The new social studies standards are deeply flawed. Will Oklahoma lawmakers take a stand?

Oklahoma’s students are about to be handed a set of deeply politicized social studies standards, and what’s happening here is a warning for the rest of the country.

But the real danger isn’t any single lie, it’s the system Superintendent Ryan Walters has created while imposing them. He has methodically silenced dissent by slashing the time for public comment from three minutes to one. He’s attempted to bury his policy changes from public scrutiny through efforts to change how the State Department of Education responds to open records requests. And we’ve seen him threaten to strong-arm “rogue” school leaders into compliance with other policies while spreading misinformation.

This is how propaganda replaces truth.

Walters has celebrated creating these standards with the help of right-wing pundits. But despite being so proud of them, Walters apparently had to trick the State Board of Education into approving them. Board members have said that Walters neglected to mention to them that he’d made last-minute changes, and that there were two different versions of the standards — the one available to the public online and the other included in a packet put together for the governing board.

In fact, my analysis of the public draft versus the one sent to lawmakers found the State Department of Education made more than 70 secret changes after public comment closed. Among those changes are claims that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab and that the 2020 presidential election involved interference. Both are unproven and highly politicized assertions that would now be presented as fact to Oklahoma’s students.

If these standards are so laudable why are education leaders afraid to give these the public vetting and discussion they deserve?

Walters quietly embedded these narratives over a month ago, and now we are watching as similar language begins surfacing at the federal level. This past weekend, the federal government quietly altered its official COVID-19 web pages to reflect the same lab-leak framing promoted in Oklahoma’s proposed standards. It signals how President Donald Trump and his allies intend to reshape public memory and our classrooms in coordinated, strategic ways.

What Walters is doing here is not just about Oklahoma. It is part of a larger, carefully timed campaign. If these standards pass, it will not stop here.

The Oklahoma Legislature has until May 1 to consider them. They could accept, reject, alter them or do nothing, which would result in them passing as written. Some State Board of Education members are calling on lawmakers to return the standards to them for further review.

So far, Republican legislative leaders have not been willing to take a stand.

But it won’t be long before Oklahomans learn if their elected officials can tell the difference between truth and propaganda.

For all our sakes, I hope they can because our children deserve nothing less than the accurate, unvarnished truth.

Oklahoma Voice (oklahomavoice.com) is an affiliate of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization, supported by grants and donations. Oklahoma Voice provides nonpartisan reporting, and retains full editorial independence.