By Chet Love
New York recently mandated “climate education” across K-12 public schools starting in the 2027–28 school year. Conservatives should be cheering—seriously.
Naturally, we should all lament that nearly 50% of all young New Yorkers can’t read at grade level. Clearly this new mandate will leave many students still unable to read or do math as they are now. But from another perspective, conservatives should be supporting New York’s right to do so.
As conservatives we believe that states should control public education. That principle allows states like New York to spend taxpayer money on climate education—but it also allows other states to use education as they see fit–free from progressive boondoggles and federal mismanagement.
So conservatives’ answer to New York’s climate mandate is not to attack it, but rather to embrace public education initiatives like those in Texas and Florida. There, conservative governors and legislators are wielding that same robust state authority to build something dramatically different.
Texas not only recently enacted substantial school choice reforms, it is also changing higher education and refocusing schools on their core academic mission- better student outcomes. Florida has gone further, restructuring entire universities like New College and reasserting state authority over institutions that had become intellectually captured.
President Trump’s administration has reinforced this states-first approach, reducing federal mandates, shrinking the Department of Education’s bureaucracy, and returning authority to states and local communities. Obama and Biden-era “Dear Colleague” letters that implicitly threatened schools with federal action if they didn’t follow the progressive line are gone, while the freedom to innovate is unleashed.
Now, if New York can mandate what its schools teach about the environment, Texas can re-create space for intellectual pluralism on campus and Florida can require phonics-first reading instruction. Like most Americans, there are some education policies that I support and others that I do not. But it’s most important that we live in a nation where states vigorously exercise their educational sovereignty so that bad ideas can be quarantined, good ones can spread, and citizens have the ability to both see the outcomes of those choices over time and vote for what is best for their community.
And the votes are coming in. Shaping public education has become a winning issue for conservative lawmakers. The results, especially for the students who need strong public education most, speak loudly.
Recent National Assessment of Educational Progress data, adjusted for poverty and race, show a striking reversal. The red states of Mississippi,Louisiana, and Alabama are now posting some of the strongest educational gains in the country. Black fourth-graders in Mississippi are reading at levels that surpass their peers in many wealthy blue states, after years of science-of-reading reforms. Florida’s aggressive school-choice expansion hasproduced charter-school students outperforming those in district schools across the vast majority of categories. Multiple analyses of 2022–2024 NAEPresults confirm the pattern: several Republican-led Southern states now outpace many blue states while spending far less per pupil.
Even on the issue of “climate education,” red states have a genuine opportunity. Rather than declining to engage with questions of energy and environment, conservative states can tell the competing (and true) story of how American innovation and free enterprise have produced some of the most dramatic environmental improvements in modern history. U.S. air quality has improved by almost every measure over the past half-century, driven by technological progress, rising living standards, and a property-rights tradition that gives citizens real standing to demand clean air and water. Meanwhile, the American shale revolution, a triumph of entrepreneurship, did more to reduce domestic carbon emissions than a generation of renewable energy subsidies.
Let New York teach climate anxiety and government solutions. Red states can teach the power of innovation, competition, and human ingenuity to solve hard problems, energy and environmental ones included. We will see where graduates are better prepared and more inspired to tackle their generation’s challenges.
Conservatives win the long game by celebrating proven ideas. In education, as in the rest of American life, the ideas that deliver for kids are the ones that deserve to win. Right now, the data suggest that the most exciting wins for the students who need them most are coming from laboratories run by conservative governors and legislatures, backed by a federal administration whose instinct is to empower states.
New York’s mandate will run its course. So will Mississippi’s reading reforms and Florida’s school choice experiment. The beauty of the federal system isn’t that every state gets it right — it’s that no state gets to get it wrong for everyone. Conservatives have been winning that argument for a decade.
Chet is CEO of Cornerstone Group International.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
“As conservatives we believe that states should control public education.”
NO . Parents should control the education of their kids .
Conservative parents in New York should advocate a balanced climate education. Teach truth, not propaganda.
Climate education shouldn’t exist in the 1st place – just as it didn’t for almost all of history for all the right reasons.
They banned religion from schools; but replacing it with AGW is ok?
The Department of ‘Education’ should abolished in it’s entirety.
The state of education in the United States is a scandal thanks to the national teachers unions. The children’s’ proficiency numbers are horrific. Twenty-two percent can read at grade level!
One of President Trump’s more important moves is to do away with the federal Education Department.
