Last year, Texas Board of Education member Julie Pickren sparked a media firestorm when she appeared in a video with the CEO of conservative media company PragerU, announcing that its instructional material had been approved for use in Texas schools.
“We are definitely ready to welcome PragerU into the great state of Texas,” Pickren said with a broad smile.
But, in the wake of online outrage and numerous media inquiries, Pickren’s boss strongly pushed back. PragerU had not submitted any instructional material for review, a statement by the board’s chair said.
Behind the scenes, as outraged comments from parents flooded into the board’s inbox, Pickren faced backlash from her colleagues, for, as one put it, “lying.”
But Pickren was not alone in working with PragerU and the announcement she made, despite the denials, did not come from nowhere.
Public records reveal at least some contact between PragerU and top education officials in Texas before the announcement.
By the time Pickren went public, PragerU had made multiple outreach efforts to top-level officials, trying to get its foot into the door of the Texas education system. And after the media storm died down, the board chair, who had earlier contradicted Pickren, attended a meeting with PragerU where they discussed how its materials could be approved for Texas.
PragerU CEO Marissa Streit released the promotional video on Aug. 21 last year. Pickren, a Republican board member who fought to keep critical race theory out of textbooks, made an appearance with a cowboy hat on and a hearty “Howdy.” She described an ongoing effort in Texas to standardize core knowledge curriculum under a recent state law.
“Our team has been working very closely with all of you out there in Texas on the core knowledge curriculum,” Streit said, hinting that PragerU’s materials would be included in it. In addition, its statement said PragerU was already a Texas-approved vendor. She presaged future cooperation, mentioning “great things we are going to do together” that would catapult Texas to the number one spot in education.
Pickren did not contradict her. “Absolutely, that’s the Texas way,” she said.
PragerU publishes a wide range of learning materials for children designed to, as it puts it, “promote America,” which have a heavy right-wing slant. It has come under criticism from historians for presenting a white-washed view of American history and pushing misogyny and Christian nationalism through propagandized videos.
One instructional video titled “How to embrace your femininity” encourages girls to “try smiling” and to “stay grateful.” In another, a cartoon Christopher Columbus minimizes slavery and condemns native populations as vicious non-Christians. Yet another promotes anti-vax ideology in the guise of man-on-the-street interviews.
PragerU, officially Prager University Foundation, is not a university, nor is it accredited as a school, according to the Accrediting Commission For Schools. It mainly produces digital media. Despite this, right-wing officials in some states, including Florida and Oklahoma, approved the use of PragerU’s material for instruction.
The PragerU-Pickren announcement spread consternation across the Lone Star State. Calls and emails flooded the education board’s inbox. Emails hit the inbox of the Texas Education Agency (TEA), the agency that oversees schools. While the TEA consists of political appointees and career employees, the board Pickren is on has 15 elected members who set curriculum and instruction standards.
“Validating horrendous acts such as slavery should have no place in public schools,” one email said.
“Public schools should not provide propaganda and call it education,” another said.
“I will continue to call and complain every single day until Julie Pickren is fired,” a voicemail said.
State legislators also got concerned emails from constituents, who sought clarification from the TEA. “I am a Christian, but to allow the TEA to entertain introducing this curriculum to our schools is a disservice to our children,” a self-described “very conservative Baptist” constituent wrote.
Standards for instructional material have become a high-stakes debate in the last year after the passage of HB 1605, a new law that aims to standardize instructional material across Texas. It aimed to fix the “academic slump” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and raise the quality of the material teachers use in classrooms.
Progressive critics of the law fear that it will cede too much power to the religious right by putting TEA Commissioner Michael Morath, appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R).
Under the law, districts can still use other material but are financially incentivized to pick from the state’s list. The board is currently involved in an open process of selecting material for language arts and math.
In the announcement video, Pickren and Streit both hinted that PragerU materials are under consideration for the state’s new “core knowledge” standard. But this was strenuously denied by the other board members.
Several of the 15-strong board of elected members appealed to then-chair Keven Ellis for help responding to their constituents. He pointed them to a statement he gave to the media.
“PragerU has not submitted any instructional materials to the SBOE under the new Instruction Material review process that was adopted by the legislature this year.” He added, “no one from PragerU has … contacted me … to discuss any working relationship.”
