Conservatives must make education a policy priority — not only because it will help us win elections, as we saw in Virginia last month, but because education lays the very foundation for this movement and what it’s trying to do, which is to preserve the principles that founded this nation and the documents in which they are described.

A coalition of conservatives published a strategy this week that will help us do just that. Led by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and the Heritage Foundation, the signatories laid out a three-pronged plan: First, state legislators need to pass legislation that rejects the toxic racialism found in critical race theory. Second, the states must increase transparency regarding the curricula taught in public schools so that parents can be as involved as possible. And third, lawmakers need to expand school choice and give parents the power to pull their children out of the public school system if that’s what they would prefer.

Regarding CRT and its inclusion in public school curricula, state lawmakers can prevent teachers and students from being “compelled to affirm, believe, profess, or adhere to any idea that violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” the agenda says. They can also ban courses of instruction and units of study that "may direct or otherwise compel students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to any idea that violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” And, they can prohibit public schools from contracting services from professional development persons, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion officers, “who promote racially essentialist doctrines and practices that have been held to violate the Civil Rights Act.”

To expand curricula transparency, lawmakers can give parents the right to “bring a right of action against any public institution engaged in racial discrimination,” according to the agenda. And, they can require school boards and other educators to compile all curricular materials, “including syllabi, lists of textbooks, and teacher-created assignments and books, worksheets, along with content that educators use for teacher professional development training sessions,” into an online database made available to the public.

Finally, state lawmakers should embrace school choice policies that give parents the power “to choose how and where a child learns.” Specifically, they should fund students instead of systems by providing each child with an education savings account, or education vouchers, that parents can use to pay for whichever school system they prefer: public, private, charter, or at home.

These are realistic policies that every conservative should get behind. Students should be taught how to learn, not what to learn, and parents should be involved with their students' education every step of the way. Those goals have to be our priority, and this agenda makes them possible.