BY STEVE NUZUM
A national playbook, driven by groups like Moms for Liberty and The Heritage Foundation, continues to develop to push an anti-public school narrative. South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver continues to demonstrate that she is willing to use that playbook to push a pro-voucher, pro-censorship, and ideologically biased agenda in South Carolina schools.
On September 11, Weaver, in her capacity as Superintendent of Education, voiced predictable outrage about the logical (if pleasantly surprising) decision by the state Supreme Court to remove direct funding for private schools from a school voucher law she supported, writing, in a Department memo that, “Families cried tears of joy when the scholarship funds became available for their children, and today’s Supreme Court ruling brings those same families tears of devastation”. (Of course, assuming Weaver and others read the plain language of the state Constitution, or witnessed the disastrous rollout of universal vouchers in other states, they should have known not to make promises to those families they couldn’t keep.)
The 2024-25 school year had already gotten off to a rough start, as Weaver passed a restrictive book challenge regulation and used a bureaucratic maneuver to make it much more difficult for South Carolina students to take and receive credit for AP African American studies.
Then, the following week (just in time for Banned Books Week), Weaver appeared in a long-form interview/ advertisement for controversial “edutainment” company PragerU on the company’s website. In the video, Weaver promotes a collaboration between the South Carolina Department of Education and PragerU.
Taken together, Weaver’s statements and actions heavily politicize and skew the selection of curricula and instructional materials toward her own preferred viewpoints, all apparently in the service of supporting privatization and voucher efforts that would help very few families in South Carolina and would ultimately strip funds and resources from public schools.
Still from Weaver’s interview with PragerU CEO Marissa Streit.
Many of the videos are age-inappropriate, and bear little or no relation to the standards they are supposed to address.
In one video, a clearly angry Steven Crowder (a rightwing podcaster who has been accused of abusive and sexually inappropriate behavior by his employees) yells about Columbus Day and wears a shirt emblazoned with two semi-automatic pistols, and bearing the slogan “Try the Walther” (which amounts to an advertisement for the gun manufacturer).
According to the “crosswalk” document created by the Department and PragerU, Crowder’s rant about the outrageousness of “Indigenous People’s Day” is supposed to be somehow linked to a state academic standard requiring students to be able to “Utilize a variety of primary and secondary sources to analyze multiple perspectives of innovation and industrialization on demographic change, reform, and American identity.” (That standard, admittedly, could be worded more clearly.)
Crowder suggests that schools have painted Columbus as “the devil” and America as “evil” and says that in response the children watching should want to “commit grievous bodily self-harm”. What he doesn’t do is, by any stretch of the imagination, provide any kind of perspective on “innovation and industrialization,” or about anything that is academically relevant to the standard cited in the document.
In another video, a cartoon Frederick Douglass tells students that Founding Fathers who owned slaves and/ or supported the continuation of the slave trade were just doing what they had to do “to achieve something great”. This video, according to Weaver’s document, is supposed to help students “Compare the economic and political causes of the Civil War”. Needless to say, yelling at students about self-harm is arguably not “age-appropriate,” either.
Inconveniently, the Civil War is never discussed in the video, although Cartoon Douglass says a lot about the evils of “radical” politics (an obvious reference to protests against police violence seen at the beginning of the video), and the importance of only supporting activists who “work inside the system”. So again, in addition to being historically inaccurate and offensive to Douglass’ memory, the video violates Weaver’s own regulation by having nothing to do with the academic standard supposedly being addressed, and by being “age-inappropriate” under the admittedly very broad and vague definitions of the regulation.
In another video, Dennis Prager tells children “If There is No God, Murder Isn’t Wrong,” and then delivers several minutes of questionable philosophical and theological argumentation to support that thesis. (His argument rests heavily on the false premise that only adherents of Judeo-Christian religions believe “murder, rape, and theft” are “objectively wrong”.) And again, what does any of this have to do with South Carolina state academic standards?
Another video, supposedly about energy sources, takes a very long tangent into the life of a fictional Polish girl to indirectly compare climate change activists to Nazis and to the authoritarian Polish Communist regime. (This is less surprising than it might be given that hydraulic fracturing billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks were PragerU’s largest early donors.)
Some of these videos probably represent perspectives that could be explored responsibly in schools. But by labeling them as an academic resource and by putting the seal of approval of the State Department of Education on them, Weaver is revealing once again that she does want to ban books and other materials in the most nakedly ideologically biased and ethically bankrupt way, to make way for content that it clearly biased and often constitutes pure propaganda.
There is no consistent logical rationale tying together these moves.
Despite the promises of her own regulation, Weaver’s decisions don’t add up to “consistency” in instructional decisions, or any kind of meaningful “age- appropriate standard”. They make sense only in the context of pushing an anti-school, politicized narrative.
So even as Weaver has railed, repeatedly, about unsubstantiated concerns that “woke” or “leftist” teachers are introducing liberal propaganda into schools instead of teaching “the basics” (a narrative which PragerU videos repeatedly amplify and support), and even as she has used this narrative as a justification for her regulation, she has introduced heavily biased (and often downright bizarre) videos that don’t do any of that.
Instead, removing materials vetted by teachers and librarians, and selected through district- and state-approved processes, simply makes room for the specific ideas Weaver and her backers deem acceptable in public discourse: namely, that the continuation of American slavery was morally justifiable during at least the first hundred years of the republic, that the evils of slavery have been somehow overblown by mainstream historians, that promoting positive images of Native Americans should make children uncontrollably angry, that only people with “Judeo-Christian” beliefs can objectively know that “rape and murder are wrong,” that wind and solar power are more harmful to the earth than burning coal, and so on.
That is not education, it is indoctrination.
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