Florida has added the conservative media platform PragerU to its K-12 curricula, and Texas could be next as a national parental rights struggle rages ahead of the 2024 election.
Talk show host Dennis Prager founded the company — which produces short videos and is not a university — in 2009. The PragerU Kids lesson plans, billed as alternatives to “woke agendas” in public schools, feature short videos on figures like President Abraham Lincoln and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
Last week, PragerU announced it had registered with the Texas Comptroller’s office as a vendor, paving the way for the State Board of Education to review its history and civics lessons for inclusion on a list of “open educational resources.”
Last month, the Florida Department of Education greenlighted the PragerU lessons as optional “supplemental teaching materials” for school districts.
“Under [a] new statute, the State Board of Education has ultimate approval on [open educational] resources once they are ready for full release,” the Texas Education Agency said in an email, noting that PragerU has not yet submitted materials for review.
“As advocates of education choice, we believe that it is up to the local schools to select from the variety of the supplementary education content we create,” Marissa Streit, PragerU’s CEO, told The Washington Times.
The move to bring PragerU into red state classrooms comes as those states have passed laws restricting materials with “divisive concepts” in public schools.
In recent years, school-choice advocates have produced their own K-12 resources and promoted them to teachers as “unbiased” alternatives to increasingly left-leaning lessons on racism, capitalism, transgender identity and other hot-button topics.
“The bottom line is this is an alternative and parents are screaming for alternatives,” Sheri Few, president of U.S. Parents Involved in Education, told The Times. “Parents don’t want critical Marxist theories, overt sexualization and anti-American propaganda taught in government schools.”
Critics say PragerU videos whitewash racism, feed anti-immigrant bias and spread unscientific doubts about climate change.
Some educators say the videos don’t belong anywhere near a classroom.
“It’s a disgrace,” Andrew Crook, press secretary for the American Federation of Teachers, a leading labor union, said in an email.
Others say they will wait to see which PragerU materials appear on campuses before forming an opinion.
“Given the efforts to ban books and control what type of content is taught in schools, I think you will see more companies emerge to create the curriculum they believe parents want,” said Tyrone Howard, a UCLA education professor specializing in racial equity. “The question that must be asked is, how accurate are elements in these curricula?
At least 19 states enacted parental rights laws or policies limiting race and gender materials in public schools between January 2021 and June 2023, PEN America reported Wednesday. They include Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Texas and Virginia.
The New York free-speech group said GOP lawmakers introduced most of the proposals after the 2021 election of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who emphasized parental rights in his campaign.
“It’s not a coincidence that Florida is barring teaching about sexuality and then promoting content by PragerU,” said Jonathan Friedman, an education free speech analyst at PEN America. “These efforts are being pushed at a time when people believe them to be advantageous for winning elections.”
According to PragerU, growing demand from teachers and school board members prompted the K-12 initiative. The company has pledged that more states will follow Florida’s lead.
Conservative resources
The PragerU videos, which feature high production values, colorful graphics and upbeat music, have earned praise from conservatives.
In one episode of Leo & Layla’s History Adventures, posted online as a sample lesson plan for 3rd to 5th graders, two animated characters discuss the nature of the Supreme Court with founding father John Marshall. Mr. Marshall, the fourth chief justice of the United States in the early 1800s, teaches them about the branches of the federal government.
Besides PragerU, other right-leaning K-12 education resources in recent years include Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum and the Tuttle Twins franchise, which champions free markets.
Another is “The Story of America,” a distance learning website that uses patriotic anecdotes from the bestselling books of former Reagan education secretary William Bennett, who holds a doctorate in philosophy.
“It’s good that conservatives are stepping up to the task of providing a good, sound and accurate American history to students,” Mr. Bennett said in a phone call, noting a personal friendship with Mr. Prager. “Most history curricula in the past have been either tendentious in a liberal posture or just boring.”
Connor Boyack, author of the Tuttle Twins books and a producer of the Angel Studios animated series based on them, said resources like PragerU offer broader perspectives in left-leaning public schools.
He said more than 500 schools and 1.2 million homeschooling families use his Tuttle Twins books, which offer similar lessons on American history, politics and economics.
“It’s critically important that we review and improve what is taught as official curriculum to millions of kids in taxpayer-funded schools across the country,” said Mr. Boyack, president of the Libertas Institute, a Utah-based think tank.
Some conservative and moderate academics have faulted PragerU for mixing politics with scholarly content.
They point to videos on the site that feature right-leaning pundits like Ben Shapiro rather than scholars.
“It is a propaganda machine, promoting mistruths about slavery and human-made climate change,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor who teaches the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania.
Hillsdale, a private Christian campus in Michigan, produces its 1776 Curriculum as a free online resource on America’s founding. As of February, at least 73 schools and tens of thousands of parents had used it as part of a broader classical education curriculum featuring primary sources.
Reached for comment, two historians at Hillsdale were split on the educational merits of PragerU.
“Since when is Ben Shapiro an authority on the Federalist Papers?” said Richard Gamble, a U.S. history professor and past contributor to The American Conservative. “The curriculum is political, ideological and aims at making edgy culture warriors. It’s suffocatingly ideological.”
Wilfred McClay, an award-winning American historian who has filmed videos for PragerU on the lives of U.S. presidents, was more enthusiastic.
“My own experience with PragerU has been quite positive,” Mr. McClay told The Times. “I have been thoroughly impressed by their attention to detail and insistence upon accuracy, as well as their flair in presenting often-dry material in a way that is exciting and engaging for young people.”
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.