Letter: Public Comment on Iowa’s Draft Social Studies Standards

Editor’s Note: The National Association of Scholars (NAS) and the Civics Alliance work to ensure that every state has academic standards that promote first-rate education and protect school children from political indoctrination. We promote reform of content standards in every state, along the lines modeled by the Civics Alliance’s American Birthright: The Civics Alliance’s Model K-12 Social Studies Standards, and we have been asked by Iowa citizens to comment on the Department of Education’s current Draft Iowa Academic Standards for Social Studies (2025) to help inform the Department as it begins the process of reviewing and revising these standards. We conclude that the Draft Standards improve upon the previous social studies standards—but that important flaws demonstrate the need for further revision. In fact, we conclude that the Draft Standards fall far short of the original legislative goal for social studies standards revision: “to make Iowa’s educational standards the best in the nation.” The Draft Standards should be used only as one of many models to inform a fresh drafting process. This new effort will best fulfil the intent of Iowa’s elected policymakers.

The following letter was sent to McKenzie Snow, Director, Iowa Department of Education.

Director McKenzie Snow
Iowa Department of Education
400 E 14th St.
Des Moines, IA 50319
mckenzie.snow@iowa.gov

September 2, 2025

Dear Director Snow,

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) and the Civics Alliance work to ensure that every state has academic standards that promote first-rate education and protect school children from political indoctrination. We promote reform of content standards in every state, along the lines modeled by the Civics Alliance’s American Birthright: The Civics Alliance’s Model K-12 Social Studies Standards,¹ and we have been asked by Iowa citizens to comment on the Department of Education’s (hereafter, the Department) Draft Iowa Academic Standards for Social Studies (2025), to help inform the Department’s revision of its social studies standards.²

We conclude that the Draft Standards improve upon the previous social studies standards—but that important flaws demonstrate the need for further revision. In fact, we conclude that the Draft Standards fall far short of the original legislative goal for social studies standards revision: “to make Iowa’s educational standards the best in the nation.”³The Draft Standards should be used only as one of many models to inform a fresh drafting process. This new effort will best fulfil the intent of Iowa’s elected policymakers, including Governor Kim Reynolds, Chair Skyler Wheeler, Chair Steve Holt, Vice Chair Samantha Fett, Representative Helena Hayes, and Representative Henry Stone.

Primary Merits

The Draft Standards, created in response to House File 2545 (2024),⁴ do improve upon Iowa’s previous social studies standards. The previous social studies standards possessed virtually no content knowledge. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s The State of State Standards for Civics and U.S. History in 2021 gave Iowa’s social studies standards a D for Civics and an F for U.S. History.⁵ The Draft Standards now include more content knowledge, especially in Grade 5-12. The Draft Standards take care to address the specific directions of HF 2545 regarding content knowledge about Western civilization and American history and government.

The Draft Standards cite our American Birthright, and we recognize elements within the Draft Standards we believe were directly informed by the American Birthright model; we are delighted and honored that the revision committee has included some material we suggested.⁶ We will not catalogue everything the Draft Standards do correctly, but items such as SS 5.10 (p. 54) on the Civil War are very good.⁷

After years of neglect, The Draft Standards have begun to recognize that content knowledge matters, and they include more content knowledge that Iowa’s public school students should learn than did Iowa’s previous social studies standards.

Missed Opportunities

Yet the Draft Standards ultimately just add local improvements to a fundamentally flawed framework. Instead of starting fresh, in accordance with the goals and spirit of HF 2545, the Iowa Department of Education decided to base their revision of Iowa’s social studies standards on the existing standards’ framework. The provisions of HF 2545 were then “bolted-on” to the existing structure. The Draft Standards, therefore, retain an extensive catalogue of flaws, whose cumulative effect is to weaken the Draft Standards systematically, and to produce social studies standards that come far short of the expectations and vision set out in HF 2545.

