Oklahoma finally scraps Bible-heavy, conspiracy-laced Social Studies standards
After Ryan Walters’ failed ideological crusade, Oklahoma is restoring evidence-based history and bringing basic sanity back to public schools
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In the latest bit of good news out of Oklahoma, the state’s Department of Education has released a new version of its standards for public school social studies classes. (These are the required topics teachers must incorporate into their lessons.) And unlike the version promoted by the former Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, which were so blatantly illegal that the state’s Supreme Court struck them down in September, the new draft doesn’t lean into Christian Nationalism or right-wing conspiracy theories.
The new version was released last week by Walters’ replacement, Lindel Fields, who promised months ago that he would fix the mess Walters left behind. When asked in October if he would do something about the standards, he responded in a very understated way, “I think there will be some changes to them, yes.”
Why were the changes so necessary? Let’s go back to December of 2024, when Walters said in a press release that his new standards “mention the Bible and its historical impact over 40 times.”
The new standards are among the strongest in the country: pro- America, pro-American exceptionalism, and strengthen civics and constitutional studies across every grade. They include Supt. Walters Bible curriculum recommendations and mention the Bible and its historical impact over 40 times.
…
“Oklahoma is putting the Bible and the historical impact of Christianity back in school. We are demanding that our children learn the full and true context of our nation’s founding and of the principles that made and continue to make America great and exceptional,” said Walters. “I am proud that Oklahoma is taking the lead in putting President Trump’s education agenda into practice. We are presenting a successful model that others can emulate for how to restore public education and eradicate radical woke influences from our schools.
What were some of those lessons? First graders would be taught the “purpose and meaning” of the Pledge of Allegiance “and the significance of the phrase ‘under God.’” They would also have to explain the meaning of “In God we trust” and “the importance of religion to American people.”
Second graders would be taught “stories from Christianity that influenced the American colonists, Founders, and culture, including the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (e.g., the “Golden Rule,” the Sermon on the Mount).”
Eighth graders would have to “Evaluate the role of Judeo-Christian ideals in supporting colonial demands for independence, as exemplified by the Bible being a frequently cited authority by America’s Founders.” (Spoiler: It wasn’t a frequently cited authority.)
For high school students, the indoctrination was even stronger. Christianity and slavery were only connected in the standards through Christian humanitarians who called for its abolition, but there was no mention of how the Bible was often used to justify enslavement.
In U.S. Government classes, students would have to describe how the Constitution “was influenced by religion, morality, and the Bible as a frequently cited authority by America’s founders.” And in world history classes, the Bible was cited as a historical text and students would have to describe how Christianity worked in ancient Rome, including “the meanings and effects of Jesus of Nazareth’s words as recorded by Matthew.”
Outside of religion, things were also bad. The standards asked students to summarize “the political impact of President Clinton’s impeachment”… but made no mention of Donald Trump’s two impeachments.
How was this set of standards even created? To no one’s surprise, they were purposely crafted by right-wing ideologues:
[Walters] said members of that 10-person [executive review] committee would include the co-founder of the conservative nonprofit PragerU, a representative from the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the president of another conservative group, the Heritage Foundation, along with multiple other right-wing voices. Only three of the people on the executive committee have ever lived in Oklahoma.
There are no Oklahoma public-school teachers or administrators on the executive committee, although there were about 75 of them who worked on updating the standards.
Somehow, though, Walters found a way to make all that even worse.
When those standards were released in December of 2024, the state’s Board of Education was supposed to approve them (or reject them) after about 60 days of public comment. But just before it came time to vote on them, Walters pushed through even more changes without telling the board members he had done that. They approved them without even realizing there had been serious changes.
In those revised standards, Walters demanded that teachers tell kids that the 2020 election had major “discrepancies” (it did not), that there were security risks with mail-in ballots and “sudden batch dumps” (there were not), and that COVID originated in a Chinese lab (despite no conclusive proof of that). It incorporated the phrase “Gulf of America.” It removed certain requirements that taught about racial discrimination and the Black Lives Matter movement.
The standards were so awful, many major textbook publishers didn’t even bother accommodating the changes. It would have been a blow to their reputation to release such absurd content.
The state was soon hit with a lawsuit over those standards, and the Oklahoma Supreme Court, in September of 2025, put a temporary block on those new standards going into effect, which meant public schools would just use the older (sensible) standards written in 2019. That temporary block became permanent in December, when the Court said Walters violated the state’s Open Meeting Act when he forced the revised standards through without public input or enough time for the Board members to even look through them.
Since that time, Fields has replaced Walters (who resigned from his job in September to the delight of damn near every in Oklahoma who actually cares about education) and has slowly been dismantling any legacy Walters thought he was leaving behind.
