Did Ryan Walters receive $120,000 from a non-profit funded by school privatization advocates while serving as the Secretary of Education?

Walters received an annual salary of at least $120,000 as the CEO of the nonprofit Every Kid Counts, which receives a substantial amount of its funding from national school privatization and charter school expansion advocates, while serving as Oklahoma’s Secretary of Education.

An investigation conducted by The Frontier and Oklahoma Watch revealed that 78% of the $138,068 in donations raised by EKCO over four months came from the Walton Family Foundation, which advocates for a market approach to education and has spent billions of dollars on charter school expansion.

The foundation also donated more than $500,000 to Oklahoma Achieves, an initiative where Walters served as executive director before it was eventually absorbed into Every Kid Counts.

While Walters resigned from Every Kid Counts after being elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2023, he held both the nonprofit and Secretary of Education positions for more than two years beginning in 2020.