Flaw No. 1 | User Experience

The Draft Standards retain the reader-unfriendly labyrinth of Anchors, Standards, and “Disciplinary Content or Practice Clarifications,” rather than a simple list format. It is telling that the Draft Standards provide 3 pages simply to explain how to read the rest of the standards;⁸ lucid standards require no such explanation. This structure makes it difficult for teachers, policymakers, or parents to comprehend what precisely is being taught in Iowa’s public schools—and therefore makes it difficult for policymakers or parents to hold school districts accountable for what they teach in the classroom.

The Draft Standards’ labyrinthine structure cripples transparency, effectiveness, and accountability. The complex, confusing, and vague structure, as we shall see below, also is an essential means for imposing an “inquiry-based learning” framework on the Draft Standards, and subordinating content-knowledge to “inquiry” skills. This subordination directly undermines the Department’s attempt to provide content-rich standards.

Recommendation: Use Commonsense Language

The Department should redraft the Draft Standards in a straightforward list format divided by individual grade band in Grades K-8 and by course in Grades 9-12. It should remove Anchors and all other complicating categories that are not written as standards and that impede comprehension of what Iowa’s social studies standards actually mandate. Iowa’s social studies standards should be lucid, concrete, and precise throughout. If it requires detailed explanation on how to read them, then they are not readable.

Flaw No. 2 | “Inquiry”-based Approach

At first glance, the Draft Standards appear to devote substantial space to content knowledge. Guiding Principle 5 declares that “A high-quality social studies education improves reading comprehension by increasing students’ content knowledge,”⁹ and the “Disciplinary Content or Practice Clarifications” seem to contain a significant amount of detailed content. A closer look at the details of the Draft Standards, however, reveals that there actually is far less content and far less devotion to increasing students’ content knowledge.

The Draft Standards have not actually shifted to instruction focused on content knowledge. Instead they 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. “Inquiry-Based Learning” encourages teachers to replace instruction in content with instruction in “skills” where each student chooses their own adventure—instruction which becomes hollow when not accompanied by content knowledge.

When the Draft Standards does 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. More seriously, most of this content is optional, presented as examples or possibilities. In other words, there’s no expectation that students learn the content at all—including much of the most apparently content-rich material.¹⁰

The Department caveats a large majority of the content listed with the crippling stipulation “May include”; only a minority is specified as “Must include.” In other words, the Draft Standards guts the reforms desired by Iowa’s policymakers by underscoring that the new material is optional. The Department’s practice gives the unfortunate impression that it intended to lull Iowa policymakers with deceptive camouflage.

We understand that the Department does not want to micro-manage the curriculum of school districts and individual teachers, and we agree with that choice. Yet a state academic content standard, if it is be provided at all, should be a useful document. It should help new teachers who are unfamiliar with social studies content and will benefit from guidance about social studies content. It should help provide prompts for state and school district assessment. It should help professional development, curriculum frameworks, model lesson plans, and textbook creation. Fundamentally, it should allow parents to check in easily on what their child is supposed to be learning and judge yes-or-no by comparing the standards to their child’s assignments, textbooks, and homework.

The inquiry-based learning framework and the associated lack of required content severely weaken the Draft Standards for all these purposes.

Recommendation: Employ a Content-Based Framework

The Department should remove the “Inquiry-Based Learning” framework from the Draft Standards and replace it with a framework focused on content knowledge.

Recommendation: Omit Inquiry Practices

The Department should remove all Anchor Inquiry Practices from Iowa’s social studies standards. It might consider providing them as optional Curriculum Frameworks, with no coercive power affecting teachers’ practices or school districts’ funding. If Iowa must include skills in its social studies standards, it should adopt Louisiana’s lucid “Skills and Practices.”¹¹

Recommendation: Guarantee Content Specifics

The Department should change all “May include” items in Disciplinary Content or Practice Clarification to “Must include”. The Draft Standards thereby will acquire substantially greater content-knowledge richness and rigor. It would be reasonable to prune the list of “May include” items as it makes this transformation, so long as it preserve the bulk of the items currently listed as “May include”. A great many Disciplinary Content or Practice Clarifications unfortunately lack either the direction “May include” or “Must include” (e.g., Grade 7); all such items should add the direction “Must include”.

