New York Mandated “Climate Education.” Conservatives Should Be Cheering… Seriously.

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.