Florida lawmakers wary about adoption of Heritage Foundation pledge

The Florida Board of Education’s adoption last week of Heritage Foundation values will prompt possible perfidious legislative action and administrative rules to carry it out, a Florida House Democrat said Monday. 

Last week, the state board adopted The Phoenix Declaration, a paragraphs-long statement pledging to parental involvement in education, patriotism in school, the nation’s founding documents, limited government, and the equal dignity of all human beings. 

Rep. Robin Bartleman, a Democrat from Weston, is leery of what that will mean in practice.

“I’m very nervous about it and I think we’re going to see bills tied to it, and I think we’re going to see rules and policies tied to it that we never expected. If you read Project 2025, it’s scary,” Bartleman said during a Monday morning news conference. “These are just a couple of paragraphs about what they’re going to do and the devil is going to be in the details.”

The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank. It authored Project 2025 in advance of the 2024 presidential election, a conservative policy blueprint for the incoming administration.

“I have to tell you, I was scared as hell when I read Project 2025, and the fact that The Heritage Foundation authored this, and they only gave us a few snippets of paragraphs, what does that look like in implementation? What does that mean for our public school teachers, what does that mean for our children?” Bartleman said. 

During the board meeting last week, Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas said the principles in the statement are ones “that everyone across the board, on both sides of the aisle, can agree with.”

That didn’t ring true to House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell from Tampa. 

Driskell said Republican lawmakers and the governor are “trying to force this type of information down children’s throats, that it really is about trying to indoctrinate them with a conservative ideology, not really teaching them to think.”

Driskell said parents in her community “are concerned about the politicization of our public schools.”

The Heritage Foundation introduced the statement during the Conservative Vision of Education Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, in February. 

The declaration has seven categories: Parental choice and responsibility; transparency and accountability; truth and goodness; cultural transmission; character formation; academic excellence; and citizenship.

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