Better yet, the Department should move the “Disciplinary Content or Practice Clarification” into the main standards. Of course, this reform would require fundamental revision of the entire structure of the Draft Standards, which in turn would necessitate starting anew the revision of Iowa’s social studies standards.

Flaw No. 3 | 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.¹² Unfortunately, the Draft Standards includes “action civics prompts” throughout the grade levels, above all in material associated with the Anchor Inquiry Practice of “Civic Engagement and Participation.”¹³One high school “Civic Engagement and Participation” standard directs teachers to lead students in the highly politicized and fundamentally inappropriate activities of “advocacy” and “equity initiatives.”¹⁴ The Draft Standards also have redefined “Civic Virtues” as attributes that undergird action civics: “Identify the strategies people and/or groups use to take action to advocate for a cause, and evaluate the civic virtues reflected by those strategies.”¹⁵

Recommendation: Omit Action Civics

The Department should remove all prompts toward action civics from the Draft Standards. Much of this can be accomplished by removing every item attached to the Anchor Inquiry Practice “Civic Engagement and Participation.”

Recommendation: Restore Founders’ Civic Virtues

The Department should ensure that all “civic virtues” prompts actually prompt civic virtues as defined consensually throughout American history, such as courage, honesty, and self-reliance, and not prompts toward action civics or other progressive political projects.

Flaw No. 4 | Missing Documents and Ideas

The Draft Standards improve, but not sufficiently, their emphasis on Liberty and the Documents Liberty. These remain very patchily covered: notably, neither Grade 4 coverage of the Declaration of Independence (p. 45 [SS.4.11]), Grade 5, Grade 8, and Grades 9-12 coverage of the purposes of the Constitution (pp. 52 [SS.5.6], 117 [SS.8.17], 132 [SS.9-12.Gov.4]), nor Grade 6 coverage of the ideals of Israel (p. 67 [SS.6.21]), Greece (pp. 69-71 [SS.6.25-31]), Rome (pp. 73-74 [SS.6.36-38]), or medieval England (p. 83 [SS.6.61]) mention “liberty”. The Draft Standards also import a concept of “Cultural Liberty” which camouflages progressive political distortion.¹⁶ The Draft 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.

Recommendation: Ensure Students Study Liberty

The Draft Standards should add to its four core Disciplines (Civics, Economics, Geography, and History) the Discipline of Liberty.¹⁷ “Liberty,” which should have coverage in every grade band, should be defined as: “The slow development and application of the ideals and institutions of liberty, particularly those embodied in constitutional self-government. Students generally should be able to identify the ideals, institutions, and individual examples of human liberty, individualism, religious freedom, and republican self-government; assess the extent to which civilizations have fulfilled these ideals; and describe how the evolution of these ideals at different times and in different places has contributed to the formation of modern American ideals.”

Recommendation: Ensure Students Read the Great Texts of Liberty

The Draft Standards should add to its four core Disciplines (Civics, Economics, Geography, and History) the Discipline of Documents of Liberty. The Standards should incorporate throughout K-12 instruction a series of named documents that illustrate the Western and American commitment to liberty into the Standards, including at least the 24 documents specified by Kentucky.¹⁸ The series also should include a broader selection of documents illustrating the intellectual background of the Founding Documents and American history. (See Appendix 1: Recommended Historical Documents.) The Department should also publish a Documents of Liberty Reader and provide lesson plans and professional development to facilitate instruction in the Documents of Liberty.

Flaw No. 5 | Geography in Name Only

“Geography” ought to include foundational knowledge of how to read maps and the natural and physical contours of our home state, our country, and world, as well as instruction in how this knowledge illuminates our understanding of economics and history. The Draft 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.”¹⁹ The Draft Standards’ very definitions of a “geographer” exemplify this distortion.²⁰

Recommendation: Accurately Define Geography

The Department should define “geography” as “Geographers and students of geography learn how to make and understand maps, inform themselves of the natural and political contours of the world, and use this knowledge to illuminate their understanding of economics and history.”

