money? Why do administrators make all these decisions that seem to lack common sense? Why are we so bureaucratic? Why are parents not as involved in the school system as they used to be? It seems like that was an intentional thing. You know, started down this road of trying to figure out what’s wrong with education. And in Oklahoma, we were facing the same problems that every state in the country is. You know, it is a teachers union driven model that doesn’t work for kids. It works for the teachers union. They make, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars a year off of this model. It doesn’t work for our kids. Administrators, yeah, they get more and more high paid jobs. There’s more and more of them. And you talk to teachers and you go, well, that doesn’t help me at all. And you talk to parents and they’re frustrated. They want good teachers. They want to support their teachers. But they don’t know. They’re going, I don’t know how, because the system is so set against us. And so that started me down the road where I eventually was appointed to be the secretary of education. So I oversaw the colleges, universities, and then I became the state superintendent. I was elected by the people of Oklahoma to come in and clean up the education system. And we did things that I mean, I think are common sense. Right. We we took the out of schools. We said we’re going to focus on the basics. We brought in school choice, and we brought in merit pay across the board. We started paying teachers six figures in Oklahoma, which is really good money if you were a high-performing teacher. And we said, listen, we want more great teachers. We gave the biggest signing bonuses in the country. We paid teachers $50,000 if they were a top performer in the country to move to Oklahoma and teach there. you know we did a lot of exciting things but the teachers union fought us every step of the way they were nasty they were dirty they targeted teachers that left they fought all these policies and that’s really indicative of what you see as a country
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, Ryan, I had to walk away. So we’re kind of neighbors. I grew up in Texas. I went to TCU. I got my first teaching job in a suburb of Houston. And my principal was a big union person when she was an educator. And so the first thing she told me was, Priscilla, you need to join the teacher’s union. And at the time, I was making $18,000 a year before taxes. And I was like, I don’t have the money to give you. But when I moved to Colorado, the fear factor was so immense. They said, Priscilla, if you’re not a member of the teachers union, you could get fired, you know, from your, from the principal. And so I joined the teachers union, but what ended up happening is when you’re a baby teacher, then you start to build this community. And then all your friends are in the union and it’s like, Fight, fight, fight. Red for Ed. You know, let’s like be oppositional. We’re not getting enough. And some of the things that the teachers union supports, you know, they’re good, you know, like, but we started seeing them lose their way. And so Ryan, I have to admit, I wasn’t just a member of the teachers union. I was a leader in the teachers union. I was the treasurer, the secretary. I was on the political action committee for CEA. I was a delegate for NEA. But two and a half years ago, I walked away and I’ve been on this path of making sure teachers know that there are other options because the teachers union is not supporting the things that are important to us. So tell us a little bit more about the organization Teacher Freedom Alliance and what what it has to offer.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, and, you know, listen, you know, to your point, the teachers union doesn’t lead with everything I just said. They lie to teachers. They fearmonger them into joining. They say things like, yeah, you’ll get fired. You could lose your pension. You could lose, you know, you might not get the contracted agreement rights that other teachers get, which is all baloney. You know, the Janus Supreme Court decision said, no, you don’t have to join a union. The union is a political apparatus that is funneling money into the Democrat Party. You don’t have to give them your money. You don’t have to do that to be a teacher. And so but but they start off with these lies and they say, look, we’re just a bunch of teachers. We’re to help and support you. Then you start digging in and we’ve seen study after study that’s shown. Hundreds of millions of dollars they’ve given to the Democrat Party and Democrat causes. And when most teachers hear that, they’re mortified by it. They go, well, hold on a second. You know, if I want to give my money to the Democrat Party, that’s my decision. That’s not why I joined the union. And so but what we’ve seen is teachers have been very reluctant to leave because they say, listen, we can be targeted politically. We can be targeted legally. We can be targeted. We can be doxed. We see that all the time bullied by these teachers union bosses. And so what we did is we create the teacher freedom alliance to say, listen, if you need liability insurance, we’ll cover you. If you need professional development hours and points and curriculum, we’ll cover you. We want teachers to get back to teaching the basics and to have support in doing that. And when you talk to teachers, that’s what they want. They say, look, I want help with discipline in the classroom. I want to help master the subject I’m teaching. I want to be able to talk to a teacher who’s taught what I’ve taught for 20 years and does a great job and have that mentoring experience. Those are the things we offer and we don’t give money to the Democrat Party. And so we’ve seen a huge growth in membership because there’s so many teachers that just say, listen, That’s what we want. We want to be the best teacher we can be. We don’t want any of this left-wing garbage, this nonsense, all these politics that have been injected into the classroom.