Leaders in the Republican-led Oklahoma Legislature introduced a resolution to reject the standards, but there wasn’t enough GOP support to p
Leaders in the Republican-led Oklahoma Legislature introduced a resolution to reject the standards, but there wasn’t enough GOP support to pass it.
May 17, 2025, 11:52 AM MST / Source: The Associated Press
By The Associated Press
OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma high school students studying U.S. history learn about the Industrial Revolution, women’s suffrage and America’s expanding role in international affairs.
Beginning next school year, they will add conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.
Oklahoma’s new social studies standards for K-12 public school students, already infused with references to the Bible and national pride, were revised at the direction of state School Superintendent Ryan Walters. The Republican official has spent much of his first term in office lauding President Donald Trump, feuding with teachers unions and local school superintendents, and trying to end what he describes as “wokeness” in public schools.
“The left has been pushing left-wing indoctrination in the classroom,” Walters said. “We’re moving it back to actually understanding history ... and I’m unapologetic about that.”
The previous standard for studying the 2020 election merely said, “Examine issues related to the election of 2020 and its outcome.” The new version is more expansive: “Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other 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 new standard raised red flags even among Walters’ fellow Republicans, including the governor and legislative leaders. They were concerned that several last-minute changes, including the language about the 2020 election and a provision stating the source of the Covid virus was a Chinese lab, were added just hours before the state school board voted on them.
kinda random but non western countries using western education standards is bullshit
western countries advertise that their systems are the better system
however, eastern countries are filled with cultures and their own ways of living and western education only leaves students in between gaps of cultures
although education is important we need to stop acting like what the west considers education to be important
also white people stop going to third world countries and trying to “fix” them
and ALSO im not saying education is wrong or bad im just saying that things that aren’t considered education like
learning traditional arts
learning cultural practices
shit like that is just as important if not more so
it’s kind of impossible to go back to just being us because of globalization and western countries exploiting third world countries, so what we need is a balance
The math curriculum is cobbled together from different sources: an off-the-shelf curriculum called TERC; Contexts for Learning, a “conceptual math” approach pioneered by Catherine Fosnot, an education professor at City College of New York; and “a variety of things we found on the Internet,” according to Stacey Gershkovich, who oversees math at Success. EdReports.org, an independent nonprofit that reviews curricula, has rated TERC poorly, reporting that it “does not meet expectations” for alignment to Common Core standards or for classroom usability. Gershkovich is unconcerned. “We kind of scrap it for its parts,” she explained to me.
[...]
An unintended and largely unrecognized consequence of the lack of an established curriculum in this country is the profound effect it has on how teachers spend their time. American classroom teachers spend a prodigious amount of time cobbling together lessons from scratch. A 2016 study by the RAND Corporation revealed that virtually every ELA teacher in America—99 percent of elementary teachers and 96 percent of secondary school teachers—draws on “materials they created or selected themselves.”
Among elementary school teachers, 94 percent report turning to Google to find ELA lesson plans and instructional materials; 87 percent search Pinterest. The numbers are virtually the same for math. The default curriculum in American education, at least in elementary and middle school, is simply stuff teachers find on the Internet.”
Several years ago, in the early stages of this whimsical idea of teacher accountability and how to score/grade/gauge it, I received an interesting phone call from the Advanced Placement folks asking if I was free for a few days to attend an educational scoring opportunity at Stanford. Sure, why not?
Flight paid for, so I was picked up by a limo at the airport, driven to a hotel right beside Stanford's beautiful campus, and given an itinerary...
The next morning, I, along with about 20 other educators, showed up in a small conference room in the Education Building. We were met by a team of researchers and Carol Dweck, the author of Mindsets, then a new book just recently on the shelves but with years of background and prep. They told us we were there to help them fine tune and gauge the potential of a teacher observation program funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It was called: PLATO [and there were others around the nation working with different observational tools and criteria for each subject in school] - the Protocol for Language Arts Teacher Observation.
