Eight months after becoming the first state in the nation to formally adopt the Phoenix Declaration, Florida’s State Board of Education has taken its most concrete step yet toward turning that document’s seven guiding principles into classroom practice.
At its July 22 meeting, the Board approved sweeping revisions to the state’s teacher preparation framework—amending the Florida Educator Accomplished Practices and the rules governing approval of teacher preparation programs, while adopting an entirely new rule laying out the Uniform Core Curricula that every state-approved teacher preparation program must follow.
The new rules demonstrate that the Phoenix Declaration—an affirmative vision for renewing American education endorsed by dozens of leading academics, educators, policy experts, and public officials—is more than merely symbolic.
When the Board ratified the Phoenix Declaration last November, its chair, Ryan Petty—one of the original public officials who endorsed the Declaration—called the declaration a “unifying foundation” for education in the state. The new educator preparation standards represent the first major test of what that foundation looks like when translated into binding rule.
“When I proposed that the State Board of Education adopt the Phoenix Declaration, my hope was that its principles would shape the future of education in Florida,” said Petty in an interview following the vote. “I’m encouraged to see that vision beginning to take hold. The State Board’s recent adoption of updated educator preparation standards reflects many of the Declaration’s core principles, ensuring they are woven into the preparation of Florida’s future teachers.”
According to Petty, the workgroup responsible for drafting the new rules integrated the Phoenix Declaration by “intentionally incorporat[ing] its guiding principles throughout the educator preparation standards and Uniform Core Curricula where they naturally align with effective instructional practice, professional responsibilities, and educator development.”
The first standard of the new Florida Educator Accomplished Practices Progression Plan requires that each educator “understands that he or she is held to a high moral standard in a community, and fulfills the expected obligations to students, parents, the public and the education profession.” To meet that standard, Florida educators are now expected to “embed principles of the Phoenix Declaration into daily professional actions and decision-making.”
According to Petty, the workgroup also “embedded its principles into the standards themselves, ensuring they are reflected throughout the preparation of Florida’s future educators.”
That embedding is visible throughout the text of the new Uniform Core Curricula rule. The rule opens by declaring that “a proper education is focused on the formation of a child’s character” and should cultivate “the virtues and discipline necessary for self-governance”—language that tracks directly with the Phoenix Declaration’s Character Formation principle.
Teachers, the rule states, “should model respect for our nation’s founding documents and the ideas they contain about ordered liberty, justice, the rule of law, limited government, natural rights, and the equal dignity of all human beings.” That language mirrors the Phoenix Declaration’s Citizenship principle.
The rule’s most significant academic addition is a required foundational course for educators titled “Foundations of Civil Discourse, American Exceptionalism, and Western Civilization.” In line with the Phoenix Declaration’s Cultural Transmission principle, the course requires teacher candidates to acquire the knowledge necessary to “accurately and faithfully transmit to their students the founding principles, documents, and history of American constitutional government.”
The course will include a deep study of the philosophical roots of the American founding—natural rights, consent of the governed, separation of powers, etc.—as well as its intellectual lineage from the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions, through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the democratic revolutions that shaped the American constitutional order.
Aspiring teachers must also be prepared to model civil discourse and reasoned disagreement in their own classrooms, a direct echo of the Phoenix Declaration’s Citizenship principle, which calls for teaching “the value of civil disagreement.”
The new rule also reinforces the Declaration’s commitment to Academic Excellence by mandating that every teacher candidate demonstrate competency in the cognitive science of learning, including cognitive load theory, retrieval practice, and working and long-term memory—an evidence-based emphasis consistent with the Declaration’s call for “proven teaching methods” over “fads or experimental teaching methods.”
The new curriculum requirements take effect for teacher preparation programs beginning Aug. 1, 2027, giving colleges of education roughly a year to redesign coursework and clinical training around the new standards.
Florida is demonstrating how to translate the Phoenix Declaration’s principles into specific policies with real-world effects, such as standards for training teachers.
As Petty put it, “This is an important first step in strengthening our classrooms and better preparing educators to meet the needs of every student.”
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
