The Phoenix Principles and the Fight to Rebuild American Education | Jason Bedrick and James Shuls

Jason, let's look ahead.

You know, this is still all very new, right? 24, the actual declaration.

The book is launching now.

Florida adopted last year.

Where do you see this going? Are there other states that might look at what Florida is doing and say, you know, we want that as well? Yeah, how do you see kind of next three to five years? Yeah, I mean,

I've had conversations with policymakers in a number of different states where I think people are interested, you know, Just to name a few, Oklahoma, Texas, New Hampshire, Iowa.

We've also had conversations with school board members across the country.

And so we'll see what happens sort of in the next legislative session.

I think right now everyone's sort of thinking about the upcoming election.

But next legislative session, I think we may see some more states come on board.

But really, it's that implementation that comes afterwards.

And so...

One of the resources we have in the book itself is the appendix, which is designed for school board members.

Because as James was saying earlier, if this is just a symbol and that's it, it's not very useful.

But what it does, you know, again, to use this term, it has to orient any institution.

So if the school board adopts it and says, this is what we are about, then you can use it to set the agenda.

And every minute that you are spending on this is a minute you are not spending on whatever the left is pushing, right? Whether it's CRT or DEI or SEL, whatever it is that the new acronym that they come up with, you're not just being reactive and pushing back against those things.

Because I've talked to so many school board members who get elected because they're against this or that or Common Core or what have you.

And then they get on the school board and it's like, okay, I'm the dog that caught the car.

What do I do now? Well, here is what you do.

And so it has a whole series of questions that help them.

So, okay, let's say that we are going to adopt this and we care about citizenship.

So, you know, what materials are in our curriculum that are teaching children to be good citizens, right? And how are we evaluating that? You know, what sort of civic rituals do we have? Are we saying the pledge? Are we singing the national anthem before sporting events, right? So everything, all of these questions, if the school board members are asking principals and superintendents, by the next meeting, we want you to have answers for all of this.

That is how you set the agenda.

It shows the principals and the school leaders, this is what we want out of your schools, and we're going to hold you accountable for it.