Getting America’s schools back on track.
Fixing American education begins with figuring out what to do about the United States Department of Education (ED). The Trump Administration wants to eliminate the ED at once. Kenin Spivak’s recent article for The American Mind argued that policymakers should simplify the ED and reduce its power, and then consider whether to eliminate the department entirely. Regardless of the option they ultimately choose, policymakers should at minimum return most of the ED’s powers to determine the content and structure of education back to the states and local school districts.
Why should the first priority of education reformers be to eliminate the Education Department, or at the very least remove most of its power over American education?
The National Association of Scholars’ report Waste Land: The Education Department’s Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism provides chapter and verse on how the ED misbehaves. The Education Department and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) use four big tools to impose ideologically extreme policies on states and school districts. These tools are:
- Informal race and sex quotas;
- Disparate impact theory, which criminalizes policies that affect identity groups differently regardless of whether they have discriminatory intent;
- Bureaucratic, textually unjustified expansion of antidiscrimination law to include (sexual) harassment, sexual orientation, gender expression, and gender identity; and
- Suppressing liberty (for example, due process, free speech, and religious freedom) whenever it conflicts with quotas or so-called antidiscrimination.
ED and OCR bureaucrats also use Dear Colleague Letters and “voluntary” case resolutions to sidestep federal accountability laws. States and school districts “voluntarily” avoid the process-as-punishment of an OCR investigation, and the ED claims that since it never took action, it doesn’t have to justify itself to policymakers or the public.
But that cannot be where education reform ends. Education reformers must then work at the state and local level to create a new education system.
Education reformers are for high expectations in education. We are for depoliticized education. And we are for transmitting to our children the knowledge of Western civilization and America’s history and ideals. We are for education that prepares our children for college and a career that supports American prosperity, security, and liberty. We are for education that helps our children become self-reliant citizens capable of exercising moral judgment in private and public life. And we are for a practical way to achieve these goals in every state and school district.
We will pass laws and enact regulations that ensure our public K-12 schools are guided by these principles. Education reformers must focus on public schools, because that is where the vast majority of American children are educated. But we can’t just rely on laws and regulations to change what’s being taught in our country’s classrooms. Laws restraining ideologically extreme teachers will never be as effective as educating a new generation of K-12 teachers who want to teach properly. This means we must also reform the colleges and education schools where our K-12 teachers are taught.
K-12 public school instruction has become ideologically extreme. Far too many of our high school graduates are semi-literate and simply parrot radical propaganda. Radical activists have redesigned our public high schools to produce Americans who are not ready for college or careers, much less prepared to contribute to the scientific and technological research that’s needed to defend America from peer rivals such as China.
Education reformers should start with instituting the state-level reforms proposed by the NAS and the Civics Alliance. These include model state legislation for K-12 schools, undergraduate education, education schools, and accreditation and licensure. Some of these model laws, such as our model Partisanship Out of Civics Act and our Universities Nondiscrimination Act, would complement the Trump Administration’s work on the federal level to defund ideologically extreme activism by enacting state-level restraints on authoritarian, illiberal activism in public K-12 and higher education.
We will remake our public schools by reforming the four core academic content standards in K-12 education: social studies, science, mathematics, and English language arts.
Existing state standards in these core disciplines are largely mediocre, politicized, and written in incomprehensible education-school jargon. Most draw upon the bad models provided by the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, the Next Generation Science Standards, and the Common Core State Standards for mathematics and English language arts. Americans should discard these models for the ones NAS has created in collaboration with Freedom in Education: American Birthright: The Civics Alliance’s Model K-12 Social Studies Standards (2022), The Franklin Standards: Model K-12 State Science Standards (2024), The Archimedes Standards: Model PreK-12 State Mathematics Standards (2025), and The Hawthorne Standards: Model PreK-12 State English Language Arts Standards (forthcoming 2026).
Education reformers in each state can use these four model standards to inform the revisions of their own state standards, ensuring their state’s standards are rigorous, depoliticized, and lucid. They then can use these standards as a means to reform their public education systems, including curriculum frameworks, textbooks, teacher trainings, and assessments.
In addition to improving state standards, our colleges and universities also need to be reformed. We must set up new administrative homes within our colleges and universities that are free from capture and corruption by the ideologically extreme education establishment, where a new generation of professors can teach depoliticized courses. This new postsecondary establishment should serve all students, but we need it particularly to educate the K-12 teachers who will teach our children.
With the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, NAS has drafted the General Education Act (GEA). The GEA transforms general education requirements into a core curriculum, which includes most of the courses you’d need to become a K-12 social studies or humanities teacher. We list the rest of the courses in our model Heritage Certificates Act (HCA). The HCA requires humanities and social studies teachers to earn either a Western Heritage Certificate or an American Heritage Certificate. Our model School of Intellectual Freedom Act would set up an independent school in a public university dedicated to teaching all the courses in the core curriculum, whereby teachers who passed would earn the Heritage Certificates.
Finally, we’ve drafted a model School of Classical Education Act (SCEA), which provides public support for increasing the number of classical education teachers. Classical schools reject the dysfunctional bureaucracies and pedagogies that afflict mainstream education in America. Instead, they focus on teaching moral character, civic virtue, the liberal arts, and Western civilization. Increasing the number of classical teachers is one of the best things education reformers can do for K-12 education.
All these model acts together will increase the number of properly educated K-12 teachers. Once enough of the new generation of teachers fills up our schools, they’ll complement external reform from outside our schools with voluntary change from within.
Getting rid of the poison from Washington is where the battle begins. Afterward, we must fight in the 100,000 combined school districts in the 50 states to reform the content of American education. Education reformers must fight for a vision that can make American education great once more.
Excellence, depoliticization, intellectual freedom, knowledge and appreciation of Western civilization and American history, a liberal arts education that fosters virtuous citizenship—these are not just the ideals of the National Association of Scholars, but also the enduring ideals of American education.
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