The Republican-led state’s new high school history curriculum says students must learn about Donald Trump’s baseless claims of voting irregularities.
Should the Bible be in classrooms? Oklahoma state supt. thinks so.
School districts in Oklahoma are pushing back on a mandate by Superintendent Ryan Walters to have Bibles in classrooms.
- Oklahoma will require public high school students to learn disproved claims about alleged voting irregularities in the 2020 election promoted by President Donald Trump’s supporters.
- The curriculum will be implemented in the 2025-2026 school year.
Oklahoma’s public school history teachers will soon be required to teach the disproved conspiracy theory that the Democratic Party 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 dissect the results of the 2020 election, including learning about alleged mail-in voter fraud, “an unforeseen record number of voters” and “security risks of mail-in balloting.”
Advancing Trump’s debunked claims about his 2020 presidential election loss on young people is one of many changes made by State Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters, including requiring bibles in every classroom. The new curriculum also removed a prior proposal for lessons about George Floyd’s murder and Black Lives Matter, and teaches as fact the hotly contested theory that COVID-19 emerged from a lab leak.
“These reforms will reset our classrooms back to educating our children without liberal indoctrination,” Walters, a former history teacher, wrote in a post on X on April 29. “We’re proud to defend these standards, and we will continue to stand up for honest, pro-America education in every classroom.”
The new curriculum was drafted by a review committee that includes Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington D.C.-based conservative think tank that created the blueprint for a second Trump term, known as Project 2025 and conservative talk show host Dennis Prager.
Parents, teachers, Democrats, and even some Republicans in staunchly conservative Oklahoma, oppose the new social studies lessons.
“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,” wrote Heather Goodenough, the president of the Council for Social Studies, in a public statement.
The Oklahoma Department of Education and Walters’ office did responded to an inquiry from USA TODAY.
What is Oklahoma’s new social studies standard?
Oklahoma’s new history standards will start in the 2025-2026 school year.
Students must be able to “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,” the new standard reads.
Teachers must adjust their current curriculum to teach the lessons.
Why is it so controversial?
Former Democratic President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election with 306 electoral votes and a 7 million-vote margin in the popular vote.
The right-wing myth that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, sometimes called the “Big Lie,” emerged from Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat.
The allegations have been disproven through numerous audits and recounts in several states, court dismissals of lawsuits filed by Trump and his supporters, forensic audits of voting machines and partisan reviews.
“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” said the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in a November 2020 statement. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.”
Some Republican lawmakers have also pushed back on claims of widespread fraud.
“Nothing before us proves illegality anywhere near the massive scale, the massive scale that would have tipped the entire election,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the GOP leader in the Senate at the time.
Trump’s bogus claims of a stolen election incited his supporters’ violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump continued to make false statements about the 2020 election throughout Biden’s term, such as wrongly asserting in 2022 that a Pennsylvania court ruling in a case about that year’s midterm elections held that the 2020 election was “Rigged.” In the second 2024 presidential debate, Trump incorrectly asserted that none of the more than 60 cases he lost in court over the 2020 election were decided on the merits. In fact, 30 were.
The accusations of electoral fraud have become very widely accepted by Republican voters although they’re rejected by many Republican legal experts and GOP-appointed judges.
About one-third of Americans still believed the election was stolen from Trump in Sept. 2023 and a majority of the believers are Republican, according to a survey of about 2,500 adults from the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization Public Religion Research Institute.
What are people saying about it?
Oklahoma’s new social studies standards are welcomed by Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president and legal fellow at the conservative nonprofit organization Defending Education.
She said the move shows “the power of a state to transform its education through curriculum” and applauded Walters for “leading the way.”
“I’m very impressed with the fact that this is made specifically to create critical thinkers,” Parshall Perry said in a Fox News interview. “And don’t we need more of that in American education?”
But not everyone in the GOP is on board. Mike Hunter, a former Oklahoma Republican attorney general, filed a lawsuit on behalf of five family members of students and two public school teachers against the Oklahoma State Department of Education and Walters for the move.
They argue that Walters’s state Department of Education did not follow proper protocol when passing through the new standards and are asking a judge to consider the new social studies curriculum “invalid, null and void.”
The lawsuit contends that the new curriculum “directly harms” students because the new standards “do not align with best practices and current understandings set by national organizations and experts in the field.”
The revised standards also create “a significant burden” on teachers because they are not “aligned with their current understanding of the subject matter” nor aligned with the information in the textbooks they use, the lawsuit argues.
State Democrats previously called on lawmakers to reject the proposed new curriciulum.
“Right now, the State Superintendent is not focused on improving education outcomes or increasing funding for our public schools. Instead, he’s solely focused on boosting his own partisan political agenda with these social studies standards,” said Cyndi Munson, a Democratic House Minority Leader in Oklahoma at a press conference.
Education in Oklahoma
Oklahoma is a majority Republican and conservative state, with 51.7% voters registered as Republicans and 28.4% of voters registered as Democrats in January 2024. Trump received support from about 66% of Oklahoma voters in the 2024 presidential election, according to the Oklahoma State Election Board.
Oklahoma Republicans make up an overwhelming majority of both the state Senate and House of Representatives.
Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Kevin Stitt appointed Walters to the helm of the state’s education department in Sept. 2020. Oklahoma voters then elected him for a second term in November 2022.
Walters previously taught as a history teacher in McAlester, Oklahoma for eight years and served as the chief executive officer of the nonprofit public charity Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, which runs education programs.
Since Walters took over, he has inserted conservative values in Oklahoma’s public schools.
Many policies he’s promoted and supported have ignited controversy across the state and the nation.
The state’s Department of Education is slated to mandate Bible lessons in its public schools this fall.
A proposal to allow a religious charter school in Oklahoma, which opponents say violates the principle of separation of church and state, has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Walters has supported the idea of religious charter schools.
This year, Walters has also tried to require families there to provide proof of U.S. citizenship or legal immigration status to enroll in public schools and he’s said he plans to strictly enforce the Trump administration’s directive to abolish diversity, equity and inclusion programming in schools.
Contributing: Daniel Funke, USA TODAY
Contact Kayla Jimenez at [email protected]. Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.