After nearly three hours of oral arguments Wednesday, an Oklahoma County district judge said he isn’t ready to rule on a legal challenge to the state’s controversial social studies standards.
District Judge Brent Dishman said he wanted to wait for a written response from the group challenging the standards after the Oklahoma Board of Education moved to dismiss the case, arguing that critics failed to point to any violation of statute, and the state agency followed the process as required by law.
Dishman has been asked to either enact an injunction to block the standards from being implemented or to dismiss the legal challenge outright.
A group of seven Oklahoma parents, grandparents and teachers represented by former Republican Attorney General Mike Hunter have sued and asked Dishman to nullify the controversial academic standards, which include language about discrepancies in the 2020 election, the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and biblical lessons.
Michael Beason, the state Department of Education’s attorney, argued Wednesday that the lawsuit is a waste of taxpayer dollars as the defense “searches for a needle in a haystack.” He said a handful of educators don’t like the standards and the plaintiffs “do not have a case recognized under Oklahoma law.”
The plaintiffs, though, argued the process used to implement the rules was flawed and the results are not “accurate” or “best practices” for academic standards.
The new academic standards for social studies are reviewed every six years, but state Superintendent Ryan Walters, who was not present at Wednesday’s hearing, enlisted national conservative media personalities and right-wing policy advocates to aid in writing the latest version of the standards this year.
Around half of the members of the state Board of Education later said they weren’t aware of last minute changes Walters made to the standards, but only one board member, Ryan Deatherage, voted against them. While the Legislature allowed the standards to take effect, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle called for them to be sent back to the board to be reconsidered.
After the hearing, Hunter said he appreciated Dishman’s “careful interest” in the arguments and that he expected a ruling by the end of June.
“Despite the arguments of the defendants, there has to be a recourse by citizens when there’s a process like this that is so flawed,” he said. “No vote by the Legislature and then an action of a state agency becomes law. If we believe the defendant’s arguments today, that Oklahoma citizens have no recourse in this situation based on a strained construction of the statutes, I just don’t think that’s good government, and I don’t think that that’s a correct argument, nor do I think the judge is gonna buy it.”
James Welch, an Oklahoma teacher and plaintiff in the case, testified at Wednesday’s hearing that the review process was not a true “collaboration of experts in the field and teachers in the classroom” like he thought it would be.
Using a math analogy, the judge asked Welch, a volunteer member of the standards writing committee, if he would feel the same way about the standards and process if the subject were instead math and the standards omitted trigonometry.
Welch said he would because omitting the most up-to-date standards of learning means students don’t achieve full understanding of a subject.
While the defense did not comment after the hearing, they argued that the plaintiffs could not point to a specific violation of law and simply didn’t like what was in the standards.
Chad Kutmas, an attorney for the state Board of Education, said the plaintiffs “complain about how the sausage is made, but that’s just how it’s made.”
“Everyone knew it was going on and the political body let it happen,” he said. “It’s inappropriate for a court to step in at this late stage.”
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