Iowa’s Department of Education has failed to provide properly revised social studies standards for the state’s public schools. The latest draft standards improve upon the previous social studies standards — but they fall far short of the original legislative goal stated in House File 2545 for social studies standards revision: “to make Iowa’s educational standards the best in the nation.”
Worse, these standards still impose on Iowa the politicized framework and counterproductive pedagogy of radical national organizations such as the National Council for the Social Studies and the American Institutes of Research. These standards prove that the department will not be able to fulfill the legislative intent of H.F. 2545 until it appoints an independent commission to revise its social studies standards properly.
In May 2024, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law H.F. 2545. H.F. 2545 directed the Iowa State Board of Education to review and revise Iowa’s social studies standards, “with a focus on United States history, government, founding philosophies and principles, important historical figures, western civilization, and civics.” H.F. 2545 detailed at length what Iowa social studies standards should look like. In doing so, it sketched a necessary and wonderful strengthening of Iowa’s public K-12 social studies education.
Iowa’s Department of Education, unfortunately, crippled the revision process by using the same process and personnel, in alliance with the same status quo national organizations and their affiliates, that produced Iowa’s original, catastrophically flawed social studies standards. Even more unfortunately, the department decided to hire a consultant associated with the highly politicized American Institutes for Research to lead Iowa’s social studies standards revision process. One cannot expect a different result by using the same radical methods and personnel that caused the problem the legislature and governor were seeking to solve.
Here’s what’s wrong with Iowa’s new social studies standards:
- Confusing User Experience: The Standards retain the reader-unfriendly labyrinth of Anchors, Standards, and “Disciplinary Content or Practice Clarifications,” rather than a simple list format.
- Continued Dependence on a Content-Free, “Inquiry”-Based Approach: The Standards double down on the professionally flawed, prone-to-abuse, and hollow “inquiry-based learning,” which focuses on vague, unguided questions to the exclusion of direct, factual answers. When the Standards do include content knowledge, it usually confines it to the “Disciplinary Content or Practice Clarifications,” which are subordinated to the extremely vague, skills-oriented Anchors and Standards. Most of this content is optional.
- Partisan Activism: The Standards includes “action civics” (vocational training in partisan activism) prompts throughout the grade levels, above all in material associated with the Anchor Inquiry Practice of “Civic Engagement and Participation.”
- Missing Documents and Ideas: The Standards improve, but not sufficiently, their emphasis on Liberty and the Documents of Liberty. These remain very patchily covered. The Standards also import a concept of “Cultural Liberty” which camouflages radical identity-politics ideology. The Standards lack virtually all of the instruction in liberty and its documents needed to fulfill the intent of H.F. 2545.
- Geography in Name Only: The Standards retain the ideological redefinition of geography that abandons the basic acquisition of learning the location of countries, states, rivers, etc., and substitutes in its place environmental activism, where students learn about how humans and capitalism have ruined the earth, and support for mass, open-borders migration, whose root cause is defined as “climate change.”
- Missing History: The Standards‘ historical coverage contains significant omissions and distortions. The Standards should bolster American history to include colonial history and the history of our common culture. It also should include a required Western Civilization sequence, which provides the coherent narrative of the ideals and institutions of liberty that formed America, as well as the histories of liberty, faith, science, and technology. The Standards also should include a standard on Iowa history, which focuses on the political, religious, economic, and cultural history and achievements of Iowans from frontier days to the present and removes all identity-politics distortions.
- Politicized Material and Omissions: The Standards retain a long catalogue of politicized material and omissions.
- Missing Patriotic Content for Early Learners: The Standards contain virtually no patriotic content for K-2. This contrasts notably with Florida’s excellent 2021 Civics and Government Strand.
- Dependence on NCSS Materials: The Standards derive too much of their structure and emphases from the National Council for the Social Studies’ ideologically extreme definition of social studies, as well as from the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, which replaces content knowledge with insubstantial and opaque “inquiry”; replaces social studies pedagogy with identity politics ideologies such as critical race theory; and inserts ideologically extreme activism pedagogies such as Action Civics.
Iowa’s policymakers should start the social studies standard revision process over again. They should direct the Department of Education, following the example of states such as South Dakota that have successfully revised their standards, to appoint an independent commission, without Department of Education personnel, to redraft Iowa’s social studies standards.
Participants should include history and civics professionals with proven knowledge of the American founding and our country’s ideals and institutions of free self-government, including members of the Center of Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa. Such a commission should examine the Civics Alliance’s model American Birthright social studies standards, as well as the fine alternate models of Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Virginia.
Iowa’s citizens and policymakers should not be satisfied by the Department of Education’s inadequate revision of Iowa’s social studies standards. They deserve better and they should demand better.
This article is based upon a public comment by the National Association of Scholars and the Civics Alliance.
David Randall is director of communications at the National Association of Scholars. His academic writing includes work on early modern British history.