Another member of the board added her own twist to the statement. “Your source of information appears to be gaslighting,” she wrote back to a constituent. To her colleagues, she privately added a note: “Do you think ‘#JulieIsALiar’ is too much? Asking for a friend.”
A Dallas-area resident surmised in an email that the premature PragerU announcement was a PR attempt to soften public opinion in favor of eventually approving the materials. He recommended an ethics investigation into Pickren. The board member agreed, forwarding the email to leadership.
However, the strong denials from the Board of Education do not tell the entire story. While it was false that PragerU materials were under active consideration for the new state standard, PragerU was then in contact with top TEA officials through a separate channel. Lost in the firestorm, emails show an attempt by PragerU to workshop identical statements made in the video with TEA.
In an email from June 5, 2023, PragerU CEO Streit sought an introduction to leadership in both the TEA and the Board of Education.
“If you have connections in Governor Abbott’s office or with leadership in the Texas State Board of Education and [TEA] and would be able to provide an email introduction on my behalf, that would be wonderful!” Streit wrote to Richard Weekley, a prominent Texas donor to right-wing politicians, including Abbott and Pickren.
Streit’s attempt bore fruit. Emails reference a June 20, 2023 meeting with the TEA Commissioner Morath and special projects director Cari Christman. The topic, according to Streit’s meeting request, was to make PragerU Kids an “approved vendor” for five-minute video lessons for little children, such as on financial literacy, civics, and history.
Streit’s statement released with the August video announced that the organization succeeded. “Children in … Texas schools now have the opportunity to learn from PragerU’s wholesome, patriotic, and age-appropriate content,” it said, touting its entry on the “approved vendor list.”
PragerU did get added to the vendor list. However, that does not signify state approval of any kind. The centralized list of vendors in Texas is managed by the state comptroller and is merely a way for vendors to receive bids from state purchasers. As the comptroller’s office clarified in a response to a query from the media, “That designation doesn’t signify approval other than the organization paid a $70 fee.”
Despite this, once Pickren found herself on the defensive after the firestorm broke, she attempted to downplay the PragerU announcement.
But Streit’s wording that it was “working with Texas” was not issued in a vacuum. An email from early August shows an effort by PragerU staff to confirm that they had TEA approval for the verbiage.
“Cari [Christman] mentioned it would be acceptable for us to announce that we are ‘working with Texas,’” an email from PragerU staff to TEA leadership said in highlighted text 19 days before the video was released on Aug. 21. “We just wanted to confirm [with] your office.”
Subsequent email chains discuss further cooperation with the commissioner on a planned appearance in a virtual town hall with PragerU, and on recording promotional videos.
While the emails are suggestive, a TEA spokesperson clarified that those plans never came to fruition, nor did PragerU get the confirmation they were seeking. “TEA did not provide approval to use the language or phrasing ‘working with Texas,’” the spokesperson said in an email to the Daily Dot.
The outreach to TEA leadership was matched with outreach to the chair of the education board.
A week after Board Chair Ellis issued this statement: “No one from PragerU has … contacted me, as Chair of the State Board of Education, to discuss any working relationship”—someone from PragerU did, in fact, reach out to him.
“It is my pleasure to introduce the two of you, two great patriots in the fight to preserve and restore America,” said an Aug. 30 email from an ally of other top right-wing donors in Texas. It was sent to Ellis and PragerU CEO Streit in an attempt to arrange a phone call..
A calendar entry included in the public records shows that a virtual meeting between Ellis, Streit, and two other unknown guests occurred on Sept. 11, 2023. It represented a renewed push by PragerU to be adopted by Texas schools, as opposed to merely being on the vendor list.
“I would characterize the meeting as a discussion [of] the steps they would need to take if they wanted to be placed on the adopted list,” Ellis said in an email to the Daily Dot, adding that he was not aware of any further communications between board members and PragerU. The Board now has a new chair, Aaron Kinsey, appointed by the governor in Dec. 2023.
Meanwhile, the announcement remains up on PragerU’s website. On Pickren’s social media channels, where she promotes the association with PragerU with the requisite cowboy hat on, Texas residents have pushed back.
“I think people would prefer to be educated by someone who isn’t a parody of a cowboy,” said one.
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