A who's who of culture warriors has helped the Heritage Foundation conjure up yet another set of demands for American public education. Think of this--The Pheonix Declaration--as the most current list of demands from the right wing privatization crowd.
The tone was set by news releases:
Dr. Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, emphasized the need for a proactive approach in education. "For too long, education freedom advocates have been on defense," he stated. "It’s time to go on offense."
Yeah, "education freedom advocates" surely haven't been vocally and aggressively attacking public education for the past umpteen years. Organizations funded by powerful billionaires have been after public education for decades, while simultaneously claiming to be David up against Goliath. Sure. One of the key pieces of the right wing pitch is to complain about being oppressed and outmatched.
That's especially a claim of the christianist nationalism crowd, and those are Heritage's people. The Phoenix Declaration is itself a fine example of how to take a few values that ought to be unobjectionable and, by surrounding them with a particular context, make them icky.
Every child should have access to a high-quality, content-rich education that fosters the pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful, so that they may achieve their full, God-given potential. America’s schools must work alongside parents to prepare children for the responsibilities of adulthood, including their familial and civic responsibilities, by cultivating excellence in mind and heart.
See? A few sentences from the introduction seem mostly on point. Except that phrases like "the good, the true, and the beautiful" and "work alongside parents" are recognizable dog whistly phrases; if you aren't in with the Heritage crowd, you might not get what they have in mind (we'll get to that). "Responsibilities" comes up twice, and hints at a grim "buckle down and get to work" view of life. Likewise, the pursuit of "excellence in mind and heart" is a little off for a life goal (I don't see a lot of scripture in which Jesus exhorts folks to be excellent). None of it is objectionable, and yet... In particular, all of these point toward being directed by outward measures.
Schools should equip students with the knowledge, character, and skills necessary to succeed in life as individuals and to fulfill their obligations as members of their families, local communities, and country. In order to empower families, advance educational excellence, transmit our culture, and uphold the foundational principles of our constitutional republic, we believe the following principles should guide American families, schools, and policymakers
"Obligations." And "transmit our culture." Education isn't to serve the interests of the human students, but to make them useful meat widgets.
Well, maybe it gets better. Let's look at the actual principles.
Parental Choice and Responsibility
Parents are the "primary educators" of their children and should be free to choose "the learning environments that align with their values" and best meet the child's needs. This language of parental rights sounds so much nicer than "Educating the child is the parents' problem, and the rest of us shouldn't have to worry about it or pay for it." On top of being selfish, it's also short-sighted.
And it's not just that this principle is a justification for selfishness and privatization. Any policy that elevates the rights of parents and ignores the rights of the child is a dangerous policy, because not all parents are awesome. The majority of parents are just fine, but I can tell you stories, and so can every other teacher, of parents who were a danger to the safety and well-being of their children. Children are not chattel, and making loud noises about a parent's "right and high duty" doesn't turn young human beings into property.
Nor do I think that anyone at all is served by learning environments that teach the flat earth or extol the greatness of nazis.
Parental "rights" without guardrails is both an excuse to privatize education and to abdicate collective responsibility for making sure that each young human has a shot at an education that doesn't suck.
Transparency and Accountability
The concern here is for parents. "Schools, as secondary educators, should work with parents, not attempt to serve as replacements for them," which is a good thought as long as those parents don't pose a threat to the safety or well-being of the children. The principle especially mentions "misguided policies that hide information from parents" about student mental, emotional or physical well-being, which is a dodge, because what we're really talking about here is what to do when students want to hide information from their parents, and the idea that children have no rights and parents have all of them. Schools have no rights over students; they do, however, have a responsibility to protect students, and in a country where the vast number of homeless children are homeless because their parents threw them out for being LGBTQ, that's not always an easy call.
Are there schools where staff have gone a step too far? Sure, just as there are parents who go a step too far. This will never be an easy issue to litigate, and anyone who thinks they have a simple answer (Either parents or the school are always right) is just wrong.
Truth and Goodness
I'm going to quote this whole part, because this is the shaky foundation on which the whole wobbly house rests.
Education must be grounded in truth. Students should learn that there is objective truth and that it is knowable. Science courses must be grounded in reality, not ideological fads. Students should learn that good and evil exist, and that human beings have the capacity and duty to choose good.
God save us all from people who believe there is one Truth, and they personally know what it is. Teaching The Truth rather than teaching truth fundamentally changes the whole act of education into something else, something that does not serve anyone, not even the people trying to peddle their particular Truth.
Too often the idea that Truth can be known is delivered by someone who believes they know it. Here Heritage just hints at all the attendant problems. "Science courses must be grounded in reality, not ideological fads" is a fine argument for favoring evolution over creationism in the classroom, but I'm betting that's not what they had in mind. And the notion that humans ought to choose good over evil is not wrong, but it's useless, because everyone thinks they're choosing good-- as they see it.