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I can attest to how amazing the organization is. Last summer, I went to the conference in D.C. and I didn’t know what I was going to be walking into. I thought it was just going to be a small group of us conservative educators. But there were hundreds of teachers there who were in the public education system like myself, who we were going through the trenches together. And we understood what the mission was. We understood. And I found a brand new community. of like-minded educators who were saying, we really wanna fight for our students. We’ve seen how parents were called domestic terrorists. And when we were growing up, parents were supposed to be called stakeholders, right? We were supposed to include them in everything and now we’re keeping secrets from them. And I wanna encourage every educator, every building leader to encourage teachers to attend this summer in Dallas, Texas, okay, my home state. I’ve already signed up and bought my plane ticket. I want teachers to know that for free, you can join Teacher Freedom Alliance for free. You have access to $2 million of liability insurance. And I love the education, the breakout sessions from my colleagues. were really, really good. There wasn’t one breakout session that I went to where I didn’t walk away in awe of my colleagues teaching. And so can you talk a little bit about what teachers can expect if they want to come to the conference this summer?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for that. You know, one of the things we do, you know, we listen to the good teachers. Yeah, all you got to do is listen to them and say, you know, what can we do to help you? And the same things pop up every time they want to know about, you know, what are the best discipline practices in the classroom? You’ve seen this from the left where they turn every kid into a victim. I taught in high poverty schools in rural Oklahoma and inner city Oklahoma. And the reality is if you treat kids like victims, if you lower expectations, that’s what you get out of kids. Or you can set high expectations. You can have common sense discipline policies to hold them accountable. And you know what? Kids will rise to those levels of expectations. So we’re going to do a lot around classroom discipline. We’re bringing some of the best facilitators in the country for that. We’re also going to focus in on the subject areas again. If you teach history, we’re going to have a lot of history curriculum. We’re going to have a lot of speakers there. To talk about how to make sure kids are understanding American history and world history. We’re going to go into how do you how do you work with kids all across the intellectual spectrum when they fall behind when they may have a disability things like that. How do you approach that? How do you address that? How do you build relationships with parents to your point? good teachers are mortified by the position the left has taken the parents are the enemy good teachers want to partner with parents uh you know that was one of the things when i was a classroom teacher hey i was telling every parent hey please be involved i want you to know everything we’re doing in the classroom i want you you have to be a partner in this i want you as involved as possible that’s what good teachers do so we’re going to have multiple sessions on how you engage with parents how do you make sure parents are involved, are engaged in what their kids are learning? How do you activate them at home? And how do you build that relationship with them? So those are some of the things that you’ll see emphasized over the summer. And again, to your point about some of the things we try to do, we understand it’s about academics. It’s about building that relationship with parents. Something that I hear missing a lot when we talk about education we want to produce good patriotic citizens that understand american history understand america is the greatest country in the history of the world and we want to promote that we want to promote what is america what are those ideals how do we make sure that our students have that love of country so that we continue to be the greatest country in the history of the world so we’re going going to bring in a lot of speakers. They’re going to talk about that and talk about how you do that across the board, whether you’re in kindergarten or whether you’re in high school. What can that look like? So we are so excited and we hope we have a record amount of teachers there this summer. We had over 400 last year and we’re looking to have 600 this year.
SPEAKER 03 :
If you’re just tuning in, my guest today is Ryan Walters. He is the CEO of Teacher Freedom Alliance and former Secretary of Education in Oklahoma. This is America’s 250th birthday. So I can’t think of a better way to celebrate this summer than to be in Texas with other freedom loving people. teachers and talk about how we can go into even the fall where we can celebrate all year long. That is America’s 250th birthday. But Ryan, I know you’ve got to have really thick skin because I’m sure the attacks started coming and how you were like aggressively challenging the system. What were the tactics that the left was trying to use to discourage you?