Oklahoma ranks among the top in at least one academic metric: attempts at censorship in the classroom.
A new study out today shows Oklahoma lawmakers have proposed the second most so-called “educational gag orders” in the country since 2021.
The term “educational gag order” — as used in the report by the writing and free expression group, PEN — refers to legislation that restricts discussion of a certain topic in an academic setting.
Oklahoma lawmakers have proposed 30 such bills since 2021, one of which has become law. Only their legislative counterparts in Missouri have proposed more, with 46 educational gag orders offered up, but none signed into statute.
Jeremy Young is the director of PEN’s Freedom to Learn Program and the co-author of “America’s Censored Classrooms 2024,” the report analyzing where in the country these gag order bills have popped up.
He said the language of censorship began appearing in state legislatures in 2021 following a series of presidential executive orders and memos spanning two administrations.
First was former President Donald Trump’s Sept. 2020 executive order calling for a broad elimination of divisive concepts from government agencies by making them train employees and contractors in ways that don’t portray the U.S. is “irredeemably racist and sexist.”
President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s order the first day he took office in January 2021.
By the time legislative sessions started across the country, bills borrowing language from Trump’s order began jolting legislative — and public — discourses across the country with ideas about banning the discussion of certain concepts in school.
“So these include bills like the Stop Woke Act in Florida in 2022, which banned the divisive concept in both K-12 and higher education,” Young said. “It could include things like the Don't Say gay bill, also in Florida in 2022, which banned discussion of homosexuality and homosexual identities in grades K-3.”
Another education gag order is Oklahoma’s House Bill 1775, which became law in 2021. It prohibits certain discussions of sex, gender and race and identity in schools across the state. The law includes restrictions that stretch from kindergarten to college.
A federal judge temporarily blocked parts of HB 1775 in June. A ruling is pending while the court deliberates the lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Oklahoma, along with a host of other national organizations and private plaintiffs. The ACLU calls the bill an “unconstitutional censorship of discussions about race and gender in schools.”
Also among the 30 proposed measures in Oklahoma that PEN has deemed educational gag orders is House Bill 2546, which would’ve banned sex-ed for kids in grades K-5. That measure made it through a House floor vote along party lines and died in the Senate’s Education Committee.
Others can be seen in PEN’s Index of Educational Gag Orders.