Case File 03

Targeting Kids

PragerU's move into classrooms did not happen passively. It was built — with a dedicated executive role, a marketing budget run like a growth business, and donor-brokered introductions to the state officials who approved it.

A business built to reach children

PragerU's annual revenue has grown roughly sevenfold since 2017, tracking closely with the years it built out PragerU Kids and pursued state education approvals. Figures below are from the organization's own IRS Form 990 filings. source

In recent years, PragerU's marketing spend has run at roughly half of its total expenses — a deliberate strategy CEO Marissa Streit described in her own words:

A dedicated executive role

Reaching children is not a side effort inside PragerU — it has its own line of paid executive leadership, going back years, according to the organization's tax filings. source

PragerU's total revenue reached $76.6 million in fiscal year 2025, with net assets of $105.5 million. source

The donor-to-official pipeline

PragerU's entry into Florida and Texas classrooms was brokered directly by its own donors, according to email records obtained and published by NPR. PragerU board member and donor David Blumberg — who PragerU's CEO says separately provided the seed money to launch the PragerU Kids division source — personally introduced Streit to Florida's Commissioner of Education in a January 2023 email, noting the commissioner's family were "big PragerU fans." source

A second donor, real estate investor Richard Weekley, made a similar introduction to Texas education officials in June 2023. source Separately, state officials in multiple states were invited to PragerU's own studios to review and approve PragerU Kids videos for classroom use before those approvals were finalized. source

Filling the vacuum left by public media cuts

As Congress moved to defund PBS, PragerU positioned its kids' content as the direct replacement, in the CEO's own words:

PragerU has confirmed it is developing a new early-literacy show — extending its target audience below the K-5 range its current classroom content occupies. source

Regulatory embedding

Beyond media distribution, PragerU has pursued formal standing inside the textbook procurement system itself: the organization obtained a textbook dealer license in Montana, according to reporting cited in NPR's coverage of its school-partnership strategy. source

Outside verdict

Adam Laats, a historian of American education at Binghamton University, argues the strategy should be read as a media-growth playbook, not a curriculum-development one:

Laats was similarly skeptical that state "approval" translates into real classroom use: "It'd be like if a state approved Snickers bars as healthy food. Even if no students ate it, it's important for us to agree that that doesn't count as healthy food." source

The founder's own standard for "evil"

PragerU markets itself to parents as a values-driven alternative for children's education. It's worth weighing that against what its own founder has said on camera about a closely related subject. In an April 2023 debate with Catholic podcaster Matt Fradd, Prager was asked directly about AI-generated and animated child sexual abuse material:

Prager's reasoning, repeated in the same exchange and separately reported by the Heritage Foundation, was that "evil" requires a real victim: "Who is being hurt?" he asked. "You have to have a victim." source source He added, "I won't call a fantasy evil. There's too much real evil on earth for me to start being preoccupied with people's thinking." source

Child-safety researchers and prosecutors reject that framing. The Heritage Foundation itself, in the same piece, argues AI-generated child sexual abuse material is not victimless — it normalizes real abuse imagery, and U.S. courts have already ruled it is not constitutionally protected speech. source

Related: Is PragerU Kids safe for my children? · Who funds PragerU?