How the conservative content-maker PragerU courted GOP officials to get its videos into public schools

The promotional videos all start the same: Each begins with Marissa Streit, chief executive of PragerU, the conservative nonprofit primarily known for producing web videos featuring right-wing pundits and short documentaries criticizing progressive policies.

Streit introduces a top state education official, who then raves about the new partnership between PragerU and their state’s public schools.

In one clip, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters says he “could not be more excited to get this content into our classrooms,” adding that he used PragerU videos himself as a history teacher.

New Hampshire Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, in his appearance, explains enthusiastically that students in his state can use PragerU videos to meet a high school graduation requirement, noting, “It’s quality content — it’s highly engaging for the kids.”

Montana Superintendent of Public Instruction Elsie Arntzen, meanwhile, says her state’s new relationship with PragerU will help educators recognize “how to teach things.”

PragerU was founded in 2009. Its recent videos feature messages opposing transgender health care and suggesting Americans say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy holidays.” Last year, the organization debuted a line of cartoons and classroom materials aimed at school children, called PragerU Kids, which over the last six months has received approval from four state education agencies.

The PragerU Kids video content ranges from lessons for teens about why universal health care systems in countries like Canada are worse than the United States’ system, to an explanation for young children about Israel’s Iron Dome.

In one animation, two time-traveling kids ask Christopher Columbus whether he enslaved Indigenous people. Cartoon Columbus responds, “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed,” and insists it is “estupido” to judge him by modern moral standards. In another, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass defends the Founding Fathers for not outlawing slavery.

The expansion of PragerU into public schools has alarmed some parents and educators — especially leading into an election year in which culture-war debates over education promise to be a prominent issue. Critics contend that the group’s videos inject a right-wing bias into the classroom, and civil rights groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Human Rights Campaign have described PragerU content as propaganda.

Some videos have also drawn ire from scientists. Several researchers told Reuters that PragerU misrepresented their findings in videos about climate change. An official at the National Center for Science Education said that allowing PragerU’s content in classrooms sent an inappropriate message about how to teach global warming.

Emails obtained by NBC News via records requests offer a glimpse into how PragerU has been able to expand into public schools, thanks to relationships with Republican politicians who helped with the organization’s marketing.

Edelblut and Walters each visited PragerU’s headquarters in Southern California; emails show Edelblut agreed to speak to the nonprofit’s donors at a private event there, and a video on PragerU’s website shows Walters speaking to staff and donors at a ribbon-cutting on the campus in November.

“We literally have an education system that has been indoctrinating kids with radical left wokeism,” Walters said at the ceremony. “There is no organization, no individuals, that have done more to strike at the heart of that left-wing dominance of education than PragerU.”

NBC News spoke with education policy specialists, attorneys and ethics experts who say PragerU’s courting of elected officials raises red flags. All said it is abnormal, and even alarming, for an organization to try to get its curricula into classrooms by appealing directly to politicians and to ask state leaders to film commercials.

The officials’ willingness to appear in PragerU’s promotional videos “is highly unusual,” said Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, a nonprofit that seeks stricter campaign finance laws. “It crosses the line of ethics when you use your official position to promote the interests of any single entity.”

Streit said in an interview that PragerU is on the front lines of a “cultural war” in which one side is trying to manipulate children into hating the country through schools.

“I don’t actually believe that America is going to be taken down by bullets and tanks,” she said. “I think that if America would be taken down, it’s through the erosion of the values and the ideas that have made our country what it is today.”

Dennis Prager, a long-time radio host and PragerU’s co-founder, has acknowledged that the organization is in the “mind-changing business” and doesn’t see an issue with allegations that it indoctrinates children.

“We bring doctrines to children. That is a very fair statement,” he said at a recent conference hosted by the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty. But he added: “What is the bad of our indoctrination?’”

In an interview with NBC News, Prager said his group’s messaging is superior to progressive ideology that he believes causes teachers to focus too much on the United States’ sins.

“It’s the old fashioned approach of, we’re not going to create angry kids,” Prager said. “We don’t teach ingratitude. We think you’re lucky to be an American.”

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to track how many classrooms have used PragerU videos, given that K-12 instruction is multimedia and a majority of teachers incorporate material they find online. Most show videos at some point in the semester, industry research shows.

According to PragerU’s own numbers, PragerU Kids content has been viewed 33 million times, and it has sold over 70,000 copies of kids books and magazines. NBC News cannot independently verify those metrics.

