Ryan Walters, Oklahoma Public Schools, Controversial Curriculum and the Rabid, Regressive Spirit of the Conservative Right!

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This upcoming 2025–26 academic school year, thousands of high schoolstudents in Oklahoma will be required to “learn” about President Trump’s discredited claims that fraud marred and corrupted the 2020 election. This course will not cover debunked conspiracy theories; instead, it will be an official, approved segment of the new, revised social studies curriculum that Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction and Republican right-wing advocate Ryan Walters developed. At a board meeting earlier this year, Walters described the curriculum’s purpose as “ensuring our kids have a well-rounded education and understand American exceptionalism, understand civics, and understand our Constitution and those constitutional principles.”

The new curriculum includes a section that requires students to “analyze contemporary turning points of 21st-century American society.” It requires that high school students “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by perusing graphs and other information,” informing educators that students should examine the supposed “security risks of mail-in balloting,” ballot dumps, and the “halting of ballot-counting in select cities.” The curriculum also states that educators should point to the election’s “unforeseen…