What Heritage wants to argue for is education that is grounded in their idea of reality and which adheres to their view of good. Let's just skip any debate about whether they are right or not--they are sure they're right and people who disagree with them are wrong and that should be the end of it.
Cultural Transmission
Heritage argues that transmitting accumulated human wisdom and the particular culture and heritage of a country as the "central purpose" of education, but again they assume that "what is our culture" has a single known answer. They are arguing for one particular version-- "America’s founding principles and roots in the broader Western and Judeo-Christian traditions"-- of culture, as if that culture has not changed on a yearly basis, as if that culture is not informed by constant debates about what it is, as if there aren't a whole world of roots outside "Western and Judeo-Christian traditions."
Yes, education is absolutely part of transmitting and preserving culture. But the Heritage track record suggests that what they really mean is stripping the current culture of all those influences that aren't supposed to be there and restoring it to some sort of factory setting from an imaginary golden age. And that is the opposite of cultural preservation and transmission; it's locking down a preferred culture and trying to stifle its natural growth and change.
Character Formation
Education should, in fact, prepare children "for the challenges and responsibilities of adulthood," though it would be nice if it also prepared them for the joys and beauty of human life. Thing is, there's a whole body of work intended to formally include character education-- it's social and emotional learning, the SEL that Heritage really hates. Education, they say here, should cultivate "virtues and discipline." As if the list of virtues is an immutable knowable objective thing, and not subject to arguments over virtues such as empathy.
Academic Excellence"Schools should help students achieve their full potential, going as far and as fast as their talents will take them." Well, yeah. Yeah, also, to content-rich curriculum. "No fads or experimental teaching methods." Sure. Academic excellence should be the focus. Can we get rid of the Big Standardized Test now?
Citizenship
I cannot object to a call for "an educated and patriotic citizenry," even though I know none of us will agree on what those terms actually mean, though it's clear that Heritage means that patriotic citizens agree with Heritage politics-- "ordered liberty, justice, the rule of law, limited government, natural rights, and the equal dignity of all human beings." But I'm pretty sure that Heritage's beef here is not with guys like me but with...well. they call for schools to "cultivate gratitude for and attachment to our country and all who serve its central institutions" and call for honest history that still shows that "America is a great source of good in the world." Might want to check with President Musk and Dear Leader on those.
The Phoenix Declaration is artfully done (it should be--the drafting committee contains 15 folks, some of whom are pretty smart). Some of it is silly (a call to put the pledge back in classrooms) and much of it uses broad enough terms that everyone can agree with what it says even as they totally disagree about what it means. It blows its anti-woke dog whistle hard enough to awaken the oldest, deafest labrador, and it skips over some of its biggest self-contradictions-- parents should have their choice of a school that matches their values, but all schools should be based on the values listed here. It also has a curiously dour and joyless view of education (and life), an old man waving his fist at clouds while complaining about all the lazy wokey Kids These Days.
But mostly it assumes that all reasonable Americans see it this way, and while it name checks "civil disagreement" at one point, it doesn't particularly embrace pluralism or diversity as American virtues and values.
The folks who signed off on this run the ideological gamut from A to B. Kevin Stitt, Manny Diaz, Frank Edelblut, Corey DeAngelis, Jim Blew, and folks from Hillsdale College. Institutions include the 1776 Project Foundation, Parents Defending Education, the Center for Christian Virtue, and the United States Christian Network.
Do I think this is some sort of attempt to put a fig leaf over the christianist nationalist version of education? Not really. I'm not entirely sure who the audience for the declaration is supposed to be.
I don't think it's this slice of the right wing trying to pretend to be reasonable. I think this is them believing that they are reasonable and right, that their view of education is reasonable and proper, and if they just lay their core beliefs out without the usual purple prose and rhetoric (say, Heritage Foundation via Project 2025) they will, at the very least, provide their allies with a document that lets them point and say, "See? We're not so unreasonable." There's no fig leaf here, just some of the folks who usually are waving torches and writing anti-government manifestos like Project 2025, sitting down with some of their calmer brethren and trying to stay cool.
It's remarkably cool for a declaration that we live in a time of "moral and political crises," that promises to be a beacon back toward some vision of the central purposes of education. But as I've tried to point out in some instances, many of these words are open to a broad variety of interpretation, and the core belief "There is One Truth and I personally Know what it is" really gets in the way, particularly when that truth includes items such as "all reasonable people would agree with me" and its corollary "unreasonable people should shut up." So much of the declaration could mean anything, though its creators clearly have certain meanings in mind.
Maybe it's the created-by-committee problem. Maybe it would be better if Heritage just came out and said what they really mean; I mean, I generally think they're wrong, but at least it's usually easy to see what they mean. Even the choice of phoenix is vague-- what set the old bird on fire, and what are the ashes that this one is supposed to be rising from? Are we supposed to be following the light it gives to some other place, or following the light to the phoenix itself, which is...? It's an incomplete image. The phoenix is mythical and non-existent, which fits the affection for a golden time that never existed. But I can think of better birds for this declaration.
