On July 24th, President Trump signed the Rescissions Act of 2025 into law, which clawed back $1.1 billion in previously appropriated federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for the next two fiscal years. Passage of the law left PBS and NPR, the two main beneficiaries, at an unprecedented loss, with a particular impact on the nation’s childhood educational development.
For decades, PBS has been one of the leading figures in educational broadcasting, with PBS Kids content reaching an average of 15 million users a month. Beyond popular shows like Arthur, Super Why! and Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, educators and students across the country can get free access to PBS LearningMedia, a K-12 digital learning service established by PBS and Boston member station GBH in 2011. PBS affiliate stations produce their own educational resources for PBS LearningMedia, and also engage in outreach to educators, providing professional development services and updated trainings on best practices. In rural and low-income communities in particular, these services can be a lifeline for teachers, who otherwise may not have these opportunities.
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Now, much of this support network could be lost. GBH, which contributes to PBS LearningMedia and extends assistance to other states, is expected to lose $18 million, about 8 percent of their total budget. The station has already laid off 67 employees this year, including 13 after the rescissions bill was signed. “This could limit the ability of districts to integrate high-quality, effective media into instruction or to offer localized professional development tied to national curriculum resources,” said Seeta Pai, vice president of children’s media and education at GBH.
Without public media support, America’s most in-need educators may be forced to turn to other providers of educational materials to be implemented into lesson plans. Some states have offered a controversial alternative: the Prager University Foundation, or PragerU. The ideologically conservative network could become the de facto beneficiary of PBS defunding. However, PragerU capitalizing on this opportunity may not be as simple as it seems.
FOUNDED IN 2009 BY ALLEN ESTRIN and right-wing radio talk show host Dennis Prager, PragerU has been a major player in the movement to do away with “divisive” and “inclusive” educational curricula. Although its name sounds like an academic institution, PragerU is a registered nonprofit advocacy group that rakes in millions each year from donations. In 2024, PragerU reported receiving $66,693,281 in contributions from donors, accounting for 95 percent of its total revenue ($69,710,136). Its largest benefactors? Conservative and right-wing foundations. In its early stages, PragerU was supported by funding provided by hydraulic fracking billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks, who have donated millions to far-right political initiatives and provided early funding to The Daily Wire.
PragerU’s financial support is certainly reflected in the media it produces. Right-wing luminaries such as Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, and Ben Shapiro have made appearances in its videos. Its most controversial project is PragerU Kids, an educational programming initiative that produces content for kids as young as three. Although it is marketed as “the leading network offering educational, entertaining, and pro-America content for students of all ages,” PragerU Kids has a very specific point of view.
“PragerU Kids is right-wing propaganda; it presents right-wing propaganda as ideologically neutral education and it serves as a gateway into extremism through its attempts to define issues for children at a very young age,” said John Knefel, a senior writer at the research group Media Matters for America, who has conducted significant research into PragerU Kids’ educational content. He explained that PragerU has displayed a commitment to cherry-picking and watering down the tragedies of the past, particularly in videos highlighting U.S. history. “The goal of these videos taken as a whole is to defend an unequal status quo, and to defend existing hierarchies from progressive activists, academics, and teachers who are seeking a more just society,” Knefel said.
PragerU has been a major player in the movement to do away with “divisive” and “inclusive” educational curricula.
A widely known example of how PragerU Kids videos display an inaccurate, and dangerous, analysis of history can be found in “Leo and Layla’s History Adventures With Frederick Douglass.”
In the Leo and Layla’s History Adventures series, two siblings travel back in time to meet historical figures, who explain their stories. In one video, an animated Frederick Douglass tells the children that the Founding Fathers knew slavery was wrong, but their “first priority was getting all 13 colonies to unite as one country … the Founding Fathers made a compromise to achieve something great.” When Leo and Layla meet Booker T. Washington, who also was a former slave, he claims that “America was one of the first places on Earth to outlaw slavery” and that “future generations are never responsible for the sins of the past,” absolving the siblings of any guilt or shame they might feel about the horrors of slavery.
PragerU hasn’t worked very hard to hide its ambition to shape the minds of America’s youth. Dennis Prager himself admitted that his organization is in the business of indoctrination. While speaking at a Moms for Liberty conference in 2023, Prager said, “It’s true that we [PragerU] bring doctrines to children. But what is the bad thing about our indoctrination?”
So far, PragerU has partnered with ten states to allow the optional use of its educational content in classrooms, and has developed an “ideology test” that educators who come to teach in Oklahoma from progressive states must pass. PragerU Kids is most vocally supported by fringe right-wing advocacy groups and politicians, which has gained them access to the classroom.
With Congress yanking federal funding for public media, PragerU clearly wants to fill in the gap where PBS educational programs have traditionally thrived. In its 2022 annual report, PragerU proclaimed that they were committed to going “toe-to-toe with massive youth media companies like PBS Kids and Disney.”
In a response to the Prospect, PragerU CEO Marissa Streit intimated without specifics that PBS has strayed from its roots to become ideologically biased. “When taxpayer-funded programming begins to push one-sided political narratives or introduce adult themes to young audiences, it stops being about education and starts becoming political propaganda,” Streit said. “PragerU Kids exists to be the alternative—not just to undo the damage of what is being taught, but to teach what should be taught. We offer content grounded in facts, traditional values, and a belief in America’s exceptional story.”
Yet there simply has not been enough evidence of grassroots support for PragerU Kids materials among educators, which appears to be at odds with the decisions made by elected officials.
