Republican-controlled Iowa, Texas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming are revising social studies curricula for K-12 public schools, promising voters accurate, non-leftist revisions.
Yet Iowa recently delivered new K-12 curricula that entrench rather than solve the nationwide crisis of fact-challenged, anti-American Marxists controlling publicly financed history instruction. Oklahoma is one public comment period away from a similar outcome. That public comment closes Wednesday.
The other two states are struggling to avoid the same fate. Meanwhile, decades of politicized education are causing children across the country to leave school to protest following U.S. immigration laws, an echo of the mass 2020 race riots.
A Feb. 17 report on civics education from the America First Policy Institute underscores the existential threat poor history instruction poses to the American way of life. It notes recent surveys of America’s youngest generation find two in five don’t express “pride in being an American” and only half oppose political violence. A 2024 survey found fewer than half of adult Americans can name most of the rights the First Amendment protects and one-third could not name all three branches of government — a fourth-grade-level fact.
“The United States is in the midst of a crisis of cultural disintegration marked by a loss of shared understanding of, and attachment to, its civic inheritance,” the report says. “This crisis is evident in declining patriotism and trust in institutions, and in rising support for political radicalism and violence.”
On the most recent national civics exam, 77 percent of American eighth graders scored below “proficient,” and most did not have a civics class in eighth grade. Three in five adult Americans can’t pass a basic civics exam, yet nearly all are eligible to vote. To address this crisis most Republican-controlled states task the same leftist bureaucrats whose control of American education created the crisis in the first place.
Iowa Ed Bureaucrats Defy New State Law
In 2024, Iowa’s legislature passed a law requiring the state board of education to revamp K-12 history curriculum guidelines, known as “standards.” It demanded the resulting rewrite be “the best in America.”
Iowa’s Department of Education tasked a prominent diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) advocate to coordinate the rewrite, as The Federalist reported in 2025. The new curriculum map Iowa’s State Board of Education approved last month failed to fulfill Iowa voters’ desire and the legislature’s clear mandate for “a focus on United States history, government, founding philosophies and principles, important historical figures, western civilization, and civics.”
Instead, says the National Association of Scholars (NAS), Iowa’s history curriculum rewrite “still impose[s] 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).” AIR, the organization said in a 2021 press release, “has made a strong commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and cultural and linguistic competence (CLC). … Staff at every level are engaged in intentional and comprehensive efforts to integrate DEI and CLC into every facet of AIR’s work.” Approximately half of states have multimillion-dollar contracts with AIR for testing and other services.
As The Federalist previously reported, “NCSS holds numerous extreme public positions. The organization’s ‘Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ says, ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion guide the policies, procedures, and educational practices of NCSS.’ In 2018 … the organization published a position statement ignoring the history of successful European conquest and settlement of North America that claims ‘all education in the United States takes place on Indigenous [sic] lands.’”
The Iowa Department of Education’s head and the Iowa Board of Education are all appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate. The legislative and executive branches in Iowa have been controlled by Republicans since 2017. In 2023, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds appointed McKenzie Snow, a former Gov. Glenn Youngkin official, state superintendent.
“I was so upset and frustrated and angry, frankly, at the Republican-appointed Iowa Department of Education flaunting Iowa law,” said Iowa state Rep. Charley Thomson in a phone interview with The Federalist. “We passed an actual statute and they said, ‘Too bad, we run things around here, get used to it.’ No, we don’t have to take that.”
Thomson is sponsoring House File 2286 to replace the history revamp with South Dakota’s social studies standards, which were developed with help from nonpartisan scholars from the state, as well as from NAS and Hillsdale College. Hillsdale has partnered with both Trump administrations to improve history education across the United States, especially for America’s 250th birthday this year. (This author is a Hillsdale alumna.)
“If we pass a law and they [department of education staff] defy it, that’s just not acceptable. When criminals do it we put them in jail, when bureaucrats do it, we give them another chance to ignore it,’” Thomson said.
Thomson noted constituents regularly express worries about the declining quality of taxpayer-funded education. Reams of data back them up. The latest national test scores show Iowa following the rest of the nation in exhibiting some of the worst results in decades. Iowa used to be one of the nation’s highest-achieving states. It is now near the national average, a significant decline.
House Education Chairman Skyler Wheeler is a cosponsor of 2026 House Study Bill 714, which repeats the demand of the 2024 law bureaucrats have already defied that the Iowa education department revamp its social studies standards to teach students “the history of the secular and religious ideals and institutions of liberty” and core documents including the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Federalist Papers.
Wheeler, who sat on the IDOE committee that revised the history standards, did not respond to a request for comment. The IDOE also did not respond to a request for comment.
Oklahoma Bureaucrats Take Advantage of Chaos
In spring 2025, Oklahoma had almost completed a similar rewrite of its social studies curriculum. The rewrite was a watered-down version of model social studies standards from NAS and the Civics Alliance, a coalition of academics and citizens concerned about accurate, nonpartisan history. Even as altered by education bureaucrats in the state, the new standards would have improved the state’s history curricula.
Yet the improvements were erased after former state Superintendent Ryan Walters was sued for attempting to make last-minute changes just before the new standards were formalized. He was accused of violating procedural rules, and the Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed. This gave bureaucrats an opening to further water down the curriculum maps, said Walters’ former Director of Policy and Research Tucker Cross in a phone interview.
“We already had compromised standards, and now we’re almost to back where we were before conservatives showed up,” Cross said. “It’s all back to that neutered, sterile nothingness blob-speak, which is just a tool for them to interpret as widely as they want so they can shove in whatever kind of indoctrination they want to put in place.”
Cross sent The Federalist examples of what has been removed from the current draft of the standards to reduce their patriotism and core content. In the samples below, the highlighted portions have been removed. Essentially all content related to religion has been taken out, as well as much instruction in constitutional principles and self-governing ways of life.
Two new high-school-level electives have also been entirely removed: ancient and medieval world history and the history of 20th-century totalitarianism. This will cut a teaching and curricular infrastructure buildout the previous standards would have expanded.
“Electives matter because structure matters,” Cross explained in The Federalist Feb. 17. “What exists as a named course must be planned, staffed, and scheduled. What exists only as scattered references can be abbreviated, skipped, or replaced.”
Public feedback on the current, re-revised draft closes after Feb. 18. Oklahomans could request that the 2025 draft be reinstated and the 2026 draft ditched. Oklahomans have voted Republican in every presidential election since Richard Nixon in 1968, “and we can’t even pass conservative standards,” Cross said.
Texas and Wyoming in Similar Battles
Wyoming is about to embark on a social studies standards rewrite this year that will face the same challenges. Another Youngkin alum is the Wyoming education department’s chief of staff.
Texas’ history curriculum battle, which has been ongoing since 2022, will affect the nation. Texas is not only a massive education market that drives testing and curriculum options nationwide, but the social studies curriculum Texas is developing will go into its Bluebonnet Learning curricula.
Bluebonnet Learning will be a full set of open-source, free curricular materials such as lesson plans and student worksheets, for every grade level and subject, that fulfill state standards. When completed, it will save state taxpayers millions in contracts that currently fuel woke companies such as the College Board and AIR