Did OK’s controversial education chief introduce PragerU to SC schools?
This free post is made possible by paid subscribers. Thanks for your support! Updated to add: this piece mentions a South Carolina budget proviso and the defunct 2020 Trump administration Executive Order that the proviso was based on. The Trump administration released a new EO today that also includes this language.
According to new reporting by The Daily Beast, controversial “edutainment” group PragerU reached out to Oklahoma Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters at least twice (in July and August of 2023) to ask him to facilitate contact with South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver.
The first contact reported by the publication, on July 13, would have occurred just a few weeks after Weaver and Walters shared the stage during a panel discussion at the 2023 Moms for Liberty Joyful Warriors summit.
Whether or not Walters ultimately did reach out to Weaver personally (PragerU has denied that he did), Weaver has been pretty clearly taking a similar path in her approach to leading her state’s public schools as Walters has in Oklahoma.
And a current federal lawsuit claims that Weaver’s embrace of PragerU is a part of a larger pattern of censoring and suppressing teaching about Black history and culture.
Deep connections to Project 2025’s Heritage Foundation
An investigation by Oklahoma’s Fox 25 involved a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealing deep ties between the Heritage Foundation and Walters. In particular, emails show detailed correspondence between Walters and Jennifer Burke, author of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership’s section on the federal Department of Education. (That plan involves several of the major steps already taken by the Trump administration in the past two weeks, such as rolling back Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students.)
Weaver, for her part, has long enthusiastically portrayed former Heritage president and ex-South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint as her “mentor in Washington,” and her former employer, Palmetto Promise Institute, is named as an advisory board member for Project 2025.
School Choice
The issue that seems to animate Weaver, Heritage Foundation, and Walters equally is what they call “school choice” and what generally means, in practice, less public funding for public schools and more public funding for private schools (including schools which can discriminate on the basis of religion, gender identity, and/ or sexual orientation).
Weaver, throughout her career, both as an elected official and as longtime president and CEO of the pro-voucher “think tank” Palmetto Promise (founded by DeMint), has been an enthusiastic champion of school voucher and neo-voucher schemes.
Instruction on Race
Walters has taken some outspokenly ahistorical positions on the history of race in America. For example, Walters famously claimed that race did not play a part in the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Weaver has shied away from remarks this inflammatory, but like Walters she has been vocal about combatting “wokeness” in schools, often tying “wokeness”— a concept that originated in the Black community in part to describe racial awareness— to “Leftism”.
She is currently named in a federal lawsuit brought by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF). The suit claims that while Weaver has enforced a state budget proviso that targets so-called “Critical Race Theory” in schools (and which is based directly on a 2020 Trump Administration Executive Order outlawing diversity training in federal agencies), while declining to offer guidance to school staff on how to comply with the proviso.
Weaver also supported removing the AP course designation from AP African American Studies, a move which makes it harder for students to take and get college credit for the course. As LDF’s suit explains,
Defendant Weaver’s suggestion to replace AP AAS with a locally approved Honors course disregards the undue financial burden that would shift to local school districts. For state-approved courses, the SCDE [South Carolina Department of Education] covers certification and training costs for educators, as well as the costs associated with taking the AP exam—financial benefits that are not available for locally approved Honors courses.
The suit goes on to claim that,
Upon information and belief, AP AAS is not the only course that Defendant Weaver has targeted pursuant to the Budget Proviso. In SCDE’s course code database, the following courses are noted to be deactivated for the 2025–2026 school year: Dual Enrollment Black Atlantic and African Diaspora (HIST 363); Dual Enrollment Studies in Black Feminism (AAST 333); and Dual Enrollment Black Women Writers (ENGL 315).155
Religion in Schools
Weaver has also seemed to embrace a more moderate— at least for now— version of Walters’ push to include religious instruction in public schools. Walters is currently the subject of a lawsuit after creating requirements that Oklahoma schools purchase Christian Bibles— requirements which seem to encourage schools specifically to buy a Trump-branded version of the Bible.
For her part, Weaver has been more subtle, requiring Department of Education employees to address students’ “God-given potential” and complying with a state requirement that schools display posters including the words “In God We Trust”.
The more specific overlap between Weaver and Walters in this area is in their common embrace of PragerU materials, which feature a number of videos that openly push Christian or Judeo-Christian messaging.
For example, while Weaver seemed to indicate during a recent State Board of Education meeting that it had been removed, a video in which Dennis Prager tells students, “If there is no God, murder isn’t wrong” is still featured in a document linked to the South Carolina Department website as of this writing, as part of a section of the website entitled “PragerU standards-aligned resources”. In the video, Prager tells students that while people without Judeo-Christian beliefs can be “good people,” they can’t believe in objective morality.
In the video, Prager asks, “What photographs could you show, what measurements could you provide that prove that murder, or rape, or theft, is wrong? The fact is, you can’t.”
Anti-Teacher Rhetoric
Walters has openly called teacher unions “terrorist organizations”.
Weaver has, again, been more subtle, but her former “think tank” Palmetto Promise (immediately following her tenure as president and CEO) released a “dossier” called Education or Indoctrination which claimed South Carolina teacher organizations and union affiliates were part of a “‘constellation’ of indoctrination organizations” (an idea illustrated, confusingly, through a graphic of a solar system of planets representing the organizations, rather than a constellation).
While she hasn’t come for teachers with the overt virulence of Walters, her rhetoric around public education— it is failing many students, it has been hijacked by “woke” voices intent on “misleading” students— serves a similar, and perhaps more effective purpose (because it hasn’t generated the same level of public attention or backlash as Walters’ more flamboyant and outrageous approach).
Weaver, for example, formally ended ties with the state’s main school librarian organization— the South Carolina Association of School Librarians— apparently in retaliation for members of the organization sharing information (as requested) with a formal legislative subcommittee seeking to address educator shortages, and for acknowledging the reality that book bans were taking place. In her formal letter to SCASL, Weaver wrote,
Parents are entirely justified in seeking to ensure educational materials presented to their children are age-appropriate and aligned with the overall purpose of South Carolina’s instructional program and standards. When SCASL labels those efforts as bans, censorship, or a violation of educators’ intellectual freedom, the result is a more hostile environment which does not serve the needs of students.
In short, while Walters’ actions have been more headline-grabbing (and often more patently unlawful) than Weavers’, his gameplan can provide a useful tool for anyone trying to guess the next move of school education officials who, like Weaver, have openly signaled more and more radically partisan policies and positions.
For example, some of Walters’ most recent headlines have involved him signaling to the Trump administration that he plans to support, in “any way they see fit,” raids on schools intended to round up undocumented students.
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