In October 2025, responding to the Department’s priority of promoting patriotic education that will guide its grantmaking, the NAEd drew upon robust research evidence from its synthesis report Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse and related efforts and called for a more expansive approach to “patriotic” education. In addition to suggesting changing the name of the priority to “civic education,” the Academy also provided the research support concerning the benefits of civic education. The Academy’s recommendations urge the Department to expand its priority to ensure that “education in the United States…cultivate[s] a sense of national unity while also embracing the rich cultural diversity and heterogeneity of points of view that define the American experience of democratic pluralism.”
