This post, which is intended to be the first installment in an eventual series, provides basic background on the Department of Education’s recently-proposed priority on patriotic education and highlights its relevance to school diversity (and diversity issues more broadly). It provides a high-level overview of public statements and comment letters issued in response by organizations working in relevant fields. Then, it unpacks the language used by the Department to characterize “patriotic education,” focusing on its connection to the concept of American exceptionalism. Finally, we highlight several scholarly perspectives that might help inform a way forward. We hope this post will inspire further thought and discussion on how to respond to the proposed priority and similar actions from the Department.

On September 17, 2025, the U.S. Department of Education (ED or “the Department”) announced a proposed supplementary priority–which is a focused goal that guides governmental spending and activities–regarding “patriotic education.” ED stated that the “priority will be used in grant competitions across the Department to promote a civic education that teaches American history, values, and geography with an unbiased approach.” 

The Administration’s proposed priority defines patriotic education as:

“[A] presentation of the history of America grounded in an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of the American founding and foundational principles; a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history; and the concept that commitment to America’s aspirations is beneficial and justified.”

The Trump Administration’s interest in this topic is not new. During his first term, President Trump created the 1776 Commission in order to counteract attempts to center the experiences and perspectives of marginalized groups in American history (including those that emerged and/or were popularized via the 1619 Project). The 1776 Commission’s charter cites the promotion of “patriotic education” as one of its “duties,” and the project’s broader goals align with the present administration’s approach to education policy, including its executive orders on Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling (January 2025) and Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History (March 2025).

How have organizations responded to the proposed supplementary priority, and actions leading up to it, thus far?

Many major educational and legal organizations have pushed back significantly against this suite of actions. Responses to this proposed priority and the preceding Executive Orders have been issued by organizations including the American Historical Association, the Education Law Center, and Democracy Forward, along with the major groups of legislators such as the Congressional Black Caucus and House Democrats. 

In fact, the Department received over 5,000 formal responses to its invitation to comment on the patriotic education proposed priority. Comment letters highlighted several key concerns: 

• Federal overreach and curriculum control: Critics argue the priority violates federal laws prohibiting federal government interference in state and local curricula (e.g. see here and here). 
• Marginalizing and inadequately preparing students: House Democrats, urging a withdrawal of the proposed priority, also took issue with non-continuation notices being issued to federal American History and Civics grant recipients and other “concerning decisions…around civics education,” which they fear “risk further marginalizing students in historically disenfranchised groups and inadequately preparing our children for the future without an accurate understanding of America’s past.”
• Narrow definitions: Many organizations critiqued the narrow definition of “patriotism” implied by the White House, warning that a narrow definition of patriotism can result in the promotion of nationalist propaganda.

NCSD and several of its members signed on to a letter led by EdTrust, which asserts:

“[I]t would fail our nation’s students to imply that we have ‘admirably grown closer’ to our nation’s founding principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as laid out in the grant priorities. Ruby Bridges — a historical figure who is still living — bravely integrated her elementary school 65 years ago, yet more than a third of American students still attend a highly segregated school. The final goal of an equitable American experiment has not yet been achieved. It would be wrong to teach students it has, particularly when so many are still living with the consequences of our failure to meet that goal.”

What is “American exceptionalism,” and what does it have to do with “patriotic education?”

The Department’s proposed definition of patriotic education is inextricably linked to another concept: American exceptionalism–the belief that the United States is different from (and, in fact, superior to) other nations and therefore subject to different historical, social, political, and cultural forces. 

Different versions of American exceptionalism often tie this attitude to a national mission rooted in a sense of moral superiority. All forms stem from the Puritan self-conception exemplified in John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” which invokes the images of a “city on a hill.” This explicitly theological construction exemplifies one of two roots of the concept, the other being the liberal political tradition. Later scholars note structural continuities between Winthrop’s theology and later secular forms of American exceptionalism.

