Over the last few years, there has been a reckoning in America on education, and the next few years could see radical changes as a result. Parents have been opting out of public schools by the millions and choosing alternatives, whether that’s homeschooling, private schools, or hybrid models. This isn’t due only to fatigue over lengthy COVID closures. It’s a response to ideological indoctrination, falling test scores, and administrators and school boards treating parents as if they have no right to know what their children are learning. 

All this is why change is in the air, and it will likely start with the Department of Education. Last year, every Republican candidate for president announced their intention to shut down this agency, and President Trump appears ready to fulfill that promise. There may be just cause for doing so. Public Education is nominally run by states and counties, but since President Jimmy Carter created the department in 1979, the Federal Government has played an increasingly intrusive and expensive role. In just a single school year, the DOE spends more than $18,000 per student—completely excluding state and county expenditures. And for that price, the American people have gotten worse results every year.  

Last year, the federal government’s Nation’s Report Card found that math and reading scores in the U.S. are at their lowest levels in decades. Whole school districts nationwide are described as “failing” and “drop-out factories,” and at some elite colleges, professors are finding their students can’t even read a book. Hence the growing consensus that something has gone very wrong.  

But it’s not enough to focus on what’s wrong with the status quo of education standards. We must also build a consensus around what education should look like. After all, as T.S. Eliot observed, education always assumes a basic philosophy of humanity and the world. It’s not enough to educate merely for skills or future employment, producing cogs who can take their place in the machinery of society. Eliot argued that education must also answer the fundamental question, what is man for? 

That’s why I’m thrilled about a new statement that offers this positive vision for education in America and that attempts to guide Washington to fulfill its promise of big change. The Phoenix Declaration is a new statement from the Heritage Foundation in cooperation with dozens of other conservative think tanks, colleges, leaders, and public officials. It proposes a set of guiding principles for American education reform.  

The authors begin by affirming that “too many schools have lost their way,” failing to shape children’s character and instill the virtues necessary for them to become self-governing citizens. The authors believe “it is the responsibility of America’s parents, educators, and policymakers to recommit ourselves to the central purposes of education.” 

Consequently, the first of their principles is parental choice and responsibility. They recognize that “Parents are the primary educators of their children” and should have the freedom to choose the learning environment that aligns with their values. If that’s homeschooling or private schooling, great! But public schools must also acknowledge and honor this “right and high duty of parents” by inviting them into their children’s education and empowering them to take ownership.   

The next principle is transparency and accountability. The authors affirm that since schools are “secondary educators,” they must “work with parents,” not attempting to replace or undermine them, but informing them on what and how their students are being taught. In the wake of transgender mania, this means schools must also start being more open with parents about their children’s “mental, emotional, and physical health.”

Truth and goodness are also core to the Declaration’s vision of education. Students must learn that there is objective truth, good and evil, right and wrong, and each subject should be grounded in that reality, not in “ideological fads.”  

The authors also call for schools to be places of “cultural transmission,” where students are taught “humanity’s accumulated knowledge and wisdom,” and encouraged to love and celebrate “our nation’s particular culture and heritage.”  

Schools should be especially clear about America’s founding values, and the “Western,” “Judeo-Christian” tradition that made our liberties possible. This is also reinforced by the Declaration’s core principle of citizenship and civic virtue. The authors point out that “ordered liberty, justice, the rule of law, limited government, natural rights, and the equal dignity of all human beings” are essential for students, as the future stewards of our republic, to understand.   

It’s shocking this next part needs to be said, but with public schools failing so badly, academic excellence is another core principle the system needs to rediscover. Students should be neither coddled nor held back from their full potential. They should instead be “rewarded for hard work,” and “allowed to go as far and fast as their talents will take them.” 

Finally, education reform in America must answer T.S. Eliot’s big question, what is man for? by emphasizing character formation. It is not enough to give students knowledge or skills if they’re never taught how to use them or why. Such pseudo-education only makes what C.S. Lewis called “men without chests,” enslaved to their passions and fit only for tyranny. 

I hope you’ll read the whole Phoenix Declaration for yourself and share it widely. In a time when America’s education system is so obviously failing, we need this kind of robust and morally informed vision for what successful education looks like. And with Congress, the White House, and many conservative organizations poised to act right now, there has never been a better opportunity for real and meaningful change.