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prageru
Oklahoma Screening Teachers From California, New York for 'Radical Leftist Ideology'
"This MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage," said American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten.
Aug 20, 2025
Teachers from California and New York seeking work in Oklahoma will be required to pass an "America First Test" designed to weed out applicants espousing "radical leftist ideology," the state's public schools chief affirmed Monday.
Oklahoma—which has a severe teacher shortage, persistently high turnover, and some of the nation's worst educational outcomes—will compel prospective public school educators from the nation's two largest "blue" states to submit to the exam in a bid to combat what Superintendent for Public Instruction Ryan Walters calls "woke indoctrination."
"As long as I am superintendent, Oklahoma classrooms will be safeguarded from the radical leftist ideology fostered in places like California and New York," Walters said in a statement Monday.
Walters told USA Today that the test is necessary to vet teachers from states where educators "are teaching things that are antithetical to our standards" and ensure they "are not coming into our classrooms and indoctrinating kids."
However, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten warned in a statement Monday that "this MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage."
The exam will be administered by Prager University—also known as PragerU—a right-wing nonprofit group which, despite its name, is not an academic institution and does not confer degrees.
While all of the test's 50 questions have not been made public, the ones that have been published run the gamut from insultingly basic—such as, "What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?"—to ideologically fraught queries regarding the "biological differences between females and males."
PragerU's "educational" materials are rife with false or misleading information regarding slavery, racism, immigration, the history of fascism, and the climate emergency. Critics note that the nonprofit has received millions of dollars in funding from fossil fuel billionaires.
PragerU materials also promote creation mythology over scientific evolution and attack LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender individuals, calling lifesaving gender-affirming healthcare "barbaric" while likening its proponents to "monsters."
In one animated PragerU video, two children travel back in time to ask the genocidal explorer Christopher Columbus why he is so hated today. Columbus replies by asserting the superiority of Europeans over Indigenous "cannibals" and attempting to justify the enslavement of Native Americans by arguing that "being taken as a slave is better than being killed."
Closer to home, PragerU's curriculum aligns with so-called "white discomfort" legislation passed in Oklahoma and other Republican-controlled states that critics say prevents honest lessons on slavery, the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and enduring systemic racism.
The law has had a chilling effect on teachers' lessons on historical topics including the 1921 Tulsa massacre, in which a white supremacist mob backed armed by city officials destroyed more than 35 city blocks of Greenwood, the "Black Wall Street," murdering hundreds of Black men, women, and children in what the US Justice Department this year called a "coordinated, military-style attack."
Responding to Oklahoma's new policy, University of Pennsylvania history professor Jonathan Zimmerman told The Associated Press that "instead of Prager simply being a resource that you can draw in an optional way, Prager has become institutionalized as part of the state system."
"There's no other way to describe it," he said, adding, "I think what we're now seeing in Oklahoma is something different, which is actually empowering Prager as a kind of gatekeeper for future teachers."
Oklahoma is not the only state incorporating PragerU materials into its curriculum. Florida, Montana, New Hampshire, and Texas have also done so to varying degrees.
Weingarten noted Walters' previous push to revise Oklahoma's curriculum standards to include baseless conspiracy theories pushed by President Donald Trump that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. Walters also ordered all public schools to teach the Bible, a directive temporarily blocked by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in March. The court also recently ruled against the establishment of the nation's first taxpayer-funded religious charter school.
"His priority should be educating students, but instead, it's getting Donald Trump and other MAGA politicians to notice him," Weingrarten said in her statement.
Cari Elledge, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, called the new testing requirement "a political stunt to grab attention" and a distraction "from real issues in Oklahoma."
"When political ideology plays into whether or not you can teach in any place, that might be a deterrent to quality educators attempting to get a job," she added. "We think it's intentional to make educators fearful and confused."
California Teachers' Association president David Goldberg told USA Today that "this almost seems like satire and so far removed from my research around what Oklahoma educators need and deserve."
"I can't see how this isn't some kind of hyper-political grandstanding that doesn't serve any of those needs," he added.
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State Takeovers of Schools Are Not the Answer to Educational Inequality
Too often, they are an instrument of conservative politicians wielded against local communities who find their voices shut out, and the most vulnerable students pay the price.
Aug 10, 2024
The state takeover of Houston Independent School District, the eighth-largest public school system in the United States, is entering its second year.
State-appointed superintendent Mike Miles is celebrating the occasion by touting state test score results that show preliminary improvement in student achievement. Other leaders in education across the country are paying close attention to Miles’ tactics to see if they’re effective enough to implement in their own schools.
Since 1989, over 100 school districts across the U.S. have been subjected to state takeovers, in which the state seizes control of low-performing or financially struggling school districts, replacing their locally elected school boards. This is done with the goal of dramatically improving the district’s academic or financial performance. State takeovers are difficult to neatly describe because they vary from place to place depending on the policies that the state-appointed board and superintendent decide to implement. But they are overwhelmingly ineffective.
Instead of allowing the state to take over our schools, we need to turn to proven solutions like increasing per-pupil spending, which has been shown to address achievement gaps faced by low-income students.