In the 19th century, writers like John L. O’Sullivan invoked exceptionalist rhetoric to reframe Westward expansion as a liberatory mission, using provincial and racialized terms to describe the march of “the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration.” By the 20th century, “consensus historians” turned this into an academic doctrine to explain why the United States represented an exception to factors leading to socialism and “native toryism” in Europe.

While consensus history would fall out of favor by the 1960s, exceptionalism remained alive and well in the public imagination throughout the 20th century. Most notably, Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric illustrates the breadth of this period’s exceptionalist thought. In his farewell address, Reagan used the image of a “city upon a hill…teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Exceptionalism also informed Reagan’s understanding of America’s role in the Cold War as part of “the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.” Taken together, these two examples of Reaganite exceptionalism illuminate the later 20th century American self-conception as “the land of the free.”

In many (but certainly not all) iterations, American exceptionalism can be understood as a strand of White Christian nationalist thought. White Christian nationalism is best identified through a belief that violence is required to enforce a “Christian” hierarchy wherein White Christian men enjoy privilege, freedom, and authority while all others are consigned to preordained roles. As demonstrated above, American exceptionalism has origins in Christian theology, and many of its most distinguished proponents have found violence necessary to pursue the exceptionalist “national mission.” Additionally, many iterations of the national mission have included White supremacist goals (such as the expropriation of land from indigenous peoples).

All of these forms of American exceptionalism set the stage for the term’s entry into popular discourse in the 2010s, when the Tea Party took up the exceptionalist mantle. For example, then-Senator Rick Santorum claimed that “[Obama] doesn’t see America as exceptional” and that “we are the first and only country that say [sic] rights come to us from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” The Obama era saw public debate between liberals and conservatives about what, precisely, made the United States exceptional. These debates set the stage for present-day exceptionalist discourse.

Today, this movement holds power across all three branches of government, and its position has changed. The goal has shifted from disruption toward what is known as “integration propaganda,” which is distributed through “the main channels of communication—newspapers, television, movies, textbooks, political speeches etc.—produced by some of the most influential, powerful, and respected people in a society.” According to Brett Silverstein’s Toward a Science of Propaganda, all modern societies require integration propaganda to maintain social cohesion, and the content of this propaganda reflects the needs of those in power.

As the position and propaganda needs of the Trump movement have shifted, so too has the version of American exceptionalism best suited to those needs. A dramatic example of this shift appears in rhetoric from the Heritage Foundation. In 2020, the Heritage Foundation released multiple articles on American exceptionalism that cautioned at length against the emulation of European nationalism (e.g. here and here). By contrast, Heritage Foundation Fellow Mike Gonzalez’s 2025 article “Diversity Is Not Our Strength,” shares the idea that the United States is dissimilar from European nations but is fixated on the concept of American nationhood. While prior rhetoric has been put to nationalist ends, the degree of self-conscious nationalism on display from contemporary writers like Gonzalez marks a recent development. In the Trump era, the conservative concept of American exceptionalism is defined by nationalism, with writers often resorting to racial terms to describe perceived threats, calling for immigrants to “cast off their foreign skin” to become American. 

While liberal scholars and politicians generally refrain from using the term “exceptionalism,” their beliefs often incorporate a different form of the same concept, which exists in dialogue with other exceptionalisms. Liberals who hold exceptionalist beliefs but who do not explicitly profess exceptionalism generally believe that the United States is exceptional for the multitudes it contains rather than for any one way of life that it imposes on those multitudes. To them, a multicultural pluralist democracy is this country’s greatest achievement, and it remains a work in progress.

This way of thinking is articulated by Claire Oberon Garcia, whose work as Colorado’s state historian focuses on empowering marginalized voices. Writing in response to the Trump Administration’s Executive Order Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, Garcia emphasizes the “variety of people of different classes, national origins, and genders,” concluding that multiple “narratives of the struggle for liberation and freedom unite us as Americans.” Where others have advocated a colorblind view of race as essential for national cohesion, Garcia and others contend that awareness of the plurality of cultures that comprise America ultimately bring Americans closer together.

