Screenshot/PragerU
PragerU’s Will Witt speaks with a student on the campus of California State University, Northridge, in a video entitled ‘Do Women Believe in the Wage Gap?’
Robyn Ellis was a high school sophomore in a rural town in Kern County, California, when their government teacher started showing a string of videos from a media organization that Ellis had previously seen criticized online for being conservative propaganda. In one of the first weeks of school, Ellis’s teacher plugged in a Chromebook to the classroom’s TV and screened the first of what would become many videos created by Prager University.
Caroline Lannes, now 18, knew her economics teacher was right-leaning even before he started showing the class PragerU videos. In a Northern California high school, the teacher talked about Ronald Reagan with a particularly nostalgic cadence and had a poster of Margaret Thatcher pinned to the classroom wall. But for Lannes, showing PragerU content crossed a line.
“I knew it was BS. It was clearly misinformation,” she said. “But the teacher never said anything like that. And it made me mad.” As a self-described liberal, Lannes knew that the content was only egging on her already right-leaning classmates. “It was totally fuel to the fire,” she added.
Through its huge ad campaigns on Facebook and YouTube, PragerU has made itself known to Generation Z. Most parents, though, have never heard of it. Founded in 2009 by talk radio host Dennis Prager, PragerU is a nonprofit organization turned conservative media powerhouse. Known for its exceptionally slick content and conservative videos for young people, it’s grown exponentially in the last few years, operating on a $25 million budget in 2020 with a $35 million goal for 2021. The nonprofit is primarily concerned with producing polished content, capturing new clicks and viewers through its quick turnaround. And originally, it was all made possible through big financial backers, like fracking barons Farris and Dan Wilks.
Five-minute videos are PragerU’s bread and butter. With over 4.8 billion total views, the videos often go viral and have titles like “Just Say ‘Merry Christmas’” and “The Myth of Voter Suppression.” “It’s slick, it’s cute, it has amazing graphics, and their narrators are diverse,” said Ashley Woodson, the head of Freedom School, an educational program for the Abolitionist Teaching Network.
The website looks like any other educational organization’s, with programs and videos loaded with smart-looking graphics. But its content has a clear right-wing agenda woven through its hundreds of videos.
Ellis and Lannes aren’t the only students watching PragerU videos in school. On Twitter and Reddit, dozens of students are saying that their teachers are assigning the right-wing content, especially in required history, government, and economics classes. What was reported as a single instance of the videos being assigned as extra credit in an Ohio public-school district last October only scratched the surface of a much bigger phenomenon. According to the students I spoke to, PragerU’s content has been in public schools for years.
In a phone interview, Ellis, now 18 and a senior at the same predominantly conservative high school, recounted a history teacher screening a video about why trans women athletes shouldn’t compete in sports. “As a closeted trans person, it was really upsetting,” Ellis said. “In an already hostile environment, it made me feel like my identity and who I am was up for debate. Having kids grow up with this in school is cementing the systemic political divide even deeper.”
Last fall, PragerU began its first massive initiative to concertedly push its content into schools. Known as “PREP,” the educational program already has over 6,000 educators and parents signed up. An annual donation of $25 gives users access to the program’s materials and a private Facebook group with over 1,400 members. Its website says that the media nonprofit launched the program “to give [educators and parents] the resources, support, and tools to teach their children about America’s blessings and limitless opportunities.”
According to Jill Simonian, the director of outreach for PREP, the program includes resources specifically designed for students from kindergarten to 12th grade. She said that the five-minute videos, which many students say they have seen in school, were in fact created for adults, not kids. “Occasionally, high school students might watch them,” she said. “But those videos are not meant to be consumed for PREP.”
But that’s not true. On the PREP resources page, playlists with these exact videos are advertised as a part of the program, despite the fact that Simonian says that those videos are “for adults.” These playlists include videos like “Gun Rights Are Women’s Rights” and “The Best Book to Read To Your Kids.” (No surprise: “This book, of course, is the Bible,” says the host of the latter video.)
