One of the most controversial state Republicans in American education policy played a secret role in encouraging the spread of “anti-woke” materials produced by a right-wing group with no academic credentials to classrooms in another state, the Daily Beast can reveal.
Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, has come to national attention for requiring schools under his jurisdiction to teach the Bible. He’s also faced criticism for appointing anti-LGBT influencer Chaya Raichik—known by the handle Libs of TikTok—to a committee that reviews school library content.
Emails obtained by the Daily Beast show Walters urged the conservative advocacy group PragerU to approach South Carolina officials about getting their controversial material for children in the state’s schools.
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South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver revealed in September that her state had joined others, including Oklahoma, in making PragerU Kids materials including videos, worksheets, and lesson plans, available in its schools.
PragerU—which is not an academic institution but rather a conservative content creation nonprofit—aims to “disrupt the current education system” which it calls a “left-wing propaganda machine”, according to its CEO Marissa Streit.
The revelation of Walters’ role in the spread of PragerU materials is particularly notable given apparent efforts by South Carolina officials to keep the origins of their partnership with the conservative group secret.
Last month, South Carolina State Rep. Jermaine Johnson said at a press conference that when he asked local officials to turn over records on how materials from PragerU ended up in his state’s schools, they essentially provided no answer.
Instead, the state’s Department of Education responded to his freedom of information request with a handful of emails that revealed nothing about how the deal came into place.
“I’m like, ‘Well, what the hell is this?’” Johnson told the Daily Beast. “I went back to them and I said, ‘Well, where is the information on the beginning of the partnership?’ And they didn’t give me anything. It’s just ridiculous at this point.”
Meanwhile, a July 13 2023 email from a PragerU official to Walters, obtained by the Daily Beast, shows he encouraged the organization to reach out to South Carolina officials.
“Thank you for your recommendation to reach out to Superintendent Weaver of South Carolina, if you’d be so kind as to facilitate and introduction to her, that would be fantastic!” reads a July 13, 2023 email from a PragerU official to Walters.
The email, which notes that the organization met with Walters earlier that day, was obtained through a freedom of information request in Oklahoma.
Walters has situated himself at the forefront of a national, conservative crusade to inject religion and right-wing thought into public schools.
In doing so, he has echoed President Donald Trump’s calls to abolish the federal Department of Education, something both have claimed would limit the reach of a “woke” curriculum.
At last year’s Republican National Convention, the party adopted a national strategy to cut federal funding to schools “pushing critical race theory,” end teacher tenure, and reinstate Trump’s 1776 Commission that urged a national overhaul of school curricula with “patriotic education.”
Walters, meanwhile, has been accused by the state’s Republican attorney general of ignoring spending and transparency laws, and called the state teacher’s union a “terrorist organization.”
He once claimed the 1921 Tulsa race massacre wasn’t motivated by race and that teachers should not “say that the skin color determined it.”
“The man is a notorious sympathizer of the darkest moments of history and all those who perpetuated them,” said Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols, a former Oklahoma state representative, in a tweet.
Walters’ distorted claims about Tulsa run parallel to dubious portrayals of history in the PragerU materials he has invited into schools.
One PragerU lessons for kids depicts a cartoon Frederick Douglass, the great civil rights leader who spent his life advocating against slavery, suggesting that the enslavement of Black people was a “compromise to achieve something great” made by America’s founding fathers.
In another video, when a cartoon Christopher Columbus is asked why he enslaved Indigenous peoples, he replies, “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed.”
“There is no better example of a curriculum that rips the soul out of the liberal takeover of our schools than providing PragerU to every Oklahoma student,” Walters told the Washington Post last year.
Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, offered a different take, telling Education Week: “PragerU is not a university. It is a political propaganda machine, and it promotes mistruths about climate change, slavery, and a whole host of other things.”
Through a spokesperson, PragerU told the Daily Beast that it connected to South Carolina officials “through a family in South Carolina that saw the success of our PragerU in Schools initiative in other states and wanted their children’s teachers to have access to our great resources as well.”
They did not specify who the family was or how they got in contact.
A follow up email from PragerU to Walters in August 2023 shows they asked him again to facilitate an introduction to Weaver.
The spokesperson claimed Walters ultimately did not follow up on their requests.
However, he appears to have remained in contact with PragerU, having appointed the organization’s founder and conservative radio host Dennis Prager to a panel to shape Oklahoma’s academic standards for social studies in July 2024.
The Oklahoma Department of Education did not provide any internal records about PragerU that were generated by its own staff in response to the Daily Beast’s freedom of information request for records about its partnership with the advocacy group from 2023 and 2024.
Apart from the emails to Walters from PragerU were a handful of Zoom meeting invitations he sent to members of his staff and PragerU representatives, and emails from PragerU officials sending links to sample lessons of its content to Oklahoma officials.
The mysterious lack of communication by public officials in Oklahoma—apparently, they sent not a single email and kept not a single record about their meetings with PragerU, and didn’t generate any internal communications when they drafted a September 2023 press release announcing their partnership with the group—echoes the limited records that were released to Johnson in South Carolina.
“There are no records that formalize our partnership with the State because there is no exchange of funds, budgetary needs or contracts involved in these partnerships,” PragerU said in a statement to the Daily Beast. “We offer optional, free, age-appropriate educational resources that are readily available to educators, parents, and the general public.”
At his presser in South Carolina last month, Johnson said he suspected government officials communicated with PragerU using private emails or channels to avoid public scrutiny: “Who knows what was going on and how many emails were going back and forth on their personal emails?”
PragerU did not address the allegation, which the Daily Beast put to the organization, in its replies.
The Oklahoma and South Carolina departments of education did not respond to requests for comment.
“I started watching their videos, and I literally got sick to my stomach when I saw the video about Frederick Douglass being a slavery apologist sympathizer,” Johnson told the Daily Beast.
