OK: More Edu-spats

While awaiting SCOTUS's take on the Big Oklahoma story-- the attempt to create the illusion that a religious charter school-- do not miss the other ongoing crazypants fussing going on over various other issues.

Oklahoma is wrestling with some new history standards, subject to Edu-dudebro-in-chief Ryan Walters intense desire to jam his version of Christianity into schools while simultaneously making google eyes at Dear Leader in DC.

Here's the thing-- the standards were rather christianism-infused to begin with. But then as the new year rolled around, a bump or three appeared in the road.

There'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." But Walters now has to deal with three new members of the board who don't appear to be either impressed by or afraid of Walters, and the history standards have emerged as the first topic of dispute. 

The standards were tossed in front of the board, complete with three new members, in February, accompanied by a demand that these needed to get okayed super quick. Only it turns out that the final version of the standards had some changes that had been quietly slipped in there, most notably a requirement that Oklahoma students "identify discrepancies in the 2020 election results." Those changes were not discussed, and the newly appointed board members somehow didn't know about them.

Walters has handled this challenge to his authority with aplomb and diplomacy. Ha, just kidding. He has called the new board members liars and accused them of creating a "fake controversy." "I can't make you do the reading," he said, referring to the standards with changes that nobody was told about. 

"I'm not a speed reader," said new member Ryan Deatherage, reminding Walters that he had asked for more time at the February meeting.

"I did my homework," said (more or less) new member Michael Tinney, pointing out that he downloaded the standards to read, but that what he read was the pre-sneaky-changes standards.

Sasha Ndisabiye and Bennett Brinkman have been all over this for NonDoc. They report:

Asked after the meeting why Walters did not at least notify board members of what changed between the initial version of the standards and the final version, Walters declined to give a reason besides saying he made it clear to board members that the version of the standards given to them less than 24 hours before the meeting was the updated and final version.

“I don’t control when Gov. (Kevin) Stitt put these board members on here. That’s what he chose to do,” Walters said. “It was at the very end of the process.”

I think we could safely call this a passive-aggressive hissy fit. And to add to the cheery atmosphere, the GOP chair of the Senate Education Committee, Rep. Adam Pugh, filed a resolution shortly after the board fireworks saying the Senate doesn't like the standards and will send them back to the board for a do-over. 

Walters continues to demonstrate what it looks like to put politics and personal brand building over educating actual young humans. In the meantime, Oklahomans can consider the value of adding The Big Lie to the curriculum when there are so many smaller lies near to hand.