Recommendation: Enhance Iowa and U.S. Geography

The Department should incorporate into the Draft Standards substantial detailed expectation in Grades K-6 for factual geographical knowledge of Iowa, the United States, and the world, including the locations of continents, countries, states, country and state capitals, oceans, and major mountain ranges, rivers, and deserts. The geographical material in Grade 6 provides a good model for what should be used throughout Iowa’s social studies standards.

Recommendation: End the Ideological Hijacking of Geography

The Department should remove material that promotes ideologically extreme activism (e.g., climate change activism or open borders activism). The Department should begin by removing all material indicated by Anchor Geography Human-Environment Interaction.

Flaw No. 6 | Missing History

The Draft Standards include improved historical material, generally following the statutory language of HF 2545. We commend the Department for these improvements. Nevertheless, the Draft Standards historical coverage contains significant omissions and distortions, which the Department should remedy.

Recommendation: Bolster American History

The Department should incorporate more material on America’s colonial history—the first 150 years of our nation’s history. It also should include substantial coverage of America’s and Iowa’s common culture, integrated throughout its coverage of American and Iowan history. The history of common culture is the history of what unites Americans and Alaskans, rather than what divides them. It is also the history of people enjoying themselves—their stories and their music—and students need to learn that history is more than a dour series of political and social problems and crises.

Recommendation: Restore Study of Western Civilization

The Department should include a required Western Civilization sequence, consisting of spiraled instruction in Grades 3-5, Grades 6-8, and high school, 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 existing material on Western Civilization provides a decent foundation for this recommended sequence—and we particularly commend the Department for the new Grade 6 sequence on the Ancient and Medieval World. This, and other material on Western Civilization, should be used as the basis for extended, spiraled instruction.

Recommendation: Demarcate the Scope of World History

The Department should create a distinct World History sequence, which provides fuller coverage of Asian, African, and Latin American history. This sequence might be listed as Optional or Elective, but it will be useful to inform expectations for K-12 social studies teachers’ professional development.

Recommendation: Add Military, Religious, Economic, Scientific, and Cultural History

Iowa students cannot understand the true history of the West, America, or Iowa if they do not learn full accounts of our wars, faiths, free markets, scientific discoveries, and exemplary cultural practices and artistic masterpieces. Too much of these entire fields of history are missing from the Draft Standards; e.g., they notably do not mention the religious dimensions of the Mayflower Compact (p. 41 [SS 3.12]. Iowa’s social studies standards should make central these fundamental themes of history.

Recommendation: Make a State History Worthy of Iowa Children

The Draft Standards use “Iowa Connections” as an excuse to provide material that largely fulfills the dictates of identity-politics ideology. The Draft Standards do not actually provide a coherent narrative of Iowa state history and culture and its unique role in the American story; the “Iowa Connections” reduce Iowa’s history to incoherent insertions in American history instruction. Iowa’s social studies standards should include a standard on Iowa History, either as discrete, spiraling instruction in Grades 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12 or to inform American history instruction. Iowa History should focus on the political, religious, economic, and cultural history and achievements of Iowans from frontier days to the present and remove all identity-politics distortions of the history of Iowa and Iowans.

Flaw No. 7 | Politicized Material and Omissions

The Draft Standards retain a long catalogue of politicized material and omissions. (See Appendix 2: Politicized Material and Omissions.) While these are not as distorting as the extreme politicization, unprofessional vocabulary, and ideologically extreme content that have degraded social studies standards in states including Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Minnesota,²¹ they do substantially degrade the Draft Standards. For a notable example, the Draft Standardscontinue to refer to America pervasively as a “democracy” rather than a “republic”.

Iowa’s Department of Education has succeeded in creating social studies standards that are less politicized than the worst standards in the country—but that is a low bar. The Draft Standards remain far too politicized—far from what students deserve and far from what Iowans, the legislature, and the Governor expected.

