The U.S. Department of Education unveiled plans Wednesday to promote “patriotic education” in civics and history classrooms—a cause that President Donald Trump, who has accused schools of foisting overly critical views of the United States on students, has championed since his first term.
U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon announced patriotic education as a new priority for competitive grants, describing it as teaching that “emphasizes a unifying and uplifting portrayal of the nation’s founding ideals.”
The Education Department also launched the America 250 Civics Coalition, a group of 40-plus organizations that will produce educational programming for schools and universities in advance of America’s 250th birthday next year. The coalition includes the conservative America First Policy Institute; Hillsdale College, a private Christian liberal arts school; conservative educational media company PragerU; and Turning Point USA, a nonprofit that promotes conservative ideals on college campuses. Turning Point co-founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated last week.
“To truly understand American values, the tireless work it has taken to live up to them, and this country’s exceptional place in world history is the best way to inspire an informed patriotism and love of country,” McMahon said in a statement.
With these initiatives, the Trump administration’s Education Department has waded further into the contentious nationwide debate over how schools should portray the country’s complicated past and what role they should prepare students to play in its future.
For decades, Americans have argued over what values history and civics classes are supposed to inculcate—whether students should internalize narratives of American exceptionalism, or be invited to explore where the country has failed to live up to its ideals. In recent years, these questions have begun to loom large again in the public conversation.
During his first term, Trump convened the 1776 Commission, formed in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and ensuing racial reckoning in many American institutions, including schools and universities. The commission released a report in 2021, claiming the rise of identity politics and anti-American attitudes had distorted the way the nation’s history was portrayed. At the same time, individual states were taking steps to restrict the ways that teachers discussed historical and current events in classrooms. Since 2021, 20 states have passed legislation limiting how teachers can discuss racism or sexism.
Now, the Education Department has identified civics as a priority, announcing earlier this week that it will invest over $160 million in American history and civics grants—a large sum in a field that has traditionally struggled for funding.
Penny Schwinn, a former state education chief who’s currently serving as chief strategist in the Education Department, said Wednesday during a civics conference in Washington that the federal government should establish a “national mandate to say it is our requirement that every student in this country should be proficient in civics.”
That mandate, she said, should be accompanied by investing dedicated funding, removing regulations that impede flexibility, and holding states and schools accountable for meeting concrete goals.
Still, not all social studies education has the administration’s support. In recent weeks, 19 of the roughly 26 recipients of federal American History and Civics grants expecting another round of funding received non-continuation notices. One of the affected recipients, for example, provided training for future teachers to learn about Black, Mexican, and LGBTQ+ history.
Education Department highlights civic knowledge, ‘American values’
Civics is largely a bipartisan priority, but debates about how the subject should be taught often break down along partisan lines.
Republicans at the state level have criticized approaches to civics that encourage students to create solutions to local problems or write their representatives about issues that matter to them, a method often referred to as “action civics.” Texas lawmakers, for example, banned assignments that required “direct communication” between students and elected officials in 2021.
Instead, GOP lawmakers have championed expanding students’ civic knowledge—their understanding of founding documents, for example—and fostering their civic pride.
Recent efforts by national education groups to design guidelines for the field have tried to chart a middle path, emphasizing the importance of building both civic knowledge and civic dispositions.
The Education Department’s initiatives, though, lean toward prioritizing the country’s founding principles and what McMahon called, in a statement, “American values.”
“Celebrating the 250th is a worthwhile endeavor, and we appreciate efforts to engage the nation with the anniversary. The membership of this coalition seems to represent one side of the aisle,” said Louise Dubé, the CEO of iCivics, a civic education nonprofit, in an emailed statement.
“We know of many high-quality efforts that are in the works but are not yet represented in this group,” she continued. “We understand that this is an open coalition, and we believe it would be useful to our country to integrate more balance of perspectives so that we can as a nation exercise reflective patriotism at this critical time.”
For the patriotic education grant priority, a notice published in the Federal Register outlines proposed topics that would shape future grantmaking, including projects that deepen understanding of the founding documents, the influence of Western civilization, “the role of faith,” and “a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history.”
Under these proposed priorities, any organization that provides foundational constitutional education could find an opportunity for funding, said Donna Phillips, executive director of the Center for Civic Education, a Maryland-based nonprofit.
“We have so much to do in civic education that starting with our foundational principles is as fine a place to start as any,” Phillips said.