With regards to the new standards, imagine competent people making the decisions and everything begins to fall into place, as the Oklahoma Voice noted:
The Education Department reconvened a team of educators to reevaluate the social studies standards, said Tara Thompson, a spokesperson for Fields’ administration. The committee made further revisions to prepare the latest draft for public input.
…
Under the new draft, public schools wouldn’t be required to teach students Bible stories nor a disputed claim that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab. References to patriotism are pared down, though not completely removed, and students wouldn’t be taught how the Bible and Judeo-Christian ideals influenced America’s founders.
High school students wouldn’t be asked to “identify discrepancies” in the 2020 presidential election between former President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, including “sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.”
The word “Bible” only appears once, in relation to the Gutenberg printing press and the translation of the Bible. “Christianity” appears a few times, but in the context of how colonialists converted Indigenous people, as one of many popular world religions, and as part of a “Social Gospel movement [that] emphasized the engagement of churches in social reform.” That last bit also asks students about the “application of Christian principles to societal problems such as poverty, inequality, and injustice,” but not quite in the heavy-handed way Walters would have done it, by suggesting Christianity was the only solution to those problems.
When it comes to Trump, high school students are asked to identify the significant events of his first term, including tax cuts, social media influence, and judicial appointments; changes in foreign policy and trade agreements; COVID responses; and “political polarization and constitutional issues” as related to the 2020 election.
Regarding Biden, students would have to assess economic recovery and his policies “in the post-COVID era,” the bipartisan infrastructure efforts, and his foreign policy (like withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the Israel/Hamas conflict).
It’s basically what a normal state would tell educators they need to cover in order to make sure students have a firm foundation of the subject. (School districts can obviously go above and beyond all this.)
Want more good news? The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a right-wing think tank founded by the “longtime board chairman of The Heritage Foundation,” is very upset about the proposed standards:
… the Oklahoma education establishment has taken advantage of the new revision process to remove much of what was good in the 2024 Draft Standards. It may not be possible to do better at present, given the unease aroused in many Oklahomans by the procedural irregularities that attended the promulgation of the 2025 Standards. But the 2026 Standards do sacrifice many of the gains of the 2024 Standards.
…
… the 2026 Oklahoma Standards reflect the education establishment’s studied lack of interest in patriotism, the historic roots of the American republic, or any notable achievements by conservatives or Republicans.
Students wouldn’t need to be taught “patriotism” if their elected officials gave them better reasons to love their state and country, the historic roots are reflected in the standards but they don’t have a fictional Christian bent to them, and the reason the standards don’t list notable achievements by conservatives or Republicans is because conservatives and Republicans don’t do anything notable worth celebrating. (Glad to clear up that confusion.)
Perhaps even more importantly, even Republican lawmakers (who eventually have to approve the standards) said they were looking forward to this version. Last time around, they had the opportunity to vote down Walters’ revised standards, but they chose not to, allowing that version to go into effect automatically. This time, they can affirmatively approve the standards without embarrassment.
“Social studies standards should not be that controversial,” Senate President Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton, R-Tuttle, said. “I’m glad we’re getting another bite of that apple.”
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“I think the former superintendent, Ryan Walters, just had a hold on the Republicans in this building,” House Minority Leader Cyndi Munson, D-Oklahoma City, said. “His influence was really, I think, weighing on those who are elected, and so they didn’t want to fight him.”
For now, the public is invited to comment on the new standards. The Board of Education is slated to approve them on March 26.
The best thing about these new standards is ultimately how normal they are. They’re not trying to smuggle political or religious ideology into the curriculum; they’re a rundown of what experts in the field say students should know about history and social studies. In a way, Ryan Walters failed because he pushed the standards too far to the right. He was so bad at enacting his agenda that courts and publishers refused to play along.
And now, seemingly normal standards feel like a breath of fresh air. The fact that this counts as a victory tells you just how degraded the baseline had become. This is what education is supposed to look like when adults are in the room.
What’s the appropriate reaction, then? Relief, sure, but also further vigilance. Oklahomans shouldn’t be satisfied with a return of basic competence; they should demand that it never again get this close to the brink. Standards must always be written by educators, not ideologues. They should be grounded in evidence, not conspiracies. They should be insulated from partisan crusades.
Still, this feels like a huge step forward even if the end result is barely any movement at all.
The religious right puts their magic book forward as self-evident truth in spite of the fact there is next to nothing in the way of independent corroboration for any of it. There is no independent corroboration for any part of the Jesus story what so ever. The Constitution does not mention the words Bible, Jesus or God, and specifically bans religious tests for holding public office. Never the less, the Christian Nationalists continue to claim this country was somehow based on their book. It wasn’t.
𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐸𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝐷𝑒𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑎 𝑡𝑒𝑎𝑚 𝑜𝑓 𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑣𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑙 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑟𝑑𝑠.
Which is how it should have been done in the first place. At least they're fixing the mess Walters left behind. I have a hazmat endorsement, I can haul it away for them.