Oklahoma high schools to teach 2020 election conspiracy theories as fact

As part of the latest Republican push in red states to promote ideologies sympathetic to Donald Trump, Oklahoma’s new social studies curriculum will ask high school students to identify “discrepancies” in the 2020 election results.

The previous standard for studying the 2020 election merely said: “Examine issues related to the election of 2020 and its outcome.” The new version is more expansive: “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 revised curriculum standard comes at the behest of Ryan Walters, the state school superintendent, who has publicly voiced his support for Trump. In October, Walters lauded Trump in an interview, saying that “Trump’s won the argument on education”.

Walters, who has also advocated for ending “wokeness” in public schools, went on to say: “We have education bureaucrats that are left-wing, elitist, that think they know best for families, and they have become so radicalized that our families are going: ‘What is going on here?’”

Oklahoma’s new social studies standards for K-12 public school students, already infused with references to the Bible and national pride, were revised at Walters’ direction. The Republican official has spent much of his first term in office not only lauding Trump but also feuding with teachers’ unions and local school superintendents.

“The left has been pushing left-wing indoctrination in the classroom,” Walters said. “We’re moving it back to actually understanding history … and I’m unapologetic about that.”

As part of his revisions, Walters also proposed removing education about Black Lives Matter and George Floyd’s murder, Tulsa’s NBC affiliate KJRH reports.

The outlet further reported that the revisions were expected to cost the state’s taxpayers $33m in new textbooks and related material.

Other efforts by Walters include promoting Trump-endorsed Bibles across classrooms, as well as supporting an attempt to establish the US’s first public religious charter school – a case the conservative-majority supreme court seems open to siding with.

The new standard raised red flags even among Walters’ fellow Republicans, including the governor and legislative leaders. They were concerned that several last-minute changes, including the language about the 2020 election and a provision stating the source of the Covid-19 virus was a Chinese lab, were added just hours before the state school board voted on them.

A group of parents and educators have filed a lawsuit asking a judge to reject the standards, arguing they were not reviewed properly and that they “represent a distorted view of social studies that intentionally favors an outdated and blatantly biased perspective”.

While many Oklahoma teachers have expressed outrage at the change in the standards, others say they leave plenty of room for an effective teacher to instruct students about the results of the 2020 election without misinforming them.

Aaron Baker, who has taught US government in high schools in Oklahoma City for more than a decade, said he’s most concerned about teachers in rural, conservative parts of the state who might feel encouraged to impose their own beliefs on students.

“If someone is welcoming the influence of these far-right organizations in our standards and is interested in inserting more of Christianity into our practices as teachers, then they’ve become emboldened,” Baker said. “For me, that is the major concern.”

Leaders in the Republican-led Oklahoma legislature introduced a resolution to reject the standards, but there wasn’t enough GOP support to pass it.

Part of that hesitation likely stemmed from a flurry of last-minute opposition organized by pro-Trump conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, which has a large presence in Oklahoma and threatened lawmakers who reject the standards with a primary opponent.

“In the last few election cycles, grassroots conservative organizations have flipped seats across Oklahoma by holding weak Republicans accountable,” the group wrote in a letter signed by several other conservative groups and GOP activists. “If you choose to side with the liberal media and make backroom deals with Democrats to block conservative reform, you will be next.”

After a group of parents, educators and other Oklahoma school officials worked to develop the new social studies standards, Walters assembled an executive committee consisting mostly of out-of-state pundits from conservative thinktanks to revise them. He said he wanted to focus more on American exceptionalism and incorporate the Bible as an instructional resource.

Among those Walters appointed to the review committee were Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and a key figure in its Project 2025 blueprint for a conservative presidential administration, and Dennis Prager, a radio talkshow host who founded Prager U, a conservative non-profit that offers “pro-American” educational materials for children that some critics say are not accurate or objective.

In a statement to the Associated Press, Walters defended teaching students about “unprecedented and historically significant” elements of the 2020 presidential election.

Recounts, reviews and audits in the battleground states where Trump contested his loss all confirmed Democrat Joe Biden’s victory, and Trump lost dozens of court cases challenging the results.

In addition to the curriculum revisions, a proposed rule approved by the state board of education in January mandates that parents enrolling their children in the state’s public schools show proof of immigration status.

Describing the rule, which has been met with widespread outrage among parents, students and immigration advocates, Walters said: “Our rule around illegal immigration accounting is simply that … It is to account for how many students of illegal immigrants are in our schools.”