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, really, everything was on the table with them. They came in and they tried to disrupt our board meetings. They tried to disrupt our staff. They tried to they threatened me, threatened my family, threatened my kids. You know, everything with the teachers unions on the board. They dumped all kind of money into ads that would just outright lied about me, what we were doing. They targeted teachers that left the union, putting their addresses and stalking them, bullying them across the state. We’re seeing that across the country. And that’s so important for folks to realize the teachers union, not only do they not support kids, not only do they not support parents, they don’t represent teachers either. All they are trying to do is leverage their money and power to push a left-wing agenda that’s what they’re trying to do so hey they will use teachers they will use any tactic necessary in order to achieve their goal and look we’ve been very clear our goal is to destroy the teachers union there is no reason that we should have a teachers union today they have been the greatest force for undermining our education system and undermining our country we want teachers to have the freedom to leave and to make their own decisions on what their curriculum trainings look like, on what discipline in the classroom could look like, and not have a left-wing ideology pushed on them, and then have their own money weaponized against them through a political machine, which is what they are. So they are as nasty as they come. They’re as big a bully as they come. And we’re here to push back on that and give teachers a safe place to go to say, hey, We support you. We’ve got your back and we want you to be the best teacher you can be. And I’m going to tell you, I speak. I got four little ones at home. Parents, they want good teachers in the classroom. They want to support good teachers. And again, that’s that’s what our mission is, is to do. And again, we’re seeing a dramatic growth in membership of teachers that want to be a part of it.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, you bring up so many points and so many memories about the teachers union. And I know we’ll both agree that we’ve worked with amazing colleagues, like amazing teachers who are stellar. But here’s the sad thing. So I’m a national board certified teacher. And across the United States, every state was able to decide how much of a stipend they wanted to incentivize for national board certification. In Colorado, it’s in state statute. But in 2020, our Democrat-dominant legislature decided to not fund it. And it’s been five years now where they don’t fund. We’re less than 1% of Colorado’s teachers. They don’t fund the best teachers. And it’s just a little bit of money. Ryan, it’s only $1,800 a year. as a little tiny stipend to your $50,000 incentive. So what I keep saying to the union, why aren’t you going to the state legislature and fighting for this little bit of money for the best teachers? They won’t fight for something like that, but they’ll fight for no Kings rallies. Let’s go down to the Capitol and we’re going to protest and destroy buildings and intimidate elected officials. So what’s your response? Why are teachers doing these no Kings rallies?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, and this is the thing, to your point, and that’s the reality, is most teachers in the teachers’ union don’t support all that nonsense. A lot of them don’t know that that’s what they’re doing with their dollars. You know, we exposed in New Jersey, the teachers’ union paid for a drag show for kids with teachers’ union money. They’re doing the pro-Venezuela dictator rallies. They’re doing the no king rallies. That is with your money, teachers. And frankly, I brought it for the public. Think about this is taxpayer dollars. You’re paying into the teacher’s salary through the schools. The unions are deducting this from teachers paychecks and they’re injecting it into this nonsense. And what you continue to see is there’s so many teachers when we tell them that they’re just absolutely mortified by it. You know, they thought. And again, this is another great trick that they pull. Most teachers think that, hey, I’m joining this local group, you know, and some teachers that I know, some of them are really good people, you know, hey, I’m a part of this group. 40% of their dues go up to the national organization. So when we tell them that, like, guys, you understand this isn’t just a local entity that your dollars go to. They go all the way up to the NEA. which is funding all of these rallies, all of these protests, all of the drag show nonsense. And teachers are mortified by that. And so I think it’s so important for folks to understand it’s the union leadership that is very political, very nasty. They are using people to achieve their Marxist political end. And when most teachers hear that, they’re mortified, but they are scared to leave. And that’s where our organization is so important. And it’s so important that parents And taxpayers, we all speak out and go, hey, we want good teachers. We want them to be free of what the union is doing to them.
SPEAKER 03 :
So I think it’s really important for teachers to know that people like Becky Pringle and Randy Weingarten are making half a million dollars a year. I can’t relate to that. I just can’t relate to that kind of salary. We have superintendents who are making more than the president of the United States, and they’re really not impacting educational achievement. So for me, I just realized that the ROI on my dues, my $70 a month, I couldn’t name a benefit because for the few times where I really did need the union, they had no power to do anything because the school district did whatever they wanted to do anyway. And so I just gave myself a $70 a month raise. I was able to put gas in my car. I was able to buy supplies for my class if I needed to and do these types of things, go out to eat, actually. So for teachers who feel nervous or feel trapped because the trick that the unions do is they say you can only get out during this one little window. I’ve had friends say, Can you help me like get I’m so intimidated to go into the office because you have to go into the office and get the paper and do and do like an exit interview where they scare you into staying. They do all of these things. So I want to say to teachers, have courage and know that you have a safety net now from Teacher Freedom Alliance. You have protection. You have a new army. That’s going to help you. You’re right, Ryan. There’s really no reason for a teacher nowadays. You could have made an argument decades ago for being a part of what used to be a professional association. But it’s changed quite a bit.