Recommendation: Ensure Ideology-Free Standards

The Department should remove all politicized omissions and distortions from Iowa’s Social Studies standards. (See also the recommendations in Appendix 2: Politicized Material and Omissions.)

Flaw No. 8 | Missing Patriotic Content for the Earliest Learners

The Draft Standards continue to rely on a flawed pedagogy, which believes that children should first learn about the community, then the state, and finally the nation. Advocates of this approach underestimate young children’s ability to understand America’s symbols, values, and virtues from stories of historical people and events, just as America’s founders enjoyed in their own educations. Consequently, they fail to provide students with the essential early education in America’s shared heritage of freedom. The Draft Standards contain virtually no patriotic content for K-2—only the material in SS 1.10, p. 22, which is vague, brief, and optional (“may include”). This contrasts notably with Florida’s excellent 2021 revised Civics and Government Strand,²² which used an effective pedagogy to teach K-6 students about America, as well as with American Birthright, which integrated Florida’s patriotic focus into its K-2 standards.

Recommendation: Make Early Elementary Meaningful

The Department should incorporate substantial amounts of PreK-5 patriotic content into the Draft Standards, especially for the PreK-2 standards, drawing upon Florida’s 2021 revised Civics and Government Strand and/or American Birthright.

Reading and Writing Expectations: The Department should incorporate concrete reading and writing expectations into the Draft Standards, which build toward students capable by graduation from high school of reading intellectually sophisticated 200 pages history books and writing intellectually and stylistically sophisticated 5-page history papers. These capacities will demonstrate that they are prepared for undergraduate courses in history and the social sciences.

Recommendation: Provide Concrete Reading Expectations

The Standards should integrate concrete reading expectations, which build toward students capable by graduation from high school of reading an intellectually and stylistically sophisticated 200-page history book, to demonstrate that they are prepared for an undergraduate history course.

Recommendation: Provide Concrete Writing Expectations

The Standards should integrate concrete writing expectations, which build toward students capable by graduation from high school of writing an intellectually and stylistically sophisticated 5-page history paper, to demonstrate that they are prepared for an undergraduate history course.

Nota Bene | Language Errors 

The Draft Standards generally give an unfortunate appearance of illiteracy among its personnel by using impact rather than affect, effect, or consequence. (Draft Standards, passim: 37 instances) The use of neologisms such as “prioritize” also is unfortunate. (Draft Standards, pp. 44, 51) Everyone makes mistakes, of course, and this is a draft, but Iowa’s education authorities should provide models of excellence and diligence to Iowa’s students.

Recommendation: Employ Professional Copyeditors

The Department should employ professional copyeditors to review their draft academic content standards.

Process Concerns

HF 2545 stated the wonderful ambition to make Iowa’s students the best-informed, best-thinking, and most civic-minded students in America, above all by revising the state’s social studies standards. The Department of Education’s unfortunate decision to use its regular procedures, however, has crippled the revision process. The Department used the same process and personnel, in alliance with the same status quo national organizations and their affiliates, that have been in charge during the record decline in student civic literacy, knowledge, and achievement. One cannot expect a different result by using the same methods and personnel that caused the problem the legislature and governor were seeking to solve.

Here are our most fundamental concerns.

Dependence on NCSS Materials

Many flaws in the Iowa Draft Standards proceed from one general cause: the Standards unfortunately derive too much of their structure and emphases from the National Council for the Social Studies’ (NCSS) ideologically extreme definition of social studies,²³ as well as from the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards.²⁴ 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.²⁵

Recommendation: Don’t Use the NCSS Definition of Social Studies

The Department should ensure that its social studies standards are not informed by the NCSS’s ideologically extreme definition of social studies.

Recommendation: Remove All Material from the NCSS’ C3 Framework

The Department should remove all concepts and languages from its social studies standards that draw upon or parallel the concepts and language of the C3 Framework.

