By Abraham Kenmore
SCDailyGazette.com
COLUMBIA — Educators and a Democratic legislator on Friday, Sept. 20, blasted the South Carolina Department of Education for partnering with PragerU on videos available for public K-12 classrooms without vetting them through the normal textbook process or seeking input.
In a 21-minute video released Monday by PragerU, state Superintendent Ellen Weaver endorsed a list of online lessons produced by the conservative media nonprofit for use in South Carolina schools. The announcement on the PragerU website included a 67-page document linking its videos to the education standards that South Carolina students must learn in each grade.
Teachers are not required to use any of the materials from PragerU.
South Carolina becomes the eighth state to partner with the organization, which was launched in California in 2009 by conservative talk show host Dennis Prager and screenwriter Allen Estrin. Most of the states that have already signed on are GOP-led, including Florida, Louisiana, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma.
Rep. Jermaine Johnson, D-Columbia, accused the education agency — and Weaver specifically — of using the collaboration to serve conservative ideology to students.
“Do not indoctrinate our children,” he said at a news conference Friday on the Statehouse steps. “I’m saying today. I’m demanding today: Stop indoctrinating our children.”
In response, a department spokesman said PragerU contacted the agency about offering optional, supplemental materials for South Carolina teachers at no cost to the state.
The agency is still working with PragerU to finalize a list of lessons that will be publicly provided on the agency’s website and through an existing curriculum portal for teachers, said spokesman Jason Raven.
The goal “is to provide a level playing field for all districts to access materials they might otherwise not have the resources or bandwidth to provide,” he said. The PragerU partnership is part of “an initiative to provide a wide variety of high-quality, standards-aligned civics resources at no cost to local districts.”
Johnson questions the true cost, saying any partnership with a public agency costs taxpayers money through staff salaries.
“I do not approve of my tax dollars going to the whitewashing of history,” he said.
Johnson also said he wanted legislative changes to provide more oversight of policies coming out of the Department of Education, and said he wished Weaver had presented the idea to the House Education Committee, which he sits on.
In the announcement posted to the PragerU website, Weaver touts the videos as a good resource for educators.
“(Teachers) know that when they’re teaching these resources that our kids are going to be getting the content they need in order to get a great education,” she said.
The agency didn’t actually announce anything yet. As of Friday evening, its website still had nothing about the collaboration.
Teachers were taken aback by the partnership they knew nothing about until after PragerU posted the video of Weaver and PragerU CEO Marissa Streit talking about it from the Wade Hampton Building on Statehouse grounds, with the Statehouse visible through a window in the background.
Sherry East, president of the South Carolina Education Association, said the videos have not been reviewed for their accuracy or objectivity.
“Textbooks go through a rigorous vetting process that involves parents, teachers, sometimes students, and we do not believe that PragerU went through any of that vetting process,” she said Friday.
The agency contends it regularly offers materials and training to districts that don’t require approval by the State Board of Education.
The videos offered for South Carolina classrooms, according to a link on PragerU’s website, include a range of topics, from how historians know the Civil War was about slavery to why a conservative approach to environmentalism is better than a liberal one.
The list also includes a video titled “Frederick Douglass: The Outspoken Abolitionist.” The video drew national attention last year for including an animated version of the formerly enslaved Douglass saying, “I’m certainly not OK with slavery, but the Founding Fathers made a compromise to achieve something great,” when discussing the Constitution.
“I have been Black my whole entire life, and I have never seen anything as blatantly offensive as some of these PragerU videos that feature a fictionalized Frederick Douglas,” Courtney Thomas with the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said Friday.
Patrick Kelly, lobbyist for the Palmetto State Teachers Association and a social studies teacher, said the partnership was frustrating. One particular video made his “blood boil,” he said.
Offered as a way to analyze the impact of “innovation and industrialization” on Columbus Day, the video that angered Kelly features prominent conservative commentator Steven Crowder wearing a shirt that says “Try the Walther,” referring to the firearms company, with a picture of two handguns.
With rising school shootings and scares, including a hoax Friday at his own daughter’s high school, Kelly found the inclusion of the video — which he said had nothing to do with industrialization — infuriating.
“Who vetted this thing?” asked Kelly, who was not at the news conference due to a prior commitment. “No teacher was asked to give input on this thing. Who’s driving this? Because right now it looks like PragerU has done this. PragerU has less credentials in this state than I do.”
Kelly said he did not know of any social studies teachers in the state who had received guidance on the new partnership since PragerU announced it Monday.
Effectively, he said, the partnership changed nothing, and his advice to teachers wanting to use PragerU videos was the same as for any other online video: Watch it first, and make sure it is appropriate for the classroom.
“This time last week, a teacher could have chosen to go to PragerU’s website and pull a video and show it in class,” Kelly said. “That’s true today as well. Nobody from the Department has told a teacher to do it.”
Abraham Kenmore is a reporter covering elections, health care and more. He joins the S.C. Daily Gazette from The Augusta Chronicle, where he reported on Georgia legislators, military and housing issues. S.C. Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