“The children’s’ proficiency numbers are horrific. Twenty-two percent can read at grade level!”
A good portion of this has to do with phones and social media, the two worst things to let a kid have access to. As a result, the kids aren’t interested in learning, which means no matter how good the teacher is, the kids largely won’t be engaged.
Very good teachers do manage to get kids engaged. The problem is getting mostly such very good teachers given the difficulties that the unions cause.
Good teachers were rare even before the unions went woke.
And, as we can see with inner-city youth, education starts at home. Without a stable family unit, outcomes are generally poor.
So when the gangs of “black teens” are beating up lone white people, they can scream “Climate change MFer!!”
Climate education has been embedded in the UK for quite some time (and many cohorts) now.
The BBC helpfully explains it thus:
A really simple guide to climate change
Human activities are causing world temperatures to rise, posing serious threats to people and nature. Things are likely to worsen in the coming decades, but scientists argue urgent action can still limit the worst effects of climate change. – BBC
And in the children’s education output
Most scientists agree that human behaviour is causing this increase in temperature. Humans are increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, within the atmosphere.[…] Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industry are now more than three times higher than they were in 1965. Greenhouse gases absorb any heat that is reflected from the Earth. A greater concentration of greenhouse gases means that more heat is absorbed and so the planet warms up. – BBC
The question becomes how do you de-programme the nation?
“The question becomes how do you de-programme the nation?”
Sharia law.
Like…. Dearborn and its famous 05:30 am amplified call to prayer?
Now joined by Brooklyn.
Hopefully, they will inform the students that the main greenhouse gas is water and about 80% of the earth’s climate is water and ice. For more advanced instruction the students should be taught about the Köppen climate classification system.
Science does not proceed based on consensus.
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” – Albert Einstein
“Rather than declining to engage with questions of energy and environment, conservative states can tell the competing (and true) story of how American innovation and free enterprise have produced some of the most dramatic environmental improvements in modern history. U.S. air quality has improved by almost every measure over the past half-century, driven by technological progress, rising living standards, and a property-rights tradition that gives citizens real standing to demand clean air and water.”
And exporting heavy industry to third world s-hole countries, who don’t give a damn about environmental standards.
Climate
educationpropaganda. There, fixed.Neither propaganda nor education but religion.
The climate narrative can only survive in an environment of ignorance, and the whole thing is designed accordingly. Even something trivial as the GHE is misrespresented over and over, so that there is total confusion about it. The rest of the physics is all in the models, you shall not know about it, but just believe the models..
And then all the “education” is about down stream nonsense, completely irrelevant to the dogma, which shall not be discussed anyhow. Of course they love to sell fearmongering and propaganda as “education”. But that only goes so far.
The chances still are that if you do more education, you might actually succeed. And while the “facts” will be well selected to not conflict with the dogma, presenting it always comes with the danger of triggering critical thinking.
“Meanwhile, the American shale revolution, a triumph of entrepreneurship,
did more to reduce domestic carbon emissions than a generation of renewable
energy subsidies.”
Please stop sucking up their mythical carbon issue and stop calling it carbon when it’s carbon dioxide.
The left will use this to fill kids heads with propaganda.
The ones that ‘matter’ will repeat back to the teacher what she lectured and go about life as usual outside the classroom. Take the easy ‘A’
I gave several examples of perverse national (No Child left behind, ‘standardized’ testing) and state (public teachers unions opposing charter schools) educational policies in ebook ‘The Arts of Truth’. Overall, the US educational results are a disgrace that should not be tolerated.
When half of New York school kids cannot read at grade level, teaching junk climate science to them will only have half the impact it otherwise would—in a perverse sense a good thing.
At what reading level do you realize you’re drinking a cup of coffee made with beans that were supposed to be extinct 20 years ago?
A DSA (Democratic Socialist of America) candidate for state senate in NY recently declared that home schooling is a form of child abuse and needs to be outlawed. In his view, all students should be forced to attend state run schools.
As Tom Daschle, former Democrat Majority Leader in the US Senate once declared; “If you want to professionalize, you must federalize.”
“Conservatives should be cheering….”
WTF are you talking about? Yes, state governments and not the federal government should determine education standards for their states. BUT that does NOT mean that anything the state does should be endorsed by its residents. If Albany tells all NY State students to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, should NY State parents go along with this advice? Heck no! Supporting NY schools’ continued brainwashing of its pupils is capitulation to the Left’s pseudoscientific climate change ideology, so this mandate should be opposed at every turn.