All of us were dumbfounded and resistant. Suspicions about APs involvement, how the tool might be used, why this tool... and more popped poured out from various of my fellow educators. Then one of the researches said something like this: "This is the train we're on, and we want to build the best tool we can to make the ride work." Then most of us shut up. We realized that this new buzz phrase of accountability was here to stay, even though it appeared that nobody who created it [politicians and special interest groups] and promoted the mythos behind it [all media on all sides of the political and opinion spectra] were ever held accountable for their failures.
I won't go into the details of the scoring mechanisms other that to tell you that we watched videos of classroom Language Arts teachers in grades 3-6 from around the nation. They were paid a small stipend to allow a 360 and a front-facing camera in their classroom to record their teaching for a specified number of days/weeks. It was not all classes, and these were volunteers who believed they were doing a good job and whom the administrators in their schools believed were above average educators.
While watching these videos we scored the teachers on various things like feedback, direct instruction... and so on. Anyway, I got a chance to see educators from around the US giving it their supposed best, and I was appalled. We were instructed not to judge but to score, and for the purposes of the scoring mechanism, I did that, but as a professional educator who takes the process and importance of education very seriously, it was disturbing. Of the 50+ educators I witnessed and scored, only two showed any signs of actually doing anything productive and meaningful/useful... Some were utterly horrifying in the failures. Besides all this, later I was drowned out of the program. Ha, and here was the reason: my scoring was off. Ha, I asked for feedback, one of the criteria in effective teaching and instruction, and NEVER got any from Stanford. Ha, ha, ha... We were scoring other educators on their ability to provide it, but we never received it to help us with scoring. Lord love the system that created that.
Anyway, it's been a long time and PLATO, has not, to my knowledge, hit the administrative halls of education,even though several aspects of the system had promise. Likely the Stanford researchers and their failures to provide feedback to the evaluators was part of it.
Attendees at Thursday’s town hall discussion in Florida about the DeSantis administration’s racist education guidelines seem to have been left with two main takeaways:
Florida’s education chief, Manny Diaz Jr., is a coward for pulling out of the event and effectively denying Black parents a chance to challenge him over the new guidelines.
And, importantly, that Black Floridians need to realize their political power to oust Diaz, Gov. Ron DeSantis and other leaders who want children to think enslaved people benefited from being in bondage.
For background: In late July, a Democratic state lawmaker got Diaz to commit to attend the event in Miami Gardens, a largely Black community. The lawmaker, state Sen. Shevrin Jones, told Joy on “The ReidOut” on Thursday that Diaz had notified him earlier in the week that he’d be pulling out. Jones said he got the impression Diaz had been pressured by DeSantis not to show up, though Diaz dubiously claimed that he needed to welcome back children, teachers and parents for the first day of school.
Check out the clip here:
Diaz’s choice to skip the event epitomizes a criticism that I and others have made about Florida’s education policies under DeSantis. These policies are framed as a way to shore up “parents’ rights,” but in practice they clearly prioritize some parents — namely, conservatives and whites — over all others.
Last year, when I dubbed Florida’s so-called Stop WOKE Act the “Sad White People Bill,” it was because any policy restricting discussions about race that might make people feel “guilt” is clearly designed for people who have benefited from racism (i.e., white people) and not designed for those — and descendants of those — injured by it.
And Florida’s education chief drove that point home when he declined to meet with the many Black parents at Thursday’s event. As if their rights are not a priority.
There’s a deep hypocrisy here, of course.
There’s a deep hypocrisy here, of course. Diaz, who helped push the Stop WOKE Act as a state lawmaker, said when the legislation was passed: “What we cannot debate is that we send our students to school to learn, to be thinkers, not to be told what to think.”
Now he’s telling schools that students must be indoctrinated to think slavery had benefits for Black people. And neither he nor his boss has the guts to say this in an open forum, where Black parents could give them a piece of their mind.
