Oklahoma Students To Study 2020 Election ‘Discrepancies’ After State Adopts New Curriculum Standards

The state of Oklahoma has set new academic standards that will include that students be taught about the “discrepancies” in the results for the 2020 election.Republican lawmakers in the state legislature quietly pushed through the new initiative last month despite opposition from members of the Republican Party in the state, according to a report from KSOU.The new curriculum standards state that students must “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities and 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 latest edit, which references the 2020 election, was introduced after the most recent proposed draft had been publicly posted, according to a report from the Oklahoma Voice, which also reported that the education department presented these standards to the board without acknowledging the new addition.The standards were pushed through by the state superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, a conservative firebrand.“These new standards will ensure that kids have an accurate and comprehensive view of historical events, while also reinforcing the values that make our country great,” Mr. Walters said at a February meeting of the state board of education, according to KOSU. Just hours earlier, he quietly presented to the board for approval under the false pretense that legislative deadlines needed to be met. The vote was fast-tracked and the standards were approved and moved on to the state legislature for a vote.A cadre of new board members spent the following two months requesting that lawmakers return the standards back to the board of education, claiming that there was not ample time to review the changes. The state’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, had also urged the legislature to send the standards back and GOP members of the state senate had authored a joint resolution to reject the standards. In April, lawmakers declined to block the standards after a closed-door meeting with Mr. Walters.The state house speaker, Kyle Hilbert, has defended the standards, saying they push students to engage in critical thinking.“I think that students should be challenged to think critically about that particular election and what led to that high turnout as well as all the reforms that you saw states pass in the wake of that,” Mr. Hilbert said at a March press conference. “So, I think if you’re going to talk about the 2020 election, that’s a centerpiece of the conversation, of challenging students to think critically about those important questions.”Others say the new standards promote the opposite.“If you want someone to really do some inquiry, then you would have to let the student ask the question,” the interim executive director of the National Council for the Social Studies, Anton Schulzki, said to KOSU.The chief programs officer for the Election Center, Tammy Patrick, told the NPR affiliate that the standard seems to work under the assumption that “discrepancies” in the 2020 election results are a widely accepted position and that teaching such false claims would only further erode the public’s confidence in the system.“And it will continue to erode if we continue to have these false narratives being repeated continually and used in an academic setting as though they are truth and fact by teachers, educators [and] state boards putting this out as though this is the same level of accuracy and correctness as a mathematical or scientific theorem,” she said.

Oklahoma Students To Study 2020 Election ‘Discrepancies’ After State Adopts New Curriculum Standards

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