Right – that’s the absolutist self destructive nonsense conservatives in the USA fall for
– embracing absolutelist nonsense they have been told by their favorite MSM outlets instead of using common sense and a balanced approach just to scratch their narcissistic itch to show to the world how much they stand for their values = wokeness.
The same thing with their freedom crap they have been indoctrinated with.
They call any kind of censorship and propaganda from their government tyranny – but as soon as it is executed by corporations they absolutely don’t mind.
They’ll take any shit from them.
Corporations that grew big with government contracts, buy politicians, that privatize gains and socialize losses, get artificially pumped up by QE etc – and after all that they still have the nerve to call it a free market.
The Constitution is about restricting government, not corporations. Maybe you haven’t figured that out.
The Bill of Rights restricts government. The Constitution outlines what they are allowed to do. The Supreme Court is supposed to make sure they don’t violate the BoR nor exceed the what the Constitution grants them.
It’s not perfect but by and large keeps the socialists from running too wild.
So what’s the solution, get rid of private enterprise and turn over everything to the government?
You should try studying up on the way things work over here in the US. What country are you from? China?
News Tip ?
According to the BBC, Burnham will use his first day in Downing Street to announce plans aimed at accelerating North Sea oil and gas development after years of delays under former Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
Let’s hope that is true. That would go a long way towards getting the UK out of its Net Zero dilemma.
Surprisingly, he’s also walking back from digital IDs – likely because of his ~ahem~ voter base
Unlike his predecessor, Burnham seems to have good political antennae. Digital ID is electoral poison, like Net Zero, and he knows it.
If you mean he flip flops depending on which way the wind is blowing, I agree, however, this country needs a strong leader who puts our needs first – that’s not Burnham
“refocusing schools on their core academic mission- better student outcomes”
Not sure about that vague mission statement.
I expected my kids’ school to teach them to read, write, count and think.
Everything else was up to the parents.
The World needs good parenting. Too many kids don’t have sufficient parenting.
As long as the climate education includes the decades of botched predictions of climate catastrophes made by the “experts.”
Climate education should be part of every state and provincial science curriculum, except it has to be properly balanced. Currently too much of it has been designed by leftists, environmentalists, and climate alarmists. So it’s up to those at the top of education departments and parents to demand that all sides of the theory be presented, not merely the “crisis” narrative.
So wuwt denizens have heart attacks if kids have to learn climate science. Perhaps they prefer to learn conspiracy theories about pizza gate or how Trump won the 2020 election.
If they were being taught climate science, we wouldn’t mind. But they’re not being taught anything, they’re just being told that humans are evil.
There is no science, in climate science.
I would rather kids be taught things that are true. Something you have not proven a skill for.
Climatology and astrology – two peas in a pod, except sometimes astrology gets it right. Pure coincidence, but that beats climatology.
I’m sure no one here has an issue with kids being taught about the climate, as long as the teaching isn’t just the usual propaganda.
Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the extreme left activist.
There is no such thing as climate science, and it should not be taught in schools. Basic and applied science in primary and secondary school curricula should stay close to their primary subject matter. Mention of climate or climate change should only be a brief lesson in the appropriate science class curriculum under the broad topic of atmosphere weather and climate. After that, move onto other topics. By all means climate and sustainability (so-called) should be kept out of unrelated subjects such as language arts, mathematics, etc. I was never taught Shakespeare in my algebra class, so why should a student be indoctrinated with climate change dogma in his history or English class?
After nearly 50 years as an environmental professional, I have little to no regard for people who have degrees that include the word “environmental” or “sustainability” (very generalist and activist degrees), and I do not believe there are “green jobs.” (There are just jobs, some useful and some practically useless) In fact, I studiously avoid using the term “sustainability” (a dirty 14-letter word) or the word “green” as applied to environmental matters. The Earth does not appear green from space, a brown desert scape can be healthy, and a green pond in East Texas can be algae-infested and eutrophic
I admire this guy’s enthusiasm but I don’t think New York teaching climate education is a positive thing. The classroom is no place to fail. Where the battle should take place is in the process of creating the curriculum. The curriculum should only come into existence with the best of both sides battling for what should be included. In a fair fight the alarmist side will get their backside handed to them every time. The resulting curriculum will be suitable for the whole country.
Unfortunately the climate indoctrination in New York will produce a very large number of young skulls full of propaganda mush.