SPEAKER 02 :
Look, I think you made a great point earlier about the National Board certification. You know, why do the unions oppose things like that? Well, because they are fundamentally at their leadership level, they are left-wing activists and they believe in socialism. They don’t believe that if you do a great job as a teacher or you show that, that you should make more than everybody else. They don’t believe that. So again, in our state, when we said, look, I want the best teachers to make six figures, like I want to go out and compete for them. I don’t want them to leave. I don’t want them to get another job. job outside the classroom. I don’t want them to become administrators, right? That’s so much of, hey, you want to make more money? You’re a good teacher. Why don’t you become an administrator? It’s like, well, no, I want that person to teach our kids. You know, that’s where they’re going to have this huge impact. But everything is incentivized against teachers doing a great job, teachers staying in the classroom. So when we brought in free market principles, the union opposed that because that fundamentally goes against their ideology, right? which is, no, they want socialism. Everybody makes the same. That’s what we’re going to do. And notice, as we continue to spend more money in education, where does the money go? It goes to the bureaucracy. It goes to administrative costs. President Trump is slashing the Department of Education. Us as a state, we slashed administrative costs. And yet schools kept hiring more administrators. I said, well, why are you hiring more administrators? There’s less bureaucracy. There’s less paperwork to fill out. Why aren’t you paying your teachers more? Why are you spending more money to have an assistant superintendent, a deputy superintendent, a deputy to the deputy superintendent? What are we doing here? It’s less paperwork. It’s less bureaucracy. And yet you continue to grow bureaucracy because that’s what government does. And that’s where you have this beautiful alliance between parents and teachers to say no. We want good teachers in the classroom. That’s what makes a difference in education. If you want to go back to the very, very beginning, what is education? It’s really this triangle, right? It is a student. Students got to be willing to learn, right? They’ve got to be willing to learn. A parent, parents got to be engaged with their kid, got to be engaged in learning process, has to be supportive of what their kid’s doing. And a teacher that helps facilitate the specific learning that’s going on, that triangle, if that’s intact, There is no limit to what a kid can achieve. But it has been fundamentally broken down by teachers’ unions, administrators, and the Federal Department of Education. We’re getting rid of the Federal Department of Education. We’ve got to crack down on this administrative bloat. And the last thing is we’ve got to get rid of the teachers’ unions.
SPEAKER 03 :
So you bring up a very important conversation, the Federal Department of Education. You having been at the state level and knowing some of the heartburn that you hear people say, oh, well, we really need a Federal Department of Education because what’s going to happen with special ed students? We’re in we don’t care about special ed students anymore. And I’m like, you know what? We have really, really smart people at the state level. We’re not going to let students on an IEP fall through the cracks. What’s your response when people say they’re concerned about the reduction or the elimination of the federal department of ed?
SPEAKER 02 :
No, thank you for that question. And first of all, I was a special ed teacher for the first few years in the classroom, and it was an incredible experience. Loved working with that very unique, very special population. Hold them very near and dear to my heart. And let me tell you, the Federal Department of Education’s involvement in special education has dramatically hurt special education. And you see everybody point to, well, what about this? What about that? No, no, no. When the federal government dictates a one-size-fits-all model, there’s no better place where that would be proven to be an incorrect view than special education. Every kid’s unique across the board. Let me tell you, special education, they’re very unique, right? They have different disabilities. They have different things to overcome. And by the way, when you help them overcome those things, they’re able to do great things in their life in the classroom. But the federal government mandates have overburdened classrooms, overburdened teachers, put handcuffs on what teachers are able to do to help kids out in the classroom. and has become so overly burdensome and has hurt the special ed population. You want that decision made between parents, teachers. You want that to be a local decision of what is best for Johnny, for Susie. Not this is the model that we make you use. No. What is best for these kids? So I have been a proponent. I have worked with President Trump on this from day one. We’ve got to eliminate the Federal Department of Education. No, your education system will be much better without it. And especially programs where the federal government has been so heavily involved, like special ed, it’ll be better without the federal strings, without their involvement. Your teachers will be better off. Your kids will be better off. Your parents will be happier.
SPEAKER 03 :
So Ryan, I’m looking at the time and we have to land our plane. But before we go, can you share your website and give us the dates for the conference again?
SPEAKER 02 :
No, thank you for that. Yeah, teacherfreedom.com. Come check out our website, sign up. And by the way, we want everybody. Of course, we want teachers as members, but we welcome parents, taxpayers, grandparents. Everybody join up so you can see the work that’s being done. You can help support these great teachers that are fighting to get our classrooms back on track. Hey, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Ryan Walters is the handle there. TFA is the handle for the organization. We’re very active on social media. Help us get the word out and help us get teachers to leave the teachers union. Optouttoday.com is a website that helps teachers leave then join our organization. But again, help us spread the word out Education can be great again. We can return to this great educational product. You can look back and bring this relationship between parents and teachers back by getting the unions out of the way. And we hope everybody will take a look and we’d love for you to be a part of what we’re doing.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, thank you so much for your time, Ryan Walters, CEO of Teacher Freedom Alliance. And to my listeners, thank you for tuning in and catch me next time. And remember, educating the mind without the heart is no education. So seek wisdom, cultivate virtue, and speak truth.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thanks for tuning in to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. Visit PriscillaRahn.com to connect or learn how you can sponsor future episodes to keep this message of faith, freedom, and education on the air.