Affiliates of American Institutes for Research

A major part of the Standards’ dependence on the C3 Framework, and its fundamentally flawed approach, probably derived from the Department’s decision to hire a consultant associated with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to lead Iowa’s social studies standards revision process.²⁶ States that hire AIR to take part in their social studies standards revision process standardly produce social studies standards that recapitulate the flaws of the NCSS’ C3 Framework: insufficient content knowledge, extensive use of “inquiry” pedagogy, heavy use of “skills” instruction; action civics; and at least some identity-politics ideology influence on content. All these consequences are the predictable results of hiring AIR-associated personnel. The Department’s decision to hire a consultant associated with AIR was tantamount to a decision to adopt the ideologically extreme structure of the NCSS’ C3 Framework.

Recommendation: Don’t Hire the AIR or Anyone Affiliated with AIR

The Department should not hire AIR, or in any way involve personnel associated with AIR, in any part of the revision of its social studies standards.²⁷

Strategic Recommendation: Independent Commission

We have provided a series of recommendations above for how the Iowa Department of Education should revise these Draft Standards. We judge, however, that the Department erred in its initial decision to entrust the social studies standards revision mandated by HF 2545 to the same state employees and consultants who produced the original Social Studies Standards that inspired Iowa’s policymakers to make HF 2545 into law. A charitable judgment would say that while they have tried to comply with the law, and have succeeded to some extent, they have not proven capable of revising Iowa’s social studies standards to fulfill legislative intent. Iowa’s Department of Education should start this process over again.

We recommend that the Department, following the successful example of other states that have successfully revised their standards, should appoint an independent commission to redraft Iowa’s social studies standards. Participants should include teachers from traditional public and private schools who have proven themselves by their students’ academic performance to be highly effective teachers, homeschool parents, and history and civics professionals with proven knowledge of the American founding and our country’s ideals and institutions of free self-government. 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 personnel.

The Department might also ask Iowa policymakers to pass legislation informed by our model American Birthright Taskforce Act, to create an independent commission charged with creating properly revised social studies standards for Iowa.²⁸

In sum, the Department unfortunately decided in the current revision to entrust the draft revision to a consultant associated with the deeply ideological National Council of Social Studies (NCSS), and associated as well with the discriminatory ideology known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”²⁹ Since that time, however, Iowa policymakers have authorized in HF 437 (2025) a new Center of Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa. The Department now has a natural and more appropriate pool of candidates from which to select a leader for its revision of the social studies standards: the Executive Director (temporary or permanent) of the Center for Intellectual Freedom, or a professor at the Center for Intellectual Freedom. While the Department might also select a mission-focused leader of social studies standards revision from outside Iowa, a leader selected from Iowa’s own Center for Intellectual Freedom seems an excellent choice. That leader should have full power to choose the personnel for the committee to revise Iowa’s social studies standards.

Recommendation: Start Fresh with an Independent Commission

The Department should appoint an independent commission to redraft Iowa’s social studies standards. A member of the Center of Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa should lead the new committee to revise Iowa’s social studies standards, and have full power to select the committee members.

Conclusion

The Iowa Department of Education has done a great deal to improve its social studies standards. Its personnel have responded to HF 2545 with substantial revisions, which would significantly improve the social studies education in Iowa public schools. Yet the Department’s Draft Standards have left a very great deal of work to be done. They 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. The Draft 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. 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.³⁰ A member of the Center of Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa should lead a new committee to revise Iowa’s social studies standards, and have full power to select the committee members.

