The National Association of Scholars (NAS) and the Civics Alliance deeply regret that Iowa’s Department of Education has failed to provide properly revised social studies standards. The new standards improve upon the previous social studies standards—but they fall far short of the original legislative goal stated in House File 2545 (HF 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 (AIR). These standards prove that the Department will not be able to fulfill the legislative intent of HF 2545 until it appoints an independent commission to revise its social studies standards properly.
In May 2024, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed into law HF 2545. HF 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.” HF 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. NAS and the Civics Alliance were honored that some of our model legislation informed HF 2545.
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 AIR 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.
In September 2025, NAS and the Civics Alliance communicated to the Iowa Department of Education our Public Comment on Iowa's Draft Social Studies Standards. Iowa’s State Board of Education approved much the same standards on January 15, 2026. Our evaluation of the Draft Standards in our Public Comment hold equally true for the accepted Standards. These may be summarized as follows:
- 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. The Standards’ labyrinthine structure cripples transparency, effectiveness, and accountability.
- Continued Dependence on a Content-Free, “Inquiry”-Based Approach: The Standards retain and 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: there is no expectation that students learn the optional content.
- Partisan Activism: One of the most popular social studies activities employed by left-of-center partisan activists is action civics, also known as “protest civics,” which uses the pedagogy of “service-learning” to substitute vocational training in partisan activism for classroom civics education. Unfortunately, the Standards includes “action civics 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 progressive political distortion—and, indeed, radical identity-politics ideology. The Standards provide instruction in a few documents of liberty, such as the Constitution, but lack virtually all of the instruction in liberty and its documents needed to fulfill the intent of HF 2545.
- Geography in Name Only: The Standards, unfortunately, retain instead the distorted definition of what school geography has become in recent years. This ideological redefinition of geography 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. These substantially degrade the Standards.
- 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, which uses effective pedagogy to teach K-6 students about America.
- Dependence on NCSS Materials: Many flaws in the Standards proceed from one general cause: the Standardsunfortunately derive too much of their structure and emphases from the National Council for the Social Studies’ (NCSS) ideologically extreme definition of social studies, as well as from the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards. The C3 Framework in particular 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.
The Iowa Department of Education, in drafting these revised social studies standards, has failed to follow policymaker intent and failed to produce adequate social studies standards. A charitable judgment would say that while they have tried to comply with the law, they have not proven capable of properly revising Iowa’s social studies standards.
Iowa’s policymakers should start the social studies standard revision process over again. We recommend that they direct the Department of Education, following the successful example of states such as South Dakota that have successfully revised their standards, to appoint an independent commission 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. We suggest that such a commission should examine our model American Birthright social studies standards, but we also suggest that it examine the fine alternate models of Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Virginia. Effective revision of Iowa’s social studies standards, fulfilling the legislative intent of HF 2545, will best be carried out by a commission independent of the Department of Education personnel.
Iowa’s citizens and Iowa’s 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.
Photo by Brandee Taylor on Unsplash