PragerU is not the only conservative organization creating teaching materials, but it’s one of the best funded. The group raised $65 million last year, according to tax filings. Its donors have included Farris Wilks, a Texas billionaire who has compared homosexuality to bestiality; the Marcus Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Home Depot’s co-founder, who is a prominent Republican donor; and a foundation run by Betsy DeVos, who served as secretary of education in the Trump administration.

PragerU Kids got a major entreé in July, when Florida became the first state to approve its videos for use in public schools.

Soon after, the New Hampshire State Board of Education voted to approve the use of PragerU materials to satisfy a newly required financial literacy credit.

Edelblut, the state’s education commissioner, agreed in August to visit Los Angeles to film the promotional video with Streit and speak to the nonprofit’s donors, according to emails between PragerU staff and Edelblut’s office. He paid for his own flight but accepted a one-night stay at an upscale hotel on PragerU’s account, according to a financial disclosure form, which was first reported by New Hampshire Public Radio. Edelblut declined to comment, but his office told NHPR that the trip was “an opportunity to promote” the state’s education initiatives.

Arntzen, Montana’s state superintendent, agreed to appear in a promotional video for PragerU shortly after she signed a textbook license agreement with the organization in August, according to emails in which she instructed her staff to set up a time for filming.

A spokesman for her office said Arntzen “does not partake in political activity while conducting official business” and noted that she has also done a video promoting the state’s partnership with the education technology company Frontline Education.

In Oklahoma, the education department added links on its website to PragerU videos, lesson plans and e-books following a July call with the organization, as PragerU had requested, according to emails between the two entities. Walters also volunteered to connect the PragerU team with the South Carolina state superintendent, according to emails recapping their call that were sent to department staff. The South Carolina Department of Education declined to comment on whether it has had discussions with PragerU.

“Superintendent Walters is proud to stand up for Oklahoma parents and their desire to ensure kids are not bombarded with left-wing indoctrination by the teachers unions and their woke allies,” Dan Isett, an Oklahoma education department spokesman, said in a statement. “The partnership with PragerU is just the beginning to reset the classroom back on a pro-America path.”

The department declined to say whether Walters had paid for his own flight to speak at PragerU’s ribbon-cutting.

PragerU’s foray into K-12 public education has generated pushback from activists and government watchdog organizations.

Progressive Florida activists circulated a form parents could use to opt their children out of lessons using PragerU content. Parents in New Hampshire demonstrated against PragerU before the state board approved the partnership with the organization.

The advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, meanwhile, announced in October that it had launched an investigation into the process Florida and Oklahoma education officials used to vet and approve PragerU materials. The group says that PragerU materials “advance the myth” that the country must be “a Christian nation,” citing videos like one in which a cartoon George Washington says the country should have a religious population.

“It’s not just an alternate reality to what the existing curriculum is saying, but an alternative to almost any mainstream source of information,” said John Rogers, director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access.

“Textbooks and other curricular materials are supposed to both reflect the consensus of experts in a particular field, whether it be biology or whether it be 19th-century U.S. history,” he added. “The Prager model neither draws upon expertise in particular fields, nor presents the controversies in ways that allow young people to see the differences of opinion that reside amongst scholars or amongst the broader community.”

Jill Simonian, PragerU’s outreach director, said the organization hired historians, journalists and teachers with master’s degrees to create the group’s content, and that it always relies on original sources.

Keith Robinson, a middle school history teacher in Ohio, said he’s used PragerU videos for years without complaints. He noted, though, that he avoids the most politically charged content, such as videos featuring pundit Candace Owens, who called the #MeToo movement “stupid,” encouraged people to violate stay-at-home advisories during the pandemic and said she does not believe climate change is real.

“I am conservative, I live in a conservative neighborhood, and in a conservative district, but I’m not pushing conservative ideas on kids,” Robinson said.

In interviews, PragerU executives characterized the backlash as a reaction to the organization’s threat to the dominance of the largest education publishers, such as Pearson and Scholastic, which both make multimedia content. Scholastic has recently faced complaints from conservatives that its book fairs give children access to books they consider to be explicit or too mature.

Spokespeople for Pearson and Scholastic said the companies do not ask elected state officials to appear in marketing materials.

In the year ahead, according to PragerU representatives, the organization plans to continue discussions to get more states to approve its videos as a resource for teachers, and to develop additional educational materials.

Prager said he’d like to see the American education system resemble how it operated generations ago, when there was more attention to “character development” in schools. Like the 1930s, he added, “minus the bad things.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com