The Oklahoma State Board of Education voted to downgrade the accreditation of Tulsa Public Schools after a teacher complained that the school district’s training materials “shame white people.” The board voted to lower the status of Tulsa Public Schools to “accredited with warning” after determining that an implicit bias training for teachers in August 2021 violated a state law that restricts discussion of race and sex in public schools. “Accredited with warning” means the state will provide extra oversight of Tulsa schools. The American Civil Liberties Union is suing Oklahoma charging that the law violates students’ and teachers’ 1st and 14th amendment rights.
According to a report in The Oklahoman, the Tulsa training session was provided by a third-party vendor and encouraged teachers to examine implicit racial biases and understand “how societal and systemic systems are biased against minority students.” Although the Board did not release the name of the teacher, she was later identified as Amy Cook, a science teacher at Tulsa’s Memorial High School. In her complaint to the state board, Cook accused the training of including statements that “specifically shame white people for past offenses in history, and state that all are implicitly racially biased by nature.”
This is not the first time that Cook has had an issue before the Oklahoma Board of Education. Last school year Cook, who was investigated after a student complained she was proselytizing in class. According to the unnamed student, Cook designated a section of her classroom as a prayer area with a wall covered in Bible verses and Christian prayers. When the student posted a non-Christian prayer on the wall, Cook is accused of pulling her out of class and telling her she would "burn in Hell" unless she repented and converted to Christianity.
On her campaign website, Cook, who was a candidate for the Oklahoma State Senate charged that as a Tulsa Public Schools teacher she witnessed “spiritually damaging programs, liberal brainwashing, and political indoctrination being slipped into our schools.”
Another Oklahoma teacher was placed on leave and faces having her teaching licensed revoked. Summer Boismier, a veteran Oklahoma high school English teacher is under attack for providing her students with a link to the Brooklyn Public Library Books Unbanned program. Teenagers anywhere in the country are eligible for a free BPL eCard, that provides access to the library’s eBook collection. They can check out eBooks that discuss race and gender that are banned in Oklahoma schools. Ms. Boismier is now prepared to resign, arguing she would not be able to teach in a responsible way and was being forced to censor herself and her students. She warns, "If you're listening from outside of Oklahoma, you're next. It's very important that we pay attention to what's happening here."
Oklahoma’s Academic Standards “specify what students should know and be able to do as learners of social studies.” They include that students should “Examine multiple points of view regarding the evolution of race relations in Oklahoma, including . . . causes of the Tulsa Race Riot and its continued social and economic impact . . . and forced removals of American Indians.” Prior to 2019, the State Education Department did not provide specifics about how much time should be spent on these topics, their significance, or lesson ideas. Students are also supposed to learn about “the contributions of major cultural and ethnic groups, including Asians, African Americans, American Indians, and Latinos to the state of Oklahoma and their impact on the social and economic transformation of the modern state of Oklahoma,” but not about the treatment of Native people by the State of Oklahoma and its white population.
Oklahoma has a very nasty history of racist violence. Before statehood in 1910, white mobs attacked African Americans in Lexington, Ponca City, and Lincoln County. Between 1907 and 1930 white terrorist mobs lynched dozens of Blacks in Henryetta, Okemah, Purcell, Chickasha, Eufaula, and Oklahoma City. In 1921, the same year as the Tulsa Massacre, members of the Osage tribe were murdered by local whites who wanted to steal their oil rich land. Oklahoma also had laws making anyone with “one-drop” of African blood subject to segregation and another making interracial marriage a felony until 1967 when it was overturned by the Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia decision.
While Oklahoma now offers material for teachers on the 1921 Tulsa massacre, many teachers are reluctant to teach about it in any depth because of the 2021 law that bars introducing topics that could cause students to "feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress" because of their race or gender.
With the treatment of Summer Boismier and her students, the tolerance of Amy Cook’s action by the Oklahoma Board of Education, the state’s acceptance of a complaint from a teacher who had demonstrated her disrespect for law, religious freedom, and educational policy, and the election of a Republican legislature and governor that passed the law the Board of Education was enforcing, MANY WHITE PEOPLE IN OKLAHOMA SHOULD BE ASHAMED.
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