A 2021 study done by researchers from Brown University and the University of Virginia analyzed over 100 state takeovers between 1989 and 2016. It found “no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits.” In fact, it can take years for schools to return to their previous levels of academic achievement after a takeover.
Beyond that, takeovers are emblematic of a worrying trend in education that extends beyond Houston and hurts low-income learners and students of color most.
The study also showed that state takeovers disproportionately target districts with higher concentrations of low-income and nonwhite students, regardless of academic achievement. But another study revealed that majority-Black districts rarely see financial improvement in the years following a takeover.
The Brown study also found that takeovers tend to happen in states with both a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled legislature. This should be really alarming given the fact that those same states are also passing legislation like requiring the 10 Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms and restricting the discussion of race, sex, and gender in schools.
HISD is no different.
As of 2022, almost 80% of HISD students were considered economically disadvantaged, and the overwhelming majority were students of color. Education is supposed to be the great equalizer, but state takeovers exacerbate education inequality for low-income and minority students. Too often in conservative states, they disrupt existing communities and feed students subpar and radicalizing material.
In 2019, out of HISD’s almost 300 campuses, just one school’s repeated failure to meet state standards allowed the Texas Education Agency to take over the entire district. HISD had managed to fight off takeover for four years.
During that time, their academic accountability scores improved. In 2022, the district received a high B, performing better than several other districts in the state, and Phillis Wheatley High School, the 97-year old historically Black campus that had triggered the state takeover law, improved its score to a passing 78.
Last year, the Texas Education Agency took over anyway, appointing a nine-person board of managers and Mike Miles, formerly the very controversial superintendent of Dallas ISD, to transform the Houston public school system.
As a result of the takeover, the Texas Education Agency implemented a scripted curriculum in HISD schools. This past year, Miles had to reassign a group of teachers to review the provided curriculum, which was found to be riddled with errors and inappropriate content, including ChatGPT-sourced material. He also faced backlash after it was revealed that students were being shown videos questioning human-caused climate change from the conservative Prager University Foundation.
Now, the Texas Education Agency is offering all school districts in the state $60 per student to teach a new curriculum that contains extensive biblical references. For students in Texas schools, culture war politics are increasingly invading education, and districts taken over by the state have no choice but to teach its curriculum.
There are several other problems with the HISD takeover: 28 schools faced the most radical reforms this year, and an additional 57 were brought into the new system but didn’t experience some of the larger structural changes.
State requirements for certified teachers, deans, and assistant principals were waived to ease the hiring process, while veteran teachers had to reapply for their positions, with many not offered the chance to return.
A militaristic learning environment was enforced, with teachers forced to rush through timed and scripted lessons and students made to participate approximately once every four minutes. When students had to use the restroom, they had to carry a large traffic cone as a hall pass, which many felt was humiliating and dehumanizing.
Libraries were converted into “team centers” that housed both students who finished their lessons early and students with discipline problems made to watch their lessons virtually, while librarians were let go and, in several cases, shelves emptied.
All of these reforms have led to a budget deficit of almost $200 million for this year and a projected shortfall of over $500 million for next year that Miles is attempting to make up partially through the cutting of special education and wraparound specialists, who help students dealing with homelessness and hunger. Many have questioned the long-term financial feasibility of the takeover.
On August 8, the district’s state-appointed board of managers will decide whether or not to put its proposed $4.4 billion bond, which it says will be put toward renovating facilities and improving school safety, among other promised improvements. Opponents to the takeover, including the American Federation of Teachers, have spoken out against the bond, citing their lack of faith in Miles and embracing the rallying cry “No trust, no bond.”
Meanwhile, Miles seeks to implement a pay-for-performance model, where teacher pay—and continuing employment—will be tied to standardized test scores and evaluations. For now, he’s settled for raising teacher pay, but only for the 28 schools required to follow the new model, and only for those teachers whose grades and subjects are tested on state exams. Furthermore, teachers can only benefit for as long as they manage to stay employed at those schools.
This past year, teacher turnover was almost double its usual rate, as teachers and administrators both opted to resign in protest to the reforms and were not asked back throughout the year.
It is possible that some of Miles’ practices are worth considering, but a year of teacher, parent, and student responses only support the growing body of evidence that show that takeover is not the way to go about it. Protests and student walkouts against the takeover continued until the end of the school year, with community members complaining that their concerns have been repeatedly ignored or dismissed.
We can all acknowledge that educational inequality is a major issue, and change is necessary. But a takeover is not the answer. Too often, it is an instrument of conservative politicians wielded against local communities who find their voices shut out, and the most vulnerable students pay the price.
Instead of allowing the state to take over our schools, we need to turn to proven solutions like increasing per-pupil spending, which has been shown to address achievement gaps faced by low-income students. According to a 2018 Rutgers study, Texas needs to spend $12,000 more per student to bring its poorest students up to national average outcomes.
We owe it to all of our students to find effective and sustainable reforms that center their needs. Education should not be a power struggle. Instead, it should be a way to uplift and empower communities and to help give students the start that they need to succeed in life.
