Steve Nuzum looks at the South Carolina push to limit what students may read.
A national playbook, driven by groups like Moms for Liberty and The Heritage Foundation, continues to develop to push an anti-public school narrative. South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver continues to demonstrate that she is willing to use that playbook to push a pro-voucher, pro-censorship, and ideologically biased agenda in South Carolina schools.
On September 11, Weaver, in her capacity as Superintendent of Education, voiced predictable outrage about the logical (if pleasantly surprising) decision by the state Supreme Court to remove direct funding for private schools from a school voucher law she supported, writing, in a Department memo that, “Families cried tears of joy when the scholarship funds became available for their children, and today’s Supreme Court ruling brings those same families tears of devastation”. (Of course, assuming Weaver and others read the plain language of the state Constitution, or witnessed the disastrous rollout of universal vouchers in other states, they should have known not to make promises to those families they couldn’t keep.)
The 2024-25 school year had already gotten off to a rough start, as Weaver passed a restrictive book challenge regulation and used a bureaucratic maneuver to make it much more difficult for South Carolina students to take and receive credit for AP African American studies.
Then, the following week (just in time for Banned Books Week), Weaver appeared in a long-form interview/ advertisement for controversial “edutainment” company PragerU on the company’s website. In the video, Weaver promotes a collaboration between the South Carolina Department of Education and PragerU.
Taken together, Weaver’s statements and actions heavily politicize and skew the selection of curricula and instructional materials toward her own preferred viewpoints, all apparently in the service of supporting privatization and voucher efforts that would help very few families in South Carolina and would ultimately strip funds and resources from public schools.
