Beginning in the 2025-26 school year, thousands of high school students in Oklahoma will be required to learn about President Trump’s debunked claims that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud. The lesson will not be part of a course on conspiracy theories, but an official component of the new social studies curriculum created by Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters (R).
The new curriculum includes a section that requires students to “analyze contemporary turning points of 21st-century American society.” That requirement includes the following:
Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of “bellwether county” trends.
In March, Walters said the purpose of this section was to teach “students to think for themselves” and “not be spoon-fed left-wing propaganda.” According to Walters, there are “legitimate concerns” about the integrity of the 2020 election that were “raised by millions of Americans in 2020.”
Walters is wrong. There are no “discrepancies” in the 2020 election results that validate the claims of Trump and his allies that the results were fraudulent. The new curriculum is simply an amalgamation of unsupported claims.
There was no “sudden halting” of ballot counting in key states. The counting took an extended period in some states because election officials were legally prohibited from counting early ballots in advance. Mail-in balloting is safe and secure. Large increases in vote totals (“batch dumps”) happen in every election, impact both parties, and are not a sign of fraud. Record turnout in 2020 was not “unforeseen” — it was due to increased engagement related to the pandemic and other factors. And traditional “bellwether” counties are now more conservative than the nation as a whole.
The new curriculum will cost Oklahoma taxpayers at least $33 million.
Oklahoma’s legislature had an opportunity to block the new curriculum. The chairman of the Oklahoma Senate Education Committee, Adam Pugh (R), filed a resolution that would have sent the curriculum back to the Oklahoma State Board of Education for further review. But ultimately, the resolution did not receive a vote.
Moms for Liberty, a far-right activist organization, sent a letter to Republican members of the legislature, praising the new curriculum as “truth-filled, anti-woke, and unapologetically conservative.” They also delivered a warning: “In the last few election cycles, grassroots conservative organizations have flipped seats across Oklahoma by holding weak Republicans accountable. If you choose to side with the liberal media and make backroom deals with Democrats to block conservative reform, you will be next.”
Walters’ new social studies standards were approved by the Oklahoma State Board of Education in February. But many members have since said that Walters used deceptive tactics in order to pass new last-minute changes.
Walters did not send the new standards with his additions to the members of the board until 4 p.m. the day before the board’s 9:30 a.m. meeting. This did not give members enough time to read the new standards, which are around 400 pages long. Some of the members said later that they did not even realize that the new standards were different from the earlier version that they had previously reviewed.
The email sent the day before the meeting “subtly indicate[d]” that updates had been made, but did “not provide any specifics,” 2 News Oklahoma reported. In the meeting, Walters did not mention the specific changes. In an April 24 meeting, one of the board members, Chris VanDenhende, asked Walters to provide documents that noted the changes made, but Walters called the request “irrelevant.”
At the February meeting, Ryan Deatherage, a board member, asked to delay the vote so they had time to read the full standards, but Walters “pressure[d] the board to vote that day, indicating a legislative time crunch,” according to 2 News, which attended the meeting. In reality, they had until April to approve the standards. After the February meeting, multiple members of the board stated that they wanted another chance to review the standards, calling Walters’ tactics a “breach of trust,” the Oklahoman reported.
Walters claimed that the last-minute additions to the standards were based on public input. But there is no evidence of this. During a press conference, “a reporter who reviewed an open records request said there were no public comments that suggested adding a standard about election discrepancies,” KGOU reported. Walters responded by arguing that there were “focus groups” and “a lot of discussions that were going on.” But Walters also acknowledged that he was the one who decided to change the content. “Ultimately, it was up to me to make the final decisions of what are we going to put in,” he stated.
Walters also included right-wing activists on the committee that reviewed the social studies standards. The committee would normally involve educators and other experts, but Walters’ committee included Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation; Dennis Prager, the co-founder of PragerU; and right-wing media personalities Steve Deace and David Barton. Only three out of the 10 people on the committee have lived in Oklahoma, according to the Oklahoma Voice.
The Oklahoma Council for Social Studies (OCSS) opposes Walters’ new standards: “OCSS cannot fully support the standards in their current form. Many of the late additions include historically inaccurate content and do not align with the inclusive, evidence-based approach that is essential to high-quality social studies instruction.” The statement also argued that “the manner in which these changes were introduced raises serious concerns, casting doubt on the transparency and integrity of the standards development process.”
Among the curriculum changes that will soon go into effect is the removal of part of a unit in which students will learn about former President Joe Biden’s administration. The original lesson plan taught students about the “challenges and accomplishments” of Biden’s term, but the new version focuses on challenges and leaves out accomplishments.
The original version said that students should be able to describe economic recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic and bipartisan infrastructure legislation. The new version only asks students to describe “the United States-Mexico border crisis” and “America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Gaza-Israel conflict.”
While Biden’s accomplishments are de-emphasized in the new curriculum, the amount of time Oklahoma students spend learning about Christianity and the Bible will be increased. In December, Walters proudly announced that his new curriculum will increase the number of mentions of the Bible from two to nearly 50 for students starting in first grade. The Bible lessons primarily focus on the influence of Christian values on the Constitution and the Founding Fathers.
Students as young as six years old will learn the stories of the Ten Commandments and David and Goliath. By the end of middle school, students will have gone through several lessons on how the Bible’s principles served as inspiration for the American independence movement. In high school, they will be able to take an entire course about early Christians and the history of Christianity.
Despite the new emphasis on the relationship between the Bible and America’s founding, the curriculum does not reference the separation of church and state. Walters and many of the Christian nationalist figures who helped him craft the curriculum have said that the separation of church and state is unconstitutional or a myth.
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