What is Heritage's "Phoenix Declaration"?

And which states are likely to sign on next?

Updated to add some info on the drafting committee.

True progress comes only by building on what has been learned and achieved in the past. Students should therefore learn about America’s founding principles and roots in the broader Western and Judeo-Christian traditions.

— The Heritage Foundation, “The Phoenix Declaration: An American Vision for Education”

Last month, Florida became the first state to adopt the Heritage Foundation’s “Phoenix Declaration,” a mostly-benign-sounding manifesto about education that smuggles the organization’s usual support for private school vouchers, ideologically-colored history, and the continual erasure of the separation of church and state.

The manifesto does at least superficially support easy-to-support public school values like “self-government” and “civil disagreement,” and argues for the importance of “engaging in the great conversation among the competing viewpoints that comprise our intellectual heritage, so that they freely make the best views their own.”

But, as is generally the case with the organization, the document also states some powerful built-in assumptions that should color the way readers understand Heritage’s framing of those values— something that is signaled pretty loudly when the authors say students should be able to “make the best views their own”. Which views? Well, at a minimum, the manifesto require that they include “Western and Judeo-Christian traditions” and the theological understanding “that good and evil exist, and that human beings have the capacity and duty to choose good.”

In this way, they echo one of the most controversial “lessons” from the rightwing edutainment factory PragerU, when founder Dennis Prager tells students that “If There is No God, Murder Isn’t Wrong”.

Who wrote it?

Mostly the Heritage employees and anti-public school advocates you might expect.

For example, the listed contributors on the drafting committee include Heritage’s Lindsey Burke, author of Project 2025’s chapter on revamping/ abolishing our federal education programs, and Johnathan Butcher, who is a visiting fellow at South Carolina’s Palmetto Promise, a “think tank” devoted to promoting vouchers and other Heritage policies (its founder, Jim DeMint, is a former Heritage president).

Butcher also wrote the foreword to an “dossier” of anti-teacher organization propaganda a few years back:

Who is promoting it?

One thing that makes it easy to read this ideologically biased intent into the “Declaration” is that it’s being promoted by people who have said these sort-of-quiet parts much more loudly.

Signatories include established culture warriors like former Oklahoma education secretary Ryan Walters (who famously tried to make the public school system pay millions for Trump Bibles), Florida education commissioner Manny Díaz, and South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver— all of whom appeared together at a Moms for Liberty “Joyful Warriors” conference, where they shared similar talking points, while also getting more explicit about what Heritage might mean when it decries “ideological fads”: namely, they denied the existence of transgender people and “woke ideology,” while pushing for school vouchers.

From left: Moms for Liberty’s Tiffany Justice, Ellen Weaver, Ryan Walters, and Manny Díaz at the 2023 Moms for Liberty Joyful Warriors Conference. Source: Moms for Liberty.

“Institutional Signatories” include a number of organizations pushing more explicitly radical visions for education.

One of these is the 1776 Project Foundation, authors of a model curriculum under the first Trump administration which the American Historical Association has described as “an homage to the Founding Fathers, a simplistic interpretation that relies on falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions, and misleading statements” and “a screed against a half-century of historical scholarship, presented largely as a series of caricatures, using single examples (most notably the ‘1619 Project’) to represent broader historiographical trends.”

Another is Parents Defending Education, which the Southern Poverty Law Center included in a profile in June about a “broad network of anti-student-inclusion groups”:

Framing itself as a watchdog fighting against what it calls “indoctrination” and “politicized classrooms,” the organization frequently files lawsuits against school districts and federal agencies. These legal challenges often target DEI initiatives, social emotional learning (SEL) programs, and policies designed to support LGBTQ+ students. Its consistent opposition to inclusive educational policies reveals an agenda focused on curtailing equity-based reforms and dismantling protections for marginalized student populations.​

Also included is the “National Association of Scholars,” (NAS) one of the organizations behind the initial rash of anti- “Critical Race Theory” bills. The inclusion of NAS provides important context for Heritage’s claims that it supports “civil disagreement” and students “mak[ing] the best views their own”. As I wrote in a piece about South Carolina officials’ opposition to student advocacy,

a bill filed last year in the South Carolina Senate would prohibit public schools from “encourag[ing] students into… participating in social or political activism such as protesting, marching, lobbying, or writing campaigns” or offering “course credit, incentives, or favorable consideration for participating in social or political activism”. This language comes directly from a model bill from the politically partisan National Association of Scholars (NAS), a group whose central goals include outlawing DEI and affirmative action.

You can view the full list of signatories at the end of the “Declaration” (which I have archived here).

Takeways

Florida is generally one of the states at the vanguard of rightwing culture war efforts, so it’s almost inevitable that other states will also sign onto the “Declaration”. Florida, for example, it was the first state which approved the use of PragerU materials in its schools, followed by Texas, Oklahoma, Montana, New Hampshire, Arizona, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Alaska.

So it’s likely that some or all of these states will move to adopt Heritage’s manifesto in the near future, as well.

This is especially concerning given that Heritage, as the main force behind Project 2025, has explicitly embraced a slate of education policy preferences that are anti-LGBTQ+, anti-worker, anti-Civil Rights and anti-public education.

So while the “Declaration” may not be the most radical or egregious public school policy document on its face, public education supporters would be wise to watch for signs that their states are considering adopting it. (South Carolina’s Ellen Weaver certainly seems like a good guess for a near-future adopter, given that she is a signatory and made headlines very early in her tenure as Superintendent by potentially quoting from the document when she required Department of Education staff to complete a statement about how they would help students reach their “full, God-given potential”. Weaver has also criticized students who protested book bans for being “misled” by adults, has made transphobic comments publicly, and discontinued state support for an African American Studies course.)

And by signing on, states may be enacting a goal to further continue the trend of inserting actual and explicit partisan and ideological biases