The Republican nominee points to 45 years in education, his St. Isidore vote and a runoff victory over the party-endorsed candidate as evidence he can withstand political pressure.
OKLAHOMA CITY — Robert Franklin entered the race for state superintendent only days before the filing deadline. He had changed his voter registration to Republican in 2023, did not qualify for the state party’s candidate-certification program and watched the Oklahoma Republican Party formally endorse his runoff opponent.
Franklin won anyway.
The retired Sand Springs and Tulsa Tech administrator defeated James Taylor by 33,416 votes, winning the Republican runoff 54.6% to 45.4%.
During an interview with OK Politics Today, Franklin discussed his background, priorities and differences with his Democratic opponent. He said the runoff victory left him free of political obligations.
“We really don’t owe anybody anything politically,” Franklin said.
“We’re not beholden to anything other than the young people in front of us, the families that we serve and the teachers that we’re trying to support.”
Franklin will face Democratic nominee Jennettie Marshall in the Nov. 3 general election. OK Politics Today published a profile of Marshall after the runoff.
A race shaped by the Walters years
Franklin and Marshall are running to succeed Lindel Fields, whom Gov. Kevin Stitt appointed after Ryan Walters resigned in September 2025. Fields is completing Walters’ term but is not running for election.
Walters made the superintendent’s office a center of political conflict over religion, curriculum, teacher ideology and public-school governance. Both nominees say they want to move the agency away from that conflict and back toward education.
Franklin said disagreements over policy will remain.
“Have the political debates, because they’re going to come,” he said. “Have the political debates outside of the classrooms, outside of our school buildings, and do the work at hand, because there’s plenty of it.”
From special education to CareerTech
Franklin said his education career began in 1981 as a special education teacher at the Hissom Memorial Center, a state institution for people with developmental disabilities.
After seven years, he moved into school administration with Sand Springs Public Schools. His positions included assistant principal, administrator of the school program at the Rader juvenile treatment center, principal of Charles Page High School and assistant superintendent.
Franklin said he spent 29 years with Sand Springs before moving to Tulsa Technology Center, where he served 14 years as an associate superintendent and worked with employers, adult students and high school students seeking career certifications.
He later began teaching graduate courses in educational leadership at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa. He earned a doctorate in education from OU and was inducted into the Oklahoma Educators Hall of Fame in 2024.
“This is my 45th year,” Franklin said. “It’s going to take an all-hands-on-deck, everybody-working-together approach.”
Franklin said his father died in an industrial accident when Franklin was 4. His mother returned with Franklin and his younger brother to Council Hill, where grandparents and other relatives helped raise them.
“Farmers and welders were the ones who framed me and protected me and supported and loved us,” Franklin said. “The hard work of what this job and role looks like is daunting, but it’s not something I’ll back away from.”
At 24, while teaching at Hissom, Franklin was diagnosed with testicular cancer. He underwent two major surgeries and nine months of chemotherapy. Franklin said surgeons cut his aorta while removing a mass and warned that he might not survive.
“I don’t know how we got lucky enough to survive, but we did,” Franklin said. “We just don’t want to waste moments.”
Beating the party-endorsed candidate
Franklin’s path through the Republican primary included questions about his partisan history.
He changed his voter registration from Democratic to Republican in 2023. That left him unable to meet a requirement of the new “OKGOP Certified” program, which required candidates to have no affiliation with another party during the previous five years.
Three days before the runoff, the Oklahoma Republican Party State Committee formally endorsed Taylor.
Franklin said party affiliation should not determine how a superintendent approaches students, parents or educators.
“I’ve never asked a parent, never asked a child, never asked a stakeholder, ‘What political party affiliation do you align with?’ before we started the work,” he said. “We just didn’t. That was an unnecessary hurdle. That is just terribly distracting.”
A defining vote on St. Isidore
Franklin’s most prominent public decision before the campaign came during six years on the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, including four as chairman.
He was one of two board members who voted against approving the proposed St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would have become the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school. Franklin said he also refused to sign the school’s contract.
“We’re not here to be a test case for the nation,” he said.
Franklin said the decision turned on legal authority, not religious disagreement.
“It has nothing to do with my faith, nothing to do with my faith or the faith of our Catholic colleagues,” he said. “It had everything to do with our constitutional purview.”
Franklin said he was baptized at age 8, married in a Baptist church and remains “very faithful” and “very faith-driven.”
“We just don’t need to lay that at the shoulders and the hands of our teachers who are trying to lead the work, to also be our faith leaders,” Franklin said. “That’s just for families and faith leaders to do that, not our teachers.”
He said the vote should serve as a “bell-ringing moment” showing voters that he is “a traditionalist” and “a constitutionalist” who remained firm under political pressure.
Teachers, reading, testing and AI
Franklin places teacher recruitment and retention at the top of his agenda.
“Teachers are not the problem; they’re the solution,” he said.
Franklin said competitive salaries are part of the answer, but educators also tell him they need smaller classes, behavior technicians, counselors and other support staff.
“Get us some behavior technicians. Get us some additional counseling staff so that we can begin to catch our breath, get our class sizes back in check and then help us remind people that we’re not the enemy,” Franklin said.
His second priority is implementing the Strong Readers Act and expanding training in the science of reading. Franklin said teachers and trainers should help determine how schools intervene in kindergarten and first grade, before children fall further behind.
“I think third-grade retention is far too late,” he said. “The details of how we implement this are going to be an important strategy.”
Franklin also wants to reconsider Oklahoma’s state testing system and A-F school report cards.
“We need to do a thorough reset,” he said.
Franklin said the state should bring teachers and researchers together to examine other states’ systems and determine whether Oklahoma’s tests give families and educators useful information quickly enough to improve instruction.
“Nobody likes it. Nobody thinks it’s fair,” Franklin said of the A-F system. “Everybody, quite frankly, knows that it hides more than it reveals.”
Artificial intelligence would be another early focus. Franklin said schools need state-level training and support to help teachers use AI as an instructional tool.
“It’s transforming architecture. It’s transforming banking and finance. It’s transforming medication and medicine,” he said. “It’s transforming everything, and certainly that has to happen in schools. We’re just not prepared for it.”
Franklin’s argument against Marshall
Franklin said he does not know Marshall well and sees their professional backgrounds as the clearest distinction.
Marshall’s career includes work in corrections, child-welfare investigations and Christian ministry, along with eight years on the Tulsa Public Schools Board of Education. She has emphasized that record, including her role in seeking the state audit that uncovered financial failures and alleged fraud within the district.
Franklin framed his own case as a checklist.
“Had they been a classroom teacher? Had they been a school administrator? Had they worked in a CareerTech center? Had they worked in higher ed? Had they worked with business and industry? Oh, and had they worked on a statewide board?” Franklin said. “If they checked all those boxes, then perhaps it’s time to put someone who has those credentials in that place and give them an opportunity to lead.”
He said improving Oklahoma schools would require sustained work rather than a dramatic opening act.
“It’s not what we’re going to do in a day,” Franklin said. “It’s what we’re going to do daily.”
