Read the complete 2026-10-17 briefing
Parents should demand schools teach America’s founding principles
Jason Bedrick’s lecture ties America’s founding principles to weak student scores in history and civics, putting parents’ role in education at stake.
Parents, not school bureaucracies, decide what their children carry forward about America, and The Heritage Foundation has named what is at stake. Heritage posted the warning on X on Oct. 16, 2026. For families who keep faith at the center of home life, that warning lands at the kitchen table, not in a think-tank seminar.
The Declaration sets a standard for America
Those principles come from one document. Jason Bedrick is a senior research fellow at Heritage’s Center for Education Policy. In a Feb. 23 lecture in Tempe, Arizona, he invoked the Declaration of Independence as the source of the country’s founding principles. He quoted Calvin Coolidge’s 1926 verdict: “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final.” Coolidge said the same of the nation’s prosperity: “Our Declaration created them.”1 Equality and inalienable rights give a child a fixed standard to measure the country by, and parents a standard to measure the school by.
Few eighth-graders reach proficiency in history and civics
By that standard, the schools are failing. Bedrick cited the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that only 13 percent of eighth-graders scored at or above proficiency in U.S. history and only 22 percent in civics. The gap follows those children into adulthood. Bedrick pointed to the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s finding that in some recent years fewer than half of American adults could name all three branches of government1. Would any parent accept a school where only 13 percent of eighth-graders scored at or above proficiency in U.S. history?
Honest history can preserve founding principles
The fix is honest history, and honest history is not a sanitized one. Bedrick said students must “learn the whole truth about America—its merits and failings—without obscuring that America is a great source of good in the world and that we have a tradition that is worth passing on.” That standard answers the 1619 Project. Bedrick said the project “advanced the claim that the true Founding of America was not 1776 but 1619, when the first slaves arrived.”1 A child taught the injustices together with the ideals that condemned them learns why the country corrected its wrongs. A child taught only the injustices has no reason to keep the inheritance his parents want to hand him.
Parents should hold schools to that standard
Parents have the authority to demand that balance, and the Supreme Court recognized that authority a century ago. Meyer v. Nebraska, decided in 1923, upheld parents’ liberty to direct their children’s education. Two years later, Pierce v. Society of Sisters held that the child “is not the mere creature of the state.”2 Parents should take three questions to the next school board meeting. Does my child read the Declaration of Independence? Is the founding taught as the standard America answers to? Who decided the curriculum, and will the board show it to parents? Families that ask those questions out loud, and vote on the answers, will decide what the next generation learns about America.