Oklahoma Senate education leader requests rejection of social studies standards

OKLAHOMA CITY — A key Republican Senate leader has proposed the Legislature reject academic standards for social studies and science after half of the Oklahoma State Board of Education said Thursday they weren’t aware changes were made to the standards before they voted to approve them. 

Sen. Adam Pugh, R-Edmond, filed the resolution Thursday, citing the limited time board members had to review the final draft of the standards and the “magnitude of the decision” they made. Pugh leads the Senate Education Committee.

The resolution states “questions exist regarding the transparency of the subject matter standard adoption process.” Pugh also noted the standards would cost $33 million to implement with new textbooks and classroom materials.

Academic standards dictate what topics public schools must teach to students. The social studies standards have attracted significant controversy over their inclusion of Bible stories and the last-minute addition of language suggesting there were “discrepancies” in 2020 election results.

Pugh is the first Republican lawmaker to publicly support rejecting the proposed standards. It is also the first time any lawmakers have suggested disapproving the standards for science. 

He did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday evening.

To reject the standards would send them back to the state Board of Education for further review, which is what at least one board member, Ryan Deatherage, has said he hopes the Legislature will do. The current standards, approved in 2019, would remain in effect until a new version is approved.

Gov. Kevin Stitt on Wednesday encouraged the Legislature to take action on the standards and raised doubts about the integrity of the board’s approval process. Stitt alleged officials at the Oklahoma State Department of Education emailed board members a different version of the standards from what they ultimately voted on.

State Superintendent Ryan Walters, who leads the agency and the board, said Thursday this is untrue. Records from the Education Department indicate the board members received the updated version of the standards at 4 p.m. the day before they took a vote the following morning on Feb. 27.

Making changes to the proposed draft based on public comment and input from focus groups has long been a common practice at the Education Department, Walters said.

Deatherage and two other recent appointees to the board, Chris Van Denhende and Mike Tinney, said Walters failed to notify them that changes had been made to the standards from the original draft posted for public comment in December. The board met Thursday for the first time since it approved the standards in February.

Walters said he couldn’t control whether the board members read the materials provided to them nor that the governor placed them on the board at the end of the 10-month process to develop the new standards.

“All those board members, we didn’t have their information,” Walters said after the meeting Thursday. “We’re sitting here trying to struggle to make sure they can actually legally sit for the (Feb. 27) meeting. So, that’s kind of the behind-the-scenes of what we were trying to do to get a board meeting off. So I say all that to say they knew that they’d been updated.”

House and Senate Democrats filed resolutions earlier this month to similarly reject the social studies standards in full.

However, Republican leaders of the House and Senate said there hasn’t been enough consensus among the GOP supermajority to ensure a rejection of the standards would pass in either chamber.

Senate President Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton, R-Tuttle, said Thursday the “decision has not been made” on how senators will proceed in light of the governor’s comments this week.

“It is open,” Paxton said. “We are looking at it again.”

Pugh’s resolution would need to pass both the House and Senate by May 1 to reject the standards.

House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, R-Bristow, said a vote from his Republican caucus “doesn’t look likely.”