The best way to "teach" others Christianity is to live it, not mandate it through lies, deception and manipulation. The gop / greed over people-republican "christianity" with it's alt-jesus and gospel of selfishness and self-righteousness promoted by ryan walters is the kind of witness that drives people from the Church, not to it. And ryan, watch your prayer video again and reflect on the New Testament lesson on grandstanding public prayer. From the Washington Post....
Oklahoma parents fight new curriculum on 2020 election ‘discrepancies’
A lawsuit alleges that state superintendent Ryan Walters added a provision on election questions without notifying some board members before they voted.
An Oklahoma County judge is considering a request to block the standards from being enacted and heard arguments Wednesday in the lawsuit, which was filed against state education officials by a group of teachers and parents. Meanwhile, other parents opposed to the standards’ content are circulating opt-out forms to remove their children from the future lessons.
Under the curriculum, high-schoolers would be asked to analyze debunked theories related to the 2020 vote and election security, such as “security risks” of voting by mail and “batch dumps” of ballots — references to the disproven theory circulated by President Donald Trump that he did not lose that election.
High-schoolers will also be instructed to “identify the source of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Chinese lab,” a theory that Trump has pushed but on which intelligence analysts and scientists remain divided. The standards also mandate teaching about the Bible in history lessons, escalating an ongoing debate over the use of the Bible in public schools in Oklahoma and elsewhere.
Oklahoma’s public schools have been launched into the national news repeatedly by state superintendent Ryan Walters (R), who made a push to put Bibles matching those endorsed by Trump in classrooms, asked school districts to show students a video of himself praying for Trump and backed the effort to create a publicly funded religious charter school in Oklahoma that went to the Supreme Court last week.
Walters has argued that the state’s new standards will remove alleged “liberal indoctrination” from classrooms. Opponents say Walters is the one trying to push false information on their children. (Walters has denied allegations of impropriety in the standards’ passage.)
“People are asking, ‘How do I make sure my kids don’t get taught this?’” said Erica Watkins, who leads We’re Oklahoma Education, a parent group that has circulated the opt-out letters.
As the Trump administration seeks to influence public school curriculums and right-leaning states move to incorporate Christianity into public schools, the Oklahoma standards present a possible test case. The inclusion of lessons rooted in a conspiracy theory has also raised questions among some Oklahoma parents about Walters’s leadership.
The new standards were passed by the state education board in February — but at least three board members said afterward they did not know Walters had added the election-related item to the standards before the 5-1 vote, the Oklahoma Voice reported in April.
“We were unaware that the version we received (almost 400 pages of documents) at 4 p.m. the day before the meeting had changes to what the public reviewed,” Christopher Van Denhende, one of the three board members, told The Washington Post.
Walters did not announce the changes to the publicly reviewed version at the meeting where the board voted, the suit alleges.
On Wednesday, Oklahoma County Judge C. Brent Dishman declined to rule on the plaintiffs’ request for a temporary block of the standards. A permanent ruling is expected within the next two weeks, said Michael J. Hunter, an attorney for the group that brought the lawsuit.
The draft shown to the public only mandated that high-schoolers “examine issues related to the election of 2020,” according to the lawsuit.
The version that was approved says students will “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results” and will be instructed to analyze 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.”
The board members received a copy at 4 p.m. the day before the morning meeting, and some raised concerns that they hadn’t had enough time to review the standards before Walters urged a vote, according to the lawsuit.
That prompted protest among some parents, who lobbied the legislature to send the standards back to the board — but a Republican-led attempt failed to get enough support in the GOP-controlled legislature, allowing the standards to move forward.
Through a spokesperson via email, Walters said the process was “fully transparent and above board for many months.”
“School board members were never denied access to the process at any point from the moment the standards were written to the moment they were voted on,” he told The Washington Post on Wednesday.
Van Denhende, the board member, said there should be transparency in the state’s development of the standards. He also said he believed the election language was “unnecessary” to include.
“The bigger issue is Oklahoma is 49th in the national for educational outcomes, and we need to be talking about how to improve reading and math scores, not the 2020 election,” Van Denhende said.
Hunter, the attorney for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said they are “confident that we’re going to be able to show the court the calamity which was the board’s review of the rules.”
He told The Post, “The process was completely mishandled and inconsistent with the responsibilities of the superintendent and the board.”
Valery Drazek, 31, an Oklahoma City mother of a 6-year-old who is not involved in the lawsuit, said she found We’re Oklahoma Education’s opt-out forms on social media and has been passing them out to fellow parents.
“I’m trying to raise a kid, and as she gets older, she will be going to these social studies classes. I don’t want her to think the 2020 election was rigged or that covid was man-made, things of that nature,” Drazek told The Post.
“I don’t want there to be a sentiment of distrust in our voting system,” she added. “I would like her to grow up to be an active member of society and know that her voice and her vote matters.”
There is no evidence that widespread corruption tainted the 2020 election results, and judges repeatedly said that Trump and his supporters did not provide evidence to back up their assertions, which included false accusations such as impropriety in Michigan’s ballot counts and illegal voting in Nevada.
In the email to The Post, Walters argued the curriculum on the 2020 election doesn’t “pressure or persuade students to have one opinion or another.”
“These academic standards will be based on facts as students are given graphs, charts and data points of the 2020 election and they can come to their own conclusion on what they believe the outcome was,” he said.
“Any critical thinking individual will look at the 2020 election and would understand there were discrepancies,” Walters added.
Melanie Larson, 42, a substitute teacher in Edmond, Oklahoma, said she feels Walters is “overstepping the will” of teachers and parents. She has opposed efforts to incorporate the Bible into public schools.
She said her two children, who will be in middle and high school in the fall, asked questions about how the state could put “untrue things” in the standards, referring to the item on the 2020 election results.
“I understand, because I feel that way, too,” Larson said. “I had to talk to my kids about how the things you’re learning in class may or may not be true. This is wild.”
