State board approves new academic standards with Ryan Walters' last-minute revisions

Proposed standards that had been developed over the course of 18 months by a committee of content-area experts and after two rounds of public comment reportedly had 40 items changed before being brought for a vote of the Oklahoma State Board of Education.

That included numerous edits to replace the word “diversity” with “different.”

“We did make some slight changes,” Walters acknowledged to the state board after a member of the executive committee on computer science standards revealed the information during time reserved for public comments at their monthly meeting. “We took out any woke language. This is an agency where woke will go to die.”

The revised computer science standards, as well as new standards for fine arts and health and physical education — which Walters said he did not choose to alter — were all approved by a 6-0 vote.

New board member Marla Hill was absent and has yet to attend a State Board of Education meeting since Gov. Kevin Stitt appointed her to the body in January.

The changes to computer science standards were pointed out publicly by Levi Patrick, who is executive director of the Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance. Patrick worked at the Oklahoma State Department of Education previously, leaving in 2021 as assistant deputy superintendent of curriculum and instruction.

He served on the executive committee of volunteers who worked on the computer science standards that also included educators from the Edmond, Howe and Anadarko school districts, Oklahoma Christian University and the University of Central Oklahoma.

After the meeting, Patrick told reporters the vast majority of the changes were made by a quick search of the document for the term “diversity” and replacement with the word “different,” which Patrick said he objects to because the two words have different meanings.

An example of other revisions Walters made is changing the phrase “global society” to “societies” in a standard originally written to state that students should be able “to identify real-world problems (e.g., inequities, lack of access) in relation to the distribution of computing resources in a global society.”

Asked by news reporters after the meeting what language he objected to in the proposed computer standards and and why, Walters responded that he objects to unclearly defined terms that suggest that “certain groups are diverse because other groups have held them down — that it’s system, it’s racist.”

“They continue to inject diversity and inclusion into the language of the standards. We want the focus of computer science to be computer science. We’re not going to put out woke standards; we’re going to put out standards that focus on what we want our students to know.”

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