Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the Oklahoma Council Of Public Affairs on October 29, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
Lindel Fields, Oklahoma’s new State Superintendent of Public Instruction, has announced that the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) will “restart the process of reviewing the social studies standards, obtaining public input, and presenting a draft to the Oklahoma State Board of Education and the state Legislature for approval.”
It would be beneficial to ensure that Oklahoma’s social studies standards have broad public support. At the same time, Oklahoma policymakers and citizens should urge Superintendent Fields not to allow the review process to lead Oklahoma to forfeit the solid benefits of the revised Oklahoma social studies standards. Oklahomans should make sure that the basis for Oklahoma’s new social studies standards is the Draft Social Studies Standards released in December 2024, and not the Oklahoma Academic Standards for Social Studies (2019).
2019 Standards Are Radical, Incomplete, and Ineffective
The 2019 Standards benefited from the public-spirited contributions of many Oklahomans. Unfortunately, however, they also “were informed by the National Council of the Social Studies (NCSS) Skills Framework” and a great many “other states’ standards documents” (Standards Overview, p. 3). These national organizations have redefined social studies to include large amounts of radical ideology, such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), have required action civics (which is vocational training for radical activism), and have removed basic instruction in Western Civilization, American government, and American history.
The 2019 Standards were structurally degraded by their dependence on these national frameworks. The 2019 Standards were politicized via key words such as “diversity” that facilitate the inculcation of ideologies such as Critical Race Theory (3.1.5, p. 15). The 2019 Standards also prompted action civics (p. 5). The 2019 Standards generally substituted democratic values for American values (e.g., p. 3), and silently deleted American values such as liberty, civic virtue, law, republican self-government, and patriotism.
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These distortions undermined Oklahoma’s statutory and administrative prohibitions on the promulgation of discriminatory ideologies such as CRT. These statutory and administrative prohibitions will be ineffective so long as the Oklahoma Academic Standards for Social Studies prompt or mandate teaching informed by CRT ideology—and they will do so as long as they depend on radicalized national frameworks.
Dependence upon these national organizations’ frameworks also eliminated essential content. Grades preK–2 included no study of famous Americans who exemplify the civic virtues, such as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Frederick Douglass, Clara Barton, Kate Barnard, or Joseph Oklahombi. Grade 8 United States History’s coverage of antebellum America did not mention Christianity, save for the Second Great Awakening; technological innovations such as the steamboat, the telegraph, and the Colt pistol; common American culture; or the fabric of life among American farmers (pp. 36-38). The 2019 Standards provided only a vague sketch of the history of Western Civilization.
The 2019 Standards didn’t even do a good job at getting students to meet Oklahoma’s own statewide assessments. Just 41 percent of Oklahoma high school students got proficient or advanced scores in U.S. history. It makes no sense to return to a model where most students aren’t proficient in American history.
2024 Standards Are Content-Rich and Teacher-Friendly
The Draft Social Studies Standards of December 2024—not the version irregularly emended in 2025 by then-Superintendent Ryan Walters—provided sensible improvements to the 2019 Standards’ structurally flawed model.
The Draft Standards’ clear format makes it easy for teachers to use and easy for parents to hold teachers accountable for how well they teach social studies.
The Draft Standards teach students to identify the ideals, institutions, and individual examples of human liberty, religious freedom, and republican self-government; assess the extent to which civilizations have fulfilled these ideals; and describe how the evolution of these ideals in different times and places has contributed to the formation of modern American ideals.
The Draft Standards add focused instruction on the Ancient and Medieval World, Holocaust Education, and the History of Communism to strengthen coverage of the ideals and history of Western civilization, the United States of America, and Oklahoma.
The Draft Standards provide content-rich knowledge that not only prepares students for college and careers but also supports equal opportunity. Disadvantaged students benefit from intensive content instruction even more than better-off students, who receive large amounts of content knowledge from their families. The Draft Standards’ more intensive content standards fulfill America’s and Oklahoma’s promise of equal educational opportunities for everyone.
The Draft Standards support teacher freedom, because they concentrate on what should be learned, not on how teachers should teach in the classroom.
The Draft Standards take from peers, including Florida, Louisiana, South Dakota, and Virginia, their best existing practices for social studies instruction, and build upon them to provide an excellent framework focused on Oklahoma schools.
In short, Oklahomans should urge Superintendent Fields to use the December 2024 Draft Standards as the basis for Oklahoma’s social studies standards. They provide a base of common-sense reforms to Oklahoma social studies instruction. Oklahomans may choose to remove the changes added by Superintendent Walters in 2025—which largely concerned the 2020 presidential election—and preserve all the solid reforms that were presented properly to the Oklahoma State Board of Education in December 2024 and reviewed by them properly in the first months of 2025.
Oklahomans also should urge Superintendent Fields not simply to entrust the social studies standards revision process to the same OSDE administrators who produced the 2019 Standards. As recent events in Iowa demonstrate, establishment administrators are not temperamentally suited to produce reformed social studies standards. Superintendent Fields should engage in direct supervision of the social studies reform process to ensure that the principles and substance of the December 2024 Draft Standards continue as the basis for Oklahoma’s social studies standards.
Oklahoma’s 2019 Standards didn’t do a good job of educating students to know the history of their country, their state, and the Western ideals of liberty, republican self-government, and civic virtue. Oklahomans should not go back to a failed status quo.
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