Are there any specific thinkers whose work can guide us in this moment?

To unpack this discourse, scholarly perspectives on fascist rhetoric, offered by thinkers like Robert Paxton, Jason Stanley, Brad Evans, and Henry A. Giroux, provide a lens for understanding how movements can hijack and weaponize a country’s founding myths. 

Because current rhetoric often uses racialized language to appeal to white grievance, the work of political theorist Michael Feola is particularly relevant. His scholarship delineates how exceptionalism can function as racialized propaganda and offers strategies to counteract these narratives. Ultimately, these thinkers illustrate that there is no single definitive version of American exceptionalism; the term is a contested space between nationalist and pluralist ends.

As we navigate these competing claims, a guiding light can be found in the words of late civil rights leader and historian Vincent Harding. Drawing from Langston Hughes, he posited that “America has not yet been born.”

In an era marked by conflicting visions of what the United States is and ought to be, Harding offers one especially compelling way to reconcile this country’s founding ideals with its history of failing to live up to them:

“[An] idea began to overwhelm my consciousness. And in my own strange kind of thinking, I began asking: Is it possible that what we need now are midwives? That what we need to be now are midwives? And I asked one of the most gifted midwives that I know to tell me what is at the heart of her work, and what she told me had almost nothing to do with what you might think. At the heart of the work, she said, is to be kind of a life coach, saying through words, and through actions, and through attitudes to the mother – ‘You can do this. You are able to do this. Don’t be afraid. You can do this!’”

Harding’s words harken back to remarks given by one of NCSD’s founding members, john a. powell, during NCSD’s second national conference in 2012:

“We have not embraced [a robust public space that is inclusive] as a country. It’s not just schools, it’s housing, it’s infrastructure, it’s everything. It’s gated communities. And so, can we imagine a society where we have a robust public space that is really diverse, across racial lines, immigration lines, ethnic lines, and religious lines? It’s not clear that we can. It seems to me that’s the challenge.”

True patriotism may lie not in a mandate to praise the past, but in a collective effort to help “breathe life” into the nation’s true potential, in part through an honest and inclusive account of our history. Researchers and advocates in the school integration community have an important role to play in this conversation, and we invite your reflections.

Additional resources:

• john powell: Belonging is Co-Creation via the Prebys Foundation’s Stop & Talk Podcast (2023) – In conversation with Grant Oliphant about how to apply the concept of belonging without othering, powell clarifies: “And what we say in belonging, which is really important…when people say, ‘Why should I join that thing anyway–it’s your thing.’ And to me…that’s a profound question. And so what we say is that you don’t join somebody else’s thing in belonging when done well. You co-create.” (19:32)
• Staying Power with Danielle Wingfield via the Integrated Schools Podcast (2026) – Legal historian Dr. Danielle Wingfield helps us connect today’s attacks on public education to a long history of “massive resistance.” We talk curriculum fights, “parental rights,” privatization, and what it takes to build “homeplace”—and find the staying power to outlast backlash.
• Vincent Harding: Is America Possible? via the On Being podcast with Krista Tippett (2011, re-aired in 2021) – “Vincent Harding was wise about how the vision of the civil rights movement might speak to 21st-century realities. He reminded us that the movement of the ’50s and ’60s was spiritually as well as politically vigorous; it aspired to a “beloved community,” not merely a tolerant integrated society. He pursued this through patient-yet-passionate cross-cultural, cross-generational relationships. And he posed and lived a question that is freshly in our midst: Is America possible?”

This post was written by NCSD intern Hammatt Babin, with editorial assistance from NCSD Director Gina Chirichigno and PRRAC Policy and Development Associate Tessa Delgo. The author would like to thank Kelly Bare and Peter Piazza for providing feedback on drafts.