Respectfully yours,

Peter Wood
President, National Association of Scholars

David Randall
Executive Director, Civics Alliance

Appendix 1: Recommended Historical Documents

Founding Documents, Intellectual Background

Magna Carta (1215)

Petition of Right (1628)

English Bill of Rights (1689)

Toleration Act (1689)

John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690)

Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws (1748)

United States Documents

Articles, Laws, and Orders of Virginia (1610)

Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639)

Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641)

Pennsylvania Charter of Privileges (1701),

John Woolman, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754)

John Adams, Braintree Resolves (1765)

Common Sense (1776)

Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)

Massachusetts Constitution and Declaration of Rights (1780)

Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786)

Northwest Ordinance (1787)

Anti-Federalist Papers: Brutus No. 1 (1787)

The Federal Farmer, Letter III (1787)

The Federalist Nos. 9 (Alexander Hamilton), 39 (James Madison), and 78 (Alexander Hamilton) (1787-88)

Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791)

Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address (1801)

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume I (1835) and Volume II (1839)

Abraham Lincoln, “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision” (1857)

Abraham Lincoln, “House Divided” speech (1858)

Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (1865)

Niagara Movement Declaration of Principles (1905)

Theodore Roosevelt, “The Man with the Muck-rake,” speech (1906)

Woodrow Wilson, “Peace Without Victory,” speech (1917)

Schenck v. United States (1919)

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dissenting opinion in the case of Abrams v. United States (1919)

Herbert Hoover, Rugged Individualism (1928)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address (1933)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Four Freedoms” speech (1941

Justice Robert M. Jackson’s opinion for the Supreme Court in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)

Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty (1944)

The Truman Doctrine (1947)

George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (1947)

John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address (1961)

Ronald Reagan, Berlin Wall Speech (1987)

Ronald Reagan, Speech at Moscow State University (1988)

George W. Bush, Second Inaugural Address (2005)

District of Columbia v. Heller (2008)

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022)

Appendix 2: Politicized Material and Omissions

Politicized, Education-School Vocabulary: The Draft Standards pervasively use politicized, vocabulary drawn from America’s radicalized and activist education schools, whose very presence distorts social studies instruction—and fills the Draft Standards with banal, meaningless verbiage. Words and phrases of this vocabulary, whose meaning among education professionals frequently conveys far more radical-activist connotations than their common usage, include:

action, active (citizens, citizenship), activism, address issues, advocate, belonging, bias, change, civic competence, collective responsibilities, community (helpers, involvement, leaders, workers), compelling question, critical (inquiry, thinking), cultural awareness, democratic, democracy, demonstrations, dialogue, disability rights, discrimination, diverse (diversity), engage, enslaved (people), equity (initiatives), evolve, excluded, global citizens, globalization, identities, Indigenous, inequality, informed citizens, informed (citizens, citizenship), injustice, instructional experiences, involved, lens, marginalized, meaningful, migration, misinformation, Native (Americans, Nations), neocolonialism, participate, perspectives, positive social change, power (dynamics, imbalances), protests, reactionary, relevant, respectful, scarcity, skills, social worker, sustainability, underdevelopment, unfair, unique.

Wherever the Draft Standards use these words, the content likely has been politicized.

Recommendation: The Department should replace every part of the Draft Standards that uses this vocabulary, and associated content, with depoliticized vocabulary and content.

Endemic Politicization: Examples of the Draft Standards’ endemic politicization include:

• “A social worker may support individuals affected by inequality or discrimination.” (p. 59)
• “A human rights advocate is someone who works to promote and protect civil rights.” (p. 59) Note inability to distinguish between human rights and natural rights; for which, see also p. 93 [SS.7.14].
• The invocation of “cultural liberty” to forward identity-politics ideology. (p. 93 [SS.7.15])
• The citation of the modern myth that the Māori reached Antactica as a fact of Antarctic exploration. (p. 103 [SS.7.37])
• The rote insertion of identity-politics concerns into historical study; e.g., “The contributions of and impact on free and enslaved African Americans, women and Native Americans during the American Revolution.” (p. 114 [SS.8.13])
• “Humanitarian advocates draw on historical injustices and crises to inform their efforts in promoting human rights, social justice, and global equity.” (p. 122)
• The exclusive citation of radical movements in contemporary American history (e.g., Black Lives Matter) while omitting mention of movements such as the Tea Party or Make America Great Again. (p. 179 [SS.9-12.US.51])

Recommendation: The Department should review every part of the Draft Standards that contains politicized content and remove these politicizations.

Photo by Kelcy Gatson on Unsplash