The Florida Board of Education voted on the declaration last Thursday an unanimously decided to adopt the adopted the declaration last Thursday, reports the Daily Signal. According to the state’s Commissioner of Education Anastasios Kamoursas, the principles laid out in the declaration are ones that both sides of the political aisle can agree.
The beginning of the declaration states, “In this time of moral and political crises, when too many schools have lost their way, it is the responsibility of America’s parents, educators, and policymakers to recommit ourselves to the central purposes of education.”
While only being voted on in Florida recently, the Pheonix Declaration was introduced earlier in February. The Heritage Foundation unveiled the new education principles at their Conservative Vision of Education Conference, and it was signed by a number of institutions, public officials, and individual conservatives.
Jason Bedrick, research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, says that they, in conjunction with a dozen other organizations, created a guide for American education. He says it's proactive rather than a reactive.
"We should be embracing a set of principles that we are affirmatively endorsing instead of just reacting against — things like parental accountability, like parental choice and responsibility, school accountability and transparency, character formation, academic excellence," lists Bedrick.
He reports that the usual opponents to conservative ideas are frustrated because they were not actually able to argue effectively with any of the principles. According to him, critics have accused proponents of an attempt to whitewash American history, but he assures that nothing could be further from the truth.
"It was interesting to see the opponents — over and over — completely unable to articulate anything they disagreed with in the Phoenix Declaration itself. Many even said, ‘oh, this sounds nice, or these principles sound unobjectionable, but…’ and then they argued with what they believed was some sort of hidden agenda," informs Bedrick.