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Florida Isn’t Teaching Its Students About the Climate Crisis Threatening the State’s Survival
Instead, its “education” department has approved a series of right-wing videos from Prager U, which draws much of its funding from some of the country’s biggest frackers.
Aug 15, 2023
On the list of crazy weather records this overheated summer, it’s possible that the single most extreme might have been a 101.1°F temperature measured by an ocean buoy at Manatee Bay in Florida in July. That appears to be the hottest temperature ever measured in the ocean; it’s in a murky and shallow stretch of the Keys, but across the entire Gulf coast temperatures are truly astounding. The average for the Gulf of Mexico this week is more than 88°F , crushing the average for the date across the last three decades by two and a half degrees; God forbid a hurricane gets loose in there any time soon. Coral reef researchers were reporting “100% mortality” at sites in the Keys.
So you would think that as Florida students return to school this fall, studying up on climate change would be a no-brainer—if physics and chemistry usually seem a little abstract, nothing could be more immediate than an ocean running at Jacuzzi temperatures. There’s so many ways you could study it, from the youngest students to high school seniors, and it would bring everything from history to economics alive. Some of it might be sad—I was deeply moved by this Diana Nyad piece about swimming in the ocean she’d known since she was a girl now that it was 100°F. But I was fascinated by her writing—read this one paragraph and think about the different directions a talented teacher could take it:
At age 9, after the Cuban Revolution, I searched the horizon to catch a glimpse of Cuba, this suddenly forbidden island. My mother pointed out across the ocean and said to me: “There. Havana is just across there. It’s so close that you, you little swimmer, you could actually swim there.” Later, after five attempts over 35 years, I finally did make that crossing. But I couldn’t have made that swim last month. In such hot water, the body heat I’d generate from the duress of the effort—a continuous 52 hours and 54 minutes—would quickly lead to overheating and failure. And danger. Hyperthermia would conquer even the strongest of wills.
But that’s not what Florida students will necessarily be studying this year. Instead, the state’s “education” department has approved a series of right-wing videos from Prager U, which draws much of its funding from some of the country’s biggest frackers. And they’re getting their money’s worth: The videos that Prager sends out explain, for instance, that “the planet has heated up and cooled since prehistoric times, even without the burning of fossil fuels.” Which, duh, but this time it’s—as every part of the scientific community agrees—because of the burning of fossil fuels. In one video, a Polish girl tries to explain to her classmates that like solar and wind energy that clean energy is in fact “unreliable, expensive, and difficult to store.” Which is no longer true: it’s now the cheapest power on the planet. By all accounts, Gulf neighbor Texas survived its epic heatwave earlier this summer precisely because it had so much solar and so many batteries hooked to its grid.
It’s not enough to carry water for the fossil fuel industry; the carriers would also like to imagine themselves as brave fighters against Nazism. To call it all shameless barely begins to scratch the surface.
The most obnoxious part of the Prager videos, though, is the preening they engage in. The Polish girl’s grandfather tells her not to worry that her friends think she’s old-fashioned for wanting to stick with coal; he compares her stand with the bravery of the Warsaw uprising. As a narrator explains, “Through her family’s stories, Ania is realizing that fighting oppression is risky and that it always takes courage.”
It’s not enough to carry water for the fossil fuel industry; the carriers would also like to imagine themselves as brave fighters against Nazism. To call it all shameless barely begins to scratch the surface. And the ugliness of it all is really amazing. According to Politico, a PragerU video about a child in Africa features a narrator calmly attacking solar and wind because “their batteries break down and become hazardous waste” and because it’s risky “to rely on things like wind and sunlight, which are not constant.” I have spent a fair amount of time in rural African communities which got power only because cheap solar became available, talking to kids who for the first time ever have light to read by at night. As one father in Cote d’Ivoire told me, “You can feel the effects with their grades now at school.”
But not in Florida’s schools, where anyone who watches this Prager nonsense will emerge dumber than before. And that’s galling, since the Sunshine State, throughout the lifetimes of these students, will need to be making a series of good decisions if it’s going to survive in anything like its present form. Already, for instance, major insurers are pulling out of the state; Newsweek reported that its residents might soon be “uninsurable.” But instead of starting to prepare students for the real world, the state will let them bathe in the warm water of denial.
Happily, there are educators at work in the state, and making a difference. Florida weatherman Jeff Berardelli may be the best example. From his post at WFLA, and across social media, he’s been telling the story of this summer in straightforward and useful terms. He gave an interview recently where he explained his thinking:
My job is to educate people about what I know, right? I live at the intersection between weather and climate, and specifically extreme weather and climate change. That’s my specialty. So, there are certain events that are going to take place and have been taking place that are going to be pretty alarming and I think it’s my job as a scientist, the person who kind of lives at the intersection of both of those things, to put it into context and give people perspective on it.
These are good teaching opportunities, these moments, when extreme things happen, they allow me to kind of educate people on the latest science, the latest studies… the latest facts about how climate change is impacting our extreme weather… My role is to act as both the scientist and also a communicator, because that’s exactly the field that I’m in.
This is not radical thinking, it’s not agenda-driven, it’s not partisan. It’s precisely the kind of teaching we used to take for granted in America.
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