Dive Brief:
- The Oklahoma Supreme Court paused the state's new social studies standards Monday after parents, public school teachers and others sued Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters for incorporating Christianity into the curriculum and the state board for allegedly pushing the standards through without proper public notice.
- The curriculum — which Walters has openly advocated for as a way to bring Judeo-Christian values into public schools — was approved in February and set to go into effect for the 2025-26 school year.
- However, the state Supreme Court decided that the 2019 standards will stay in place until justices rule on the parents' lawsuit, per the order. In the meantime, both Oklahoma’s education department and state board cannot use public funds to enforce the 2025 standards.
Dive Insight:
The lawsuit was brought by nonprofit Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which has led multiple other challenges against Walters' attempts to include Christianity in schools.
In its July lawsuit that led to the temporary stay this week, the organization claimed the 2025 standards "favor Christianity over all other religions." It lists the following as changes that it says were pushed through without public notice:
- Incorporation of the phrase "Gulf of America."
- Discussion over the validity of 2020 election results, including identifying "discrepancies" in the outcome.
- Removal of teaching on discrimination against Black people when teaching the New Deal.
- Removal of the Black Lives Matter movement.
- Removal of references to bipartisanship and economic recovery under the Biden administration.
- Teaching students that the source of COVID-19 was a Chinese laboratory rather than animal-to-human transmission.
The standards would take approximately $33 million in public funds to implement, according to state legislators who proposed a joint resolution in April disapproving of the new standards. Had the stay not been issued this week, the lawsuit said that those funds would have been used to develop or select frameworks, assessments, trainings and textbooks.
As a staunch advocate of the curriculum, Walters has also pushed for other ways to incorporate Christianity in K-12, like requiring Oklahoma schools to teach the Bible and to have a copy of the religious text in every classroom. A lawsuit against that mandate also reached the state Supreme Court, but it has not ruled in the case yet.
Walters has defended such measures, saying, “It is not possible for our students to understand American history and culture without understanding the Biblical principles from which they came."
While public school advocates and faith-based organizations caution that such efforts violate the separation of church and state, Walters has said that the concept “is based on a myth, on a lie.”
“You’re not going to find the separation of church and state in the Constitution. It’s not there," Walters said in support of what would have become the nation's first religious public charter school, had the state Supreme Court not struck it down last summer.
Walters is one of many Republican state leaders attempting to bring Christianity into public schools and testing the boundaries of the Establishment Clause in the process. In Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas, for example, Ten Commandments laws requiring that schools display the religious directives in classrooms have been blocked by the courts in recent months.
