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Democrats are leaning hard into the “schoolteacher” and “coach” personas for Tim Walz to paint their vice presidential candidate and the Minnesota governor as more relatable and less radical than he really is.

“I was a schoolteacher for a lot of years,” said the folksy Tim Walz in a speech last week at a Human Rights Campaign dinner, touting his time as a “social studies teacher and high school football coach.” Yet in the next breath, he praised LGBT “allyship” and declared, “We must be the country that leads on “gay and transgender rights.”

They used the same strategy during Walz’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month. Former students showed up to watch, teachers union officials played up that part of his resume on the convention floor, and Walz himself spoke about it in his speech to a crowd holding signs that said, “Coach Walz.”

Democrats and their media lapdogs are spinning away, but American voters should not be duped by the routine. As a former educator and the current superintendent of the Oklahoma State Department of Education, I can tell you that I have encountered many educators like Walz throughout my career. Every parent in the country should be on high alert if this man gets anywhere close to the vice presidency. He is as anti-parent as they come.  

Just look at his record. Walz’s governorship has, of course, always been about putting teachers unions and radical political ideologies over parents’ rights and students’ well-being. 

He supports taking children away from parents who refuse to transition them while they’re still minors. He supported a law that did that. The bill in question made Minnesota a “sanctuary” for child “sex changes” (so called) — i.e., a place for children to run away to and seek hormone treatments and surgeries. It blocked Minnesota courts and officials from complying with any removal requests, extraditions, arrests, or subpoenas that would get in the way of the procedures.

And it’s so extreme that even the corporate media tried to run cover for him, but to no avail. Facts are very stubborn things, and the fact is that Walz supports keeping your teenager from you under the force of law if you don’t agree to help your teen “transition” before he is even old enough to vote. That’s not just bad policy; it’s evil. 

And while he was letting Minneapolis burn without National Guard backup in 2020, Walz was also doing the teachers unions’ bidding and locking down schools, setting kids back years in their education. 

What was the result of all this union pleasing and catering to special interests? Disastrous test scores. According to a New York Post analysis, reading and math scores fell dramatically under Walz, while student truancy skyrocketed. 

Meanwhile, instead of making sure that Minnesota’s students were proficient in things like reading and math or simply showing up to school, Walz’s department of education was implementing a curriculum better fitted for a progressive political activist than a student. He promoted adding ethnic studies (code for critical race theory) requirements to K-12 education. He proudly supported and signed legislation to prevent parents and local school boards from removing pornographic materials from school libraries.

Naturally, he also has a noted history of fighting school choice programs; those, after all, would have empowered parents to opt their kids out of his radical indoctrination agenda. He appointed the members of the teacher licensing board that recently mandated that teachers embrace and propagate radical gender ideology.

The common thread behind all of this is simple: Tim Walz is the kind of educator who thinks that your children actually belong to the local school district. In his case, “anti-parent” isn’t just an adjective; it’s a noun.

Anti-parents like him believe they should be the final deciders in what your children learn, how they learn it, and what they’re supposed to think about it. They believe that the only say you should have as a parent is what to pack for their lunches — if even that. Because anti-parents — whether teachers, union bosses, or politicians — don’t think you’re qualified to make those decisions. 

In Oklahoma, we’ve taken the exact opposite approach, and both our students and our schools are reaping the benefits. We are showing up to work every day with the conviction that we work for parents and we answer to parents. 

We’ve overseen the implementation of a sweeping school choice scholarship program, as well as a vibrant network of innovative charter schools around the state. We believe that schools should be focused on education, not indoctrination, so we rooted out things like critical race theory and pornographic materials in schools and doubled down on reading and math. Instead of catering to unions, we attract top talent through merit pay and signing bonuses. 

We have implemented new leadership in our two largest school districts — Tulsa and Oklahoma City — and they are now working with us rather than against us to implement these new approaches. Within one year of these changes, more than one dozen schools have been removed from a list of failing schools. This is just the beginning of improvements we will realize.

This is the kind of freedom-focused, parent-driven system that we can replicate on a national scale, but we won’t do it with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz making the decisions. We need Donald Trump and J.D. Vance to take education freedom nationwide.

In this election, parents have a choice: they can choose to be in the driver’s seat of their children’s education, or they can be shoved in the trunk. That’s not an exaggeration by any means, and Walz’s record proves it. 

Ryan Walters is superintendent of the Oklahoma State Department of Education. You can follow him on X: @RyanWaltersSupt.