Michigan State Representative Gina Johnson has introduced House Bill 5364 to require that revisions to academic content standards can only go into effect if they are approved by a concurrent resolution by both the Michigan Senate and House of Representatives. The bill was sparked by the Michigan Department of Education introducing new Health Education Standards, which “include recommendations that students be taught about gender identity and sexual orientation.” Representative Johnson, and the bill’s other co-sponsors, do not think that major changes to Michigan’s public education should be imposed without the consent of elected policymakers.
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) and the Civics Alliance agree strongly with that general principle that elected policymakers should have a say in state academic content standards—and of course we have opposed the imposition of the radical theory of “gender identity” in education, whether in higher education or in K-12 schools. Our model Legislative Review Act, indeed, seeks the same end as Representative Johnson’s bill. We therefore strongly endorse House Bill 5364.
We also endorse House Bill 5364 because it a response to the broader deformation of higher education that NAS was founded to fight. For two generations and more, radicalized professors have subordinated intellectual inquiry to their political goals—and, worse, conflated the two in their teaching, so that their students cannot tell the difference between education and political activism. The younger generations of professors, teachers, and academic administrators are ever less aware that that they are committing professional malpractice when they blend the two. The Michigan teachers and administrators who imposed major policy change concerning gender identity and sexual identity and called it “education” genuinely may not know that what they do is dereliction of their professional duty. They, and all their peers throughout American government and civil society who were mistaught by their own professors, are the more dangerous to the extent they politicize education without realizing they are doing anything wrong.
We endorse House Bill 5364—but we know that the solution to systematic misconduct by a generation of education professionals cannot rely solely on legislative vetoes. We need a new generation of education professionals, both teachers and administrators, who will know that you should not marble political activism with education. We must sow new schools that will educate the teachers and education administrators of tomorrow to educate rather than to impose radical politics.
The new schools might be autonomous institutions within existing universities. They might be entirely new foundations. Either way, they must teach our teachers with the enduring spirit of Western civilization, by means of the best traditions of liberal arts education. NAS’ own core mission is to proclaim that enduring ideal, to ensure that whatever new institutional form carries out the mission to teach our teachers properly, its own scholars will know that they should dedicate themselves, as their forefathers so splendidly have done for millennia, to searching for the truth.
NAS endorses House Bill 5364 as part of this larger mission. We emphasize this partly to reaffirm that core mission, and partly to say to all the Americans, citizens and policymakers, who resist politicization imposed in the name of education—You are right to resist this local tyranny, and you are part of a larger struggle to preserve the best of our nation, the best of our civilization. The point of the political struggle for education reform is to achieve this higher end.
Put another way: in these last days of December 2025, our republic is almost 250 years old. We work so that America will endure another 250. We endorse House Bill 5364 not just with 2026 in mind, but with 2276—so that our country will continue, generation after generation, to deserve the affection and loyalty of Americans.
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