OK: Fake History and Walters Follies

Oklahoma's state slogan has been through a variety of changes, but they may change it to "We rewrite history." Oklahoma has been working on revised standards for history classes in the state for a while now, and just as they got down to the finish line, those standards picked up just a few more objectionable additions.

Sash Ndisabiye and Bennett Brinkman for NonDoc got their hands on a copy of the proposed standards, and there have been a few changes since the standards were set out for public comments.

The headline-grabbing change calls for high school students to "identify discrepancies in 2020 election 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."

What's the goal here? If they can get high school students to look over all the "evidence" that failed to convince a single court, maybe they can finally uncover someone who will find in favor of the Big Lie? No, I expect the hope is just to convince a few folks that the Big Lie is true, and 15-year-olds are about the only demographic left with which they have a shot. Easiest to rewrite history for those who haven't read much of it yet. 

NonDoc reports that this change (and many others) were made after the public comment period, and were also not pointed out to the Board of Education before it voted on the standards. 

If course, that might be because the Board is no longer a group of hand-picked allies of Oklahoma's Dudebro-in-chief of Education Ryan Walters. That's fallout from ongoing feuding among Oklahoma's big name GOP politicians. Walters tried to get State Attorney General Gentner Drummond to make some noise about Trump's anti-diversity edicts to support Walters own response, but Drummond, who has often clashed with Walters, called it "manufactured political drama" intended to get Walters more attention. Drummond is running for governor, Kevin Stitt wants to keep being governor, and Walters sure looks like he's running for something (especially now that Dear Leader didn't call him to DC). 

Then Walters decided to require all schools to send him a list of every undocumented immigrant child, and even Stitt thought that was too much ("picking on kids" he called it) and fired three members of the Board of Education. Walters put two of them on a new made-up thing called the "Trump Advisory Committee" because his old BFF Stitt is now part of the "liberal DC swamp."

Which is why it was one of the new members that ended up telling NonDoc, re: the standards changes, "In the spirit of full transparency, I question why this was done in the 11th hour and why no mention of this was made during the presentation at the board meeting."

House Common Education Committee Chairman Dick Lowe told NonDoc that the standards were already "on the edge" because of the overt Christianity references.

That's not the whole of it. The standards have the usual dopey standards features, like the kindergarten standard that calls for kindergartners to read primary and secondary documents and identify the main ideas of the text. But some curious political items just sort of quietly slipped into the standards.

"Identifying major policy issues" became "Explain the effects of the Trump tax cuts, child tax credit, border enforcement efforts including Title 42 and Remain in Mexico policy, consumer and business confidence, interest rates, and inflation rates prior to the COVID-19 pandemic."

Or how about “Identify the source of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Chinese lab and the economic and social effects of state and local lockdowns.”

And just in case any upstart history teachers feel the urge to make Infrastructure Week jokes, the sneaky revision eliminated “Describe bi-partisan efforts to address the nation’s infrastructural needs.” Rewrite away!

Unfortunately, at the contentious February 27 meeting of the state board, Walters created the impression of a looming deadline and the standards were improved, sneaky changes unseen.

Senator Mark Mann, a former teacher who sits on the Senate Education Committee, summed it all up for NonDoc.

“Anytime you put nonsense like this out, it does two things: One, it makes teachers worried (…) So they just leave something out and don’t teach it, and then kids aren’t understanding and grasping the concept. Or, they do what a lot of teachers have done, and they just decide, ‘You know what, I can go make more at Paycom. I’m not putting up with this stuff anymore.'”

Yup. State standards are most often a PITA paperwork exercise, and once you see that some of them are nonsense, you fill out your lesson plans to look compliant, and then you ignore the damned things. The effect?

“Ryan Walters, clearly, outside of being a total disaster, has done nothing to help solve the teacher shortage,” Mann said. “He’s added to it because teachers don’t want to work under him.”

This next governor's race in Oklahoma is going to be really interesting for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to see if Ryan Walters has established such a noisy, dysfunctionally high profile that he may be the first state education chief to be an actual campaign issue. It was Stitt who raised Walters up to the state level; let's see how hard he runs away from that. And then, once we see the outcome, we'll see how the Oklahoma state standards rewrite the tale.