The Republican-led state’s new high school history curriculum says students must learn about Donald Trump’s unfounded claims of voting irregularity.
Should the Bible be in the classroom? Oklahoma State Supt. That’s what I think.
Oklahoma school districts are pushing back the duties of Principal Ryan Walters to have a Bible in their classrooms.
- Oklahoma calls for public high school students to learn disproved claims about voting fraud in the 2020 election promoted by supporters of President Donald Trump.
- The curriculum will be held between the 2025-2026 academic year.
Oklahoma public school history teachers should quickly teach the disproved conspiracy theory that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election from President Donald Trump.
The Republican-led state’s new high school history curriculum says students must learn how to analyze the outcomes of the 2020 election.
Moving forward Trump’s denied claims about the loss of the 2020 presidential election against young people is one of many changes made by state chief Ryan Walters, including demanding the Bible in all classrooms. The new curriculum also removes previous proposals for lessons on the issue of George Floyd’s murder and black lives, and teaches, in fact, a passionately contested theory that Covid-19 emerged from laboratory leaks.
“These reforms will return to reverting our classrooms to educating our children without liberal indoctrination,” Walters, a former history teacher, wrote in a post on X on April 29th. “We are proud to advocate for these standards.
The new curriculum was drafted by a review committee that includes Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington, DC-based conservative think tank that created the blueprint for the second Trump terminology and conservative talk show host Dennis Prager, known as Project 2025.
Parents, teachers, Democrats, and even stubbornly conservative Oklahoma Republicans oppose new social studies lessons.
“Many of the later additions contain historically inaccurate content and do not coincide with the comprehensive, evidence-based approach that is essential to teaching high-quality social studies,” wrote Heather Goodenner, chairman of the Social Science Council, in an official statement.
The Oklahoma Department of Education and Walter’s Office responded to an investigation from USA Today.
What is the new social studies standard in Oklahoma?
Oklahoma’s new historic standards begin in 2025-2026.
Students must be able to identify inconsistencies in the 2020 election results by examining graphs and other information that include security risks including sudden halts in voting cities in certain cities in major battlefield states, security risks for email-in voting, sudden batch dumps, unexpected record numbers of voters, and security risks including conservative inconsistencies in “Bell-shaped County Trends.”
Teachers need to adjust their current curriculum to teach their lessons.
Why is it so controversial?
Former Democratic President Joe Biden won 306 votes and 7 million votes in the 2020 presidential election.
The right-wing myth that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, sometimes called a “big lie” and emerged from Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat.
The allegations have been disproved through numerous audits and recounts in several states, court filings of cases filed by Trump and his supporters, forensic audits of voting machines, and partisan reviews.
“The November 3rd election was the safest in American history,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a November 2020 statement. “There is no evidence that the voting system has deleted or lost a vote, changed the vote, or compromised in any way.”
Some Republican lawmakers have pushed back widespread fraud claims.
“We have not proven illegal in front of us that is close to a massive scale, it’s a massive scale that has leaned the entire election,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, then Senate GOP leader.
Trump’s false claims about the stolen election sparked violent riots among his supporters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Trump continued to make false statements about the 2020 election throughout Biden’s term, including falsely claiming that Pennsylvania courts ruled in 2022 in a lawsuit relating to that year’s midterm elections, and found the 2020 election to be “integrated.” In the 2024 presidential debate, Trump falsely argued that none of the 60 or more cases in which he lost courtrooms in the 2020 election had been determined on this merit. In fact, 30 was.
The accusations of election fraud have been very widely accepted by Republican voters, but they have been rejected by many Republican legal experts and GOP-appointed judges.
About a third of Americans believed that the election was stolen from Trump in September 2023, and that the majority of their followers were Republicans.
What are people saying about it?
Oklahoma’s new social studies standard is welcomed by Sarah Partial Perry, vice president and legal fellow in education education for a conservative nonprofit.
She said the move marked “the power of a nation to transform education through curriculum” and praised Walters for “leading.”
“I was very impressed with the fact that this is specifically designed to create critical thinkers,” Parshall Perry said in an interview with Fox News. “And isn’t there more needed for American education?”
However, not all of the GOP are on board. Former Oklahoma Republican Attorney General Mike Hunter filed a lawsuit on behalf of five families and two public school teachers against the Oklahoma Department of Education and Walters’ move.
They argue that Walters’ Department of Education failed to follow the appropriate protocols when passing the new standards, and that it is asking judges to consider the new social studies curriculum as “invalid and invalid.”
The lawsuit argues that the new curriculum “does directly harm” students as the new standards “does not match best practices and current understandings set by national organisations and experts on the ground.”
The revised standards also create a “significant burden” for teachers because they “do not “conform to the current understanding of the subject” and do not match the information in the textbook they are using, the lawsuit alleges..
State Democrats have previously called on lawmakers to reject the proposed new curriculum.
“Now, the state oversight hasn’t focused on improving educational outcomes or increasing public school funding. Instead, he is focusing on boosting his own partisan political agenda with these social studies standards,” said Cindy Manson, a democratic minority leader at Oklahoma’s press conference.
Education in Oklahoma
Oklahoma is a Republican and Conservative majority, with 51.7% of voters registered as Republicans and 28.4% of voters registered as Democrats in January 2024. Trump received support from around 66% of Oklahoma voters in the 2024 presidential election.
Oklahoma Republicans make up the overwhelming majority of both the state Senate and the House of Representatives.
Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt appointed Walters to the helm of the state’s education division in September 2020. Oklahoma voters selected him for his second term in November 2022.
Walters previously taught as a history teacher in McAlester, Oklahoma for eight years and served as CEO of Oklahoma, where the education program is run by the nonprofit public charity Every Kid.
Since Walters took over, he has inserted conservative values into public schools in Oklahoma.
Many of the policies he has promoted and supported have sparked controversy across the state and nation.
The state’s Department of Education will require Bible lessons at public schools this fall.
A proposal to allow a religious charter school in Oklahoma, who says opponents violate the principle of separation of churches and states, reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Walters supports the idea of a religious charter school.
This year, Walters sought to request his family to provide evidence of US citizenship or legal immigration status to enroll in public schools. He said he plans to strictly enforce the Trump administration’s direction to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programming in schools.
Contributor: Daniel Fanke, USA Today
Please contact Kayla Jimenez (kjimenez@usatoday.com). Follow her on the X on @kaylajjimenez.
