Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Founders staked everything on a bet about human character. John Adams named the terms in 1776. "Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of a Republic." They did not expect liberty to sustain itself. It would live or die by the quality of the citizens who inherited it, and those citizens had to be formed.
Thomas Jefferson identified the tool that would form them. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." He pressed for a school in every ward because he grasped a plain truth. People who cannot read the laws will not govern themselves for long. Education was the engine of the American experiment, and it still is.
So measure the country against the standard its Founders set. On the 2022 Nation's Report Card, only 22 percent of eighth graders were proficient in civics, 13 percent in United States history, and 40 percent could not reach a basic level in history at all. Civics scores fell for the first time since the exam began in 1998. The slide started well before the pandemic and deepened through it. Civics and history are the basic equipment of self-government: how a bill becomes law, why the Constitution divides power, what citizens owe one another. Fewer and fewer students can explain any of it. How does a republic survive when citizens do not know they live in one?
Many forces drove those numbers down. One institution has fought hardest to defend the system that produced them, and those are the teachers' unions. Since 1990, teachers' unions have sent Democrats at least 94 percent of their campaign contributions. Over the past decade, Defending Education's DivertED project has traced more than $660 million from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers to progressive political groups, activist nonprofits, school-board campaigns, and organized fights against school choice.
This is a political operation, and its ambitions run well past pay and pensions. It is the vehicle the radical Left uses to shape what children are taught about their own country. Civic education gives way to ideological formation. Students hear a great deal about America's sins and little about its achievements. A generation is coming of age who is estranged from their own country.
The clearest evidence surfaced during the pandemic. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention drafted its February 2021 school reopening guidance, Randi Weingarten and the AFT were in the room. Emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show the union submitted proposed language, and House investigators found that the CDC gave the AFT "uncommon access" and accepted two of its recommendations. Weingarten acknowledged that AFT staff reviewed a draft and that two proposals were adopted, while denying undue influence. The guidance carried no force of law. Even so, it gave districts and unions one more official reason to keep classrooms closed while children slipped further behind. Who in that exchange was speaking for the students?
This is the barrier America must clear in its next quarter millennium. We cannot cultivate the virtue Adams called the foundation of the republic while a political machine runs the schools and treats students as leverage. We cannot ask young Americans to defend a system of self-government that no one troubled to teach them.
Teachers are not the villains in this story. Many stay in the union out of habit or quiet pressure, unaware they can walk away, while their dues bankroll causes they would never pick. Telling them the truth about their options is part of restoring the classroom.
The Founders handed down a republic worth keeping, and the work of keeping it is concrete. Protect every teacher's right to leave a union that does not represent them, and to keep their dues out of political spending they reject. Open the door to alternative teacher associations. Give parents real transparency about what their children learn. Expand school choice so no family is trapped. Rebuild history and civics standards worthy of a self-governing people. America reaches 250 this year. The task is to carry it to 300 with citizens who are free, informed, and equal to the republic they inherit.
Teacher freedom and student formation are the same fight, and it begins in the classroom.
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