Cowards, indeed.
Ja'han Jones
Ja'han Jones is The ReidOut Blog writer. He's a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics.
Lawmakers, teachers, school board members and parents crowded into a South Florida church for a forum on the state's new standards for teach
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. (AP) — Leaders of a forum on Florida’s new standards for teaching Black history encouraged parents to let their discontent be heard by showing up at local school board meetings, sending feedback to the state’s Department of Education and voting.
Hundreds of lawmakers, teachers and parents crowded into Antioch Baptist Church in Miami Gardens on Thursday night to discuss the new policy, which has drawn harsh criticism for requiring teachers to instruct middle-school students that enslaved people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
But Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, the person responsible for overseeing the new standards, wasn’t in attendance.
Diaz, a former area high school teacher in Miami-Dade County, had previously agreed to attend, according to organizers. His participation was advertised on fliers publicizing the event, which was sponsored by Democratic state Sen. Shevrin Jones. A chair even was set up for him with a placard bearing his name.
Diaz, who who was appointed commissioner last year by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, said on social media that “there was nothing sudden” about his inability to attend the town hall meeting. He said he told Jones last week he would be visiting schools to welcome back teachers and students. Thursday was the first day of school across many parts of Florida.
But Fedrick Ingram, the secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers, called Diaz out.
“First, let me address the elephant in the room,” Ingram told the cheering crowd. “Manny Diaz is a coward. Ron DeSantis knew that this was going on. Manny Diaz knew that this was going on, and they both know how important this is for the Black community. They know they should’ve been here tonight to face you.”
Anthony Durden, a local activist and minister from Miami Gardens, called the new standards disrespectful and insensitive. He said the only way to move forward was with “honest dialogue” but that students were being deprived of that.
“To say that Blacks benefited from slavery is insane,” Durden said.
Miami-Dade school board member Steve Gallon III also urged parents to teach their children at home about the horrors of slavery.
“My prayer is this becomes a catalyst for a movement,” he said.
The meeting took place in a historic Black church in Miami Gardens, where two-thirds of the population is African American, according to the U.S. Census. The crowd’s attitude toward the new standard was mostly negative.
Jones, the state senator, said he would set up a group to study the standards, and asked audience members to sign up.
DeSantis, who is seeking the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, has repeatedly defended the new language while insisting that his critics, who include Vice President Kamala Harris and two leading Black Republicans in Congress, are intentionally misinterpreting one line of the sweeping curriculum.
Harris, the nation’s first Black vice president, traveled to Florida last month to condemn the curriculum. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is the chamber’s sole Black Republican and is also seeking the White House, also issued a direct rebuke of DeSantis.
Critics said the new school standards are the latest in a series of attacks on Black history by the governor’s administration. At the beginning of the year, DeSantis’ administration blocked a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies from being taught in high schools, saying it was contrary to state law.
DeSantis also has pushed through the “ Stop WOKE Act,” a law that limits discussions on race in schools and by corporations, and banned state universities from using state or federal money for diversity programs.
Karen Thompson, a school counselor who attended the town hall meeting, called the new standards “really absurd and heart-wrenching.” Thompson said she hoped they will be rescinded this year since she believed they were motivated by politics and racism. And she described Diaz’s reason for being absent as “a poor excuse.”
“My question to Governor DeSantis is, ‘Why suddenly all of these attacks on Black history?’ I think it’s absurd because slavery was in no way a good thing,” Thompson said. “Education should be about the truth.”
Conservative college's curriculum gets foothold in S. Dakota
Conservative college’s curriculum gets foothold in S. Dakota
2022-09-11 07:47:41
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — A few days before middle school teacher Shaun Nielsen joined a work group to develop South Dakota’s social studies standards, he got a thick package in the mail.
Sent from Hillsdale, Michigan, home to a conservative private college enjoying outsize influence among top Republicans, it contained materials that would ultimately form what the state’s public…