AMERICANS ACROSS THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM watch PBS, with the organization reporting that 65 percent of its viewership identifies as Republican or independent. PBS Kids garners more than 364 million streams across its digital video platforms each month. PragerU Kids, on the other hand, reports having 100 million views of their content since their founding 16 years ago, and that only 25 percent of impact survey respondents identify as nonconservative in 2024.
Parents have not been leading the charge to defund public media. It’s been politicians and conservative interest groups, beginning in the 1970s under President Nixon. Since then, the right has consistently attempted to cut federal funding to the CPB, arguing that taxpayer dollars should not fund media that displays political bias.
PragerU would have to establish trust with educators in order for them to feel comfortable with it as a substitute. According to Knefel, that has yet to happen. “We’re not seeing any sort of organic demand for this, even in states where you might expect that. There was significant pushback, for instance, in South Carolina to having PragerU Kids in public schools. And again, then a bunch of Florida schools didn’t take it up,” he said.
Perhaps this is because there is very little concrete evidence that PragerU Kids actually improves learning outcomes among children. Programming created by PBS Kids, including materials produced using Ready to Learn grants from the Department of Education, undergoes rigorous reviews, with studies proving its ability to improve students’ performance in many subject areas. PragerU has made no studies available about its ability to produce educational gains among children that are aligned with academic standards.
PragerU could capitalize on overworked and underresourced educators who will face additional challenges if they lose the support of their local PBS stations. Although PragerU has maintained that it is not an accredited academic institution, it could look like one to a teacher needing a plug-and-play solution.
“It’s possible that some teachers may use the content and not necessarily know about PragerU … Like if they are sent some seemingly innocuous lesson plan or video, one of their less problematic videos, they may show it in the classroom and not understand what PragerU is about as a whole,” said Maya Henson Carey, a senior research analyst from the Southern Poverty Law Center. If these videos and lesson plans are integrated into state-approved materials, the possibility of using such materials increases. In this sense, PragerU relies on educators simply not knowing any better because they do not have the time or the capacity to understand the organization’s aims.
But becoming a trusted educational resource among educators requires making on-the-ground connections. When asked if PragerU will engage in outreach to educators who stand to lose the support of local public media, Streit said, “Absolutely … we recognize that many teachers and homeschool families have relied on local public media stations for content in the past, and when that support diminishes or shifts away from their values, they may feel left without resources they can trust.” Therefore, PragerU is “not just replacing what some may lose from local public media—we’re building something better: a network of educators and parents who know they can count on us for accurate, inspiring, and age-appropriate content.”
When it comes to gaining the support of families, PragerU plays upon the desire that many parents have to keep their children safe. Henson Carey points to how moving this message is coming from groups that claim to protect children: “You think about these types of far-right organizations, there are some that are very vocal and obvious about what they want and what they don’t want and what their views are. And then there’s some like PragerU and Moms for Liberty that kind of are like ‘we’re just here to protect the kids.’”
This messaging then resonates with parents who naturally want their children to remain unexposed to more “grown-up” topics while in school. “They have these really pretty shiny websites and videos, so it takes a minute to realize what they’re about and messages that they’re sending,” Henson Carey said. “And they’re kind of banking on people not looking into it, and they bank on messages like ‘how can you disagree with this?’”
But do politicians and other interest groups truly have the safety of children in mind when they push to allow PragerU Kids materials into classrooms? PragerU’s support base appears to be motivated by the mission to indoctrinate children with right-wing messages by downplaying oppression in the U.S., and clearing the collective conscience of any wrongdoings committed in the past.
Although PragerU and its allies have publicly maintained that their focus is “wokeness” and “radical theory” in education, that is not the entire picture. The larger project is to dismantle the public education system and the organized workforce inside it, Knefel said.
“They all hate unions and especially teachers unions, and especially in the wake of COVID, teachers unions exerting a certain amount of leverage to keep their members and their students and other people in schools safe during the height of the pandemic, and that is really when PragerU Kids took off,” Knefel contended. Teachers are one of the largest organized professions in the United States, which in turn is one of the biggest sources of support to the Democratic Party. Therefore, the conversation about PragerU Kids in classrooms is much more than an issue about the integration of right-wing materials curricula; it is rooted in a general disdain for unionization.
In a recent interview conducted by Sean Rameswaram at Vox, Laura Meckler, national education writer for The Washington Post, was asked about the explosion of states accepting the use of PragerU Kids materials at the same time that PBS was defunded. Meckler pointed out that most teachers want to present a fair-minded view of history. However, Meckler also said that “the best teachers are challenging their students to look at it from multiple points of view and to understand that there is more than one way to read history … if students are being challenged to consider things from multiple points of view, that’s not a bad thing necessarily.” She dismissed much of the criticism of PragerU as being about the ideology behind it.
But this perspective on PragerU Kids materials is exactly what will further fuel its usage in the classroom. The “point of view” on topics such as social studies and history presented by PragerU Kids is exclusionary, an attempt to dissuade young people from understanding the impact of issues like slavery. It’s not an effort to enhance critical thinking, but more to shut it down.
Although it appears that for now PragerU has experienced most of its support from groups and individuals on the right who want the education system to be fundamentally changed, its content is still a risk. Even the single use of a video during a lesson provides the organization with engagement, and can introduce students to misinformation. Whether the indoctrination lures educators who have thus far been noncommittal about PragerU remains to be seen. But with other options diminishing in support, they may not have a choice.
