Nothing kills a student’s interest in a subject quicker than when they see their teacher’s heart isn’t in it. If the teacher doesn’t see what they’re teaching as important or accurate, why would the students?
Oklahoma State Department of Education Superintendent Ryan Walters doesn’t seem to understand this. He recently announced a new collaboration with the conservative nonprofit and media organization PragerU to administer a required test for educators moving to Oklahoma from California and New York because those states have what Walters calls “progressive education policies.”
Walters says his “America First” approach to classroom instruction will evaluate educators on their understanding of the Constitution, “American exceptionalism,” and “fundamental biological differences between boys and girls.” While Walters attempts to pass this off as merely a test of knowledge akin to other state-level accreditation tests teachers must pass, it is in reality a measure to coerce teachers into parroting and promoting “America First” ideology.
Some teachers I know oppose Walters’s plans because it’s directing them to bring Trumpism into the classroom. Others are unhappy with this gross violation of their academic freedom. They’re correct about both, but there’s another, perhaps more fundamental problem with the approach Walters is mandating: Top-down teaching simply does not work.
I mentor young teachers, including novice teachers at the start of their careers, and I always tell them the same thing: “Never go into a class with a lesson that you don’t believe in. You’re the one who needs to be in front of those kids every day, and above all, you need to maintain their respect. None of the people who developed the lesson are going to be in front of that class with their reputations on the line.”
Walters’s action is part of a trend in conservative states to curb teachers’ academic freedom and coerce them into teaching what conservatives find acceptable. Over the past four years, eighteen states have passed laws that restrict how supposedly controversial issues can be discussed in classrooms, imposing what the National Education Association calls “gag orders” on teachers. Laws like these have prompted First Amendment experts, such as Amy Reid of PEN America’s Freedom to Learn initiative, to call 2025 a “banner year for censorship.”
Part of what Walters and other advocates for an “America First” curriculum seek is to eliminate perceived liberal bias by browbeating teachers into sticking with their prescribed curriculum, which will inevitably portray U.S. history in the way conservatives want it to be taught.
For example, in the PragerU Kids video “Leo & Layla Meet Frederick Douglass,” Douglass, a fierce abolitionist who was instrumental in recruiting Black soldiers for the Union Army, downplays slavery, describing it as merely a “compromise” made by the Founding Fathers “to achieve something great.”
PragerU’s version of Douglass even criticizes fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, saying, “William refuses all compromise, demands immediate change, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he likes to set things on fire,” and compares him to rioters during the Black Lives Matter movement.
Even in California, a generally liberal state and where I teach, the textbooks teachers use often ignore or soft-pedal key facts about malicious American actions. Take, for example, the framing of the Cuban Missile Crisis. According to most textbooks used in U.S. public schools, the United States faced Soviet aggression when the U.S.S.R. placed missiles in Cuba, and former President John F. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade on Cuba in 1962 to defend the United States.
These textbooks downplay the fact that the Soviet attempt to install missiles in Cuba was done in response to the 1961 U.S. deployment of Jupiter missiles on the Soviet border in Turkey, just sixteen minutes from Moscow and Leningrad. But this crucial framing—of Kennedy pushing the war to the brink of nuclear war to dismantle the Soviet missiles whose installation the U.S. had itself provoked—remains absent from most curriculum.
The typical American textbook similarly misleads when explaining the origins of the Vietnam War. Students are taught that the more than 2.5 million Americans who served and 58,000 who died in Vietnam were fighting for democracy. The critical refusal of the United States and the South Vietnamese government—itself a creation of the United States—to hold the reunification elections agreed upon in the 1954 Geneva Accords, receives far less attention.
One widely-used high-school level history textbook, Modern World History, does not mention the elections at all.
More often, this history is included, but understated. For example, The Americans: Reconstruction to the 21st Century, tells us:
South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, a strong anti-Communist, refused to take part in the countrywide election of 1956. The United States also sensed that a countrywide election might spell victory for Ho Chi Minh and supported canceling elections. The Eisenhower Administration promised military aid and training to Diem in return for a stable reform government in the South.
This provides students no sense of the likelihood that, had these elections been held, there would not have been a Vietnam War, and millions of lives would have been spared. A teacher “sticking to the textbook” and afraid of appearing “anti-American” might not give this crucial fact the attention it deserves.
When discussing modern issues, PragerU videos are often almost comical in their misleading simplifications. For example, in the widely-distributed video Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy, host Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress tells us “More fossil fuel, more clean water—the more that we have used fossil fuel, the cleaner our water has become.” He explains:
“We turn on a tap and it’s there. But getting it there takes a massive amount of energy. Think of the man-made reservoirs, the purification plants, the network of pipes. In the underdeveloped world, it’s a much different story. They lack the energy, so they lack clean water. More fossil fuel, more clean water.”
Obviously it is our water infrastructure that gives us clean, easily-accessible water, regardless of how the electricity to power that infrastructure has been generated. When underdeveloped countries lack clean water, it’s principally because they do not have the capital to invest to create this expensive infrastructure. Apparently, learning to recognize the logical fallacy that correlation does not imply causation is not part of the PragerU curriculum.
Epstein further misleads by showing a chart demonstrating that, globally, both the use of fossil fuels and modern sanitation increased from 1990 to 2010, thus proving that fossil fuels “have made our environment cleaner.” Making the “environment cleaner” is misleading, as it completely ignores carbon emissions, the critical problem with fossil fuels.
The PragerU video also tells us that fossil fuels promote “air quality” because there has been a downward trend in U.S. emissions from 1970 to 2010 “even though we use more fossil fuel than ever.” This is “achieved . . . by using anti-pollution technology powered by fossil fuel.”
For one, both the Clean Air Act in 1970 and the de-industrialization of the United States—moving polluting factories from the United States to other countries—have played key roles in reducing U.S. emissions. Moreover, factories and technologies that minimize environmental impact can be powered by renewable sources.
Some of PragerU’s claims are particularly insidious because they allege facts that even many educated American adults might not realize are false.
For example, on the anniversary of D-Day last month, PragerU, purporting to tell us “What happened on D-Day,” showed a photo of U.S. soldiers at Normandy and stated “If not for these men who stormed the beaches eighty-one years ago today, the Nazis could not have been defeated.”
While the men at D-Day were indeed heroic, most German military leaders realized the war was lost long before June 6, 1944. The Nazis had been in retreat since July 1943, when the Soviet Union defeated Germany in the largest tank battle in history, the Battle of Kursk. On D-Day the overwhelming majority of the German army was still in the east fighting the Soviets. For the war as a whole, more than 80 percent of Nazi casualties were inflicted by the USSR.
Are students to know the truth about the defeat of Nazi Germany, or just PragerU’s flattering “America First” distortions?
As difficult as it can sometimes be, as teachers, it isn’t enough to present the material. We need to make the subject engaging, and that starts with believing we are teaching the truth. Social studies teachers holding a variety of perspectives can do that, but no teacher can do it in an ideological straightjacket.