President-elect Donald Trump's call to return control of schools to the states and potentially dismantle the Department of Education is the "most incredible bold, conservative education agenda the country has ever seen," Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters told Newsmax on Tuesday.
"This is how you get the schools back on track," Walters told Newsmax's "Wake Up America," while accusing the nation's teachers unions of a push to "gaslight the American people" on the country's fate without a Department of Education.
"Before the Department of Education, we forged the greatest country in the history of the world," Walters said. "We had one-room schoolhouses across the country that were teaching kids math, reading, science, and their history classes. It was actually a love for country and patriotism."
The Department of Education started under President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and Walters said that over the past four decades, "every educational statistic has gotten worse."
"Schools are teaching kids to hate their country instead of love their country, and we have a department that's working hand in hand with the teachers unions to take parents out of control of their kids' lives, take them out of power, and insert unions in control. The reality is that agency needs to go."
And Trump, he said, is "absolutely right. Get rid of that agency and return power to the states [and] return power to parents."
Walters' stance on Bibles and the Ten Commandments in the classroom has led to a lawsuit against him and the Oklahoma Board of Education, with advocacy groups, the American Civil Liberties Union, and teachers, parents, and faith leaders asking the state Supreme Court to stop him from requiring that teachers in the state include instructions from the Bible.
He squared off with CNN on Monday, arguing that "the media doesn't have to like it, but the reality is, the American people have rejected this gaslighting and have put President Trump back in the White House with a clear agenda, and we are going to stand right behind the president every step of the way."
He told Newsmax on Tuesday that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris "haven't cared about outcomes" in the nation's schools.
"They haven't been looking at education as a way to best educate our kids so that they can go get a good job so that they can have higher quality of life," he said. "They've looked at it like these are our little indoctrination centers. How much CRT do we have? How much transgender ideology do we have? How much teaching about how evil and racist of this country do we have in the classroom?"
That's because "they could care less about our kids [being] prepared for the workforce," Walters added. "President Trump has been clear. A strong America means strong schools, means an education system that supports a future workforce, and also supports a strong America that starts with patriotism and love for country."
There is also a "major problem" with the nation's colleges and universities, he claimed.
"They have completely gone woke preaching this anti-Americanism, antisemitism, anti-Israel rhetoric," he said. "These students are coming to your schools expecting to be ready for a workforce to make America the strongest country in the world, and yet they come out with nonsense classes, more student debt, no job on the back end of it."
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