On Twitter and Reddit, dozens of students are saying that their teachers are assigning the right-wing content, especially in required history, government, and economics classes.
In April, PREP is set to put out even more content for kids. Simonian described a publication detailing Ayn Rand’s life for third through fifth graders, and a video showing how to properly fold an American flag.
According to Jennifer Rich, assistant professor of sociology at Rowan University and author of the forthcoming book Politics, Education, and Social Problems: Complicated Classroom Conversations, even seemingly innocuous PragerU videos are a gateway to explicit right-wing content. And Google algorithms serve these goals. When PragerU’s videos are assigned by teachers for students to watch at home, more right-wing content comes up again and again for kids on social media and YouTube.
Ella, 15, who asked to conceal her name for fear of retribution by her teacher, is a sophomore at a public school in Idaho Falls, Idaho. She said she only first realized that her history teacher was showing PragerU videos when she opted for remote school in December. While at home, she was able to verify the source of a video on the Cold War that she knew to be spouting a conservative message.
Pandemic-spurred remote learning has exacerbated the trend of classrooms showing PragerU’s content. Teachers are strained and often in a desperate search for multimedia materials to keep kids engaged.
“Suddenly, underfunded school districts need to outsource their educational materials,” said Henry Williams, the co-founder of the Gravel Institute, a progressive organization that has begun to explicitly counter PragerU’s content with its own political videos. “And of course, PragerU slips in at just the right time. It’s about winning the hearts and minds of the young. They’ll do anything to get in front of your kids.”
The political battle over classrooms isn’t new. In Texas, the debate over politics in schools first erupted in 1917, when a law authorized the state board to purchase textbooks for all public schools. Since then, textbook publishers have been forced to shape their content to meet the demands of often right-wing school authorities. As a result, groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution and the John Birch Society have been able to shape what’s taught in the Lone Star State.
PragerU is only the most recent iteration of this long-standing clash. And as a primarily digital enterprise, it’s been able to blanket the entire country, not just one state.
Much of this debate over school curriculum has centered on religion, and its role in the classroom. According to Simonian, PREP’s resources are founded on Judeo-Christian values, with God being a core piece of its greater mission. “I don’t think that God should be a bad word in any school, public or private,” she said. “Our country was founded by God.”
But according to the constitutional separation of church and state, there shouldn’t be a place for religious instruction in the classroom. “There’s a difference between teaching religion and teaching about religion,” said Rich. “I think that when you base a curriculum around religious values, you’re crossing a line.”
Much of this debate over school curriculum has centered on religion, and its role in the classroom.
One of the most recent obsessions of educators and parents on PragerU’s private Facebook group is the possibility of critical race theory being taught in schools. To them, teaching about systemic racism promotes separatism. “Critical race theory strives to teach kids that America is a horrible place,” said Simonian. “And I don’t believe that, and many teachers don’t believe that.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis joined the debate by promising that a $106 million boost to revamp civics education would omit critical race theory. “It will expressly exclude unsanctioned narratives like critical race theory and other unsubstantiated theories,” he said during a press conference in Naples on March 17. “Teaching our kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.”
But Woodson counters, “There’s no way of eradicating white supremacy without naming it.”
A number of students who watched PragerU videos in school said it was their first introduction to certain political issues, like Medicaid and immigration policy. “It’s dangerous if a PragerU video is your first introduction to a concept like income taxes,” said Williams, the co-founder of the Gravel Institute. “What I’m more scared of, though, is the scale and the scope of their coverage. It’s everywhere.”
With no federal policy barring political biases in the classroom, education legislation is largely left up to states. And PragerU’s status as a nominally apolitical nonprofit organization makes it particularly slippery. Unless teachers are made aware of its conservative agenda, and are discouraged from using it, it’s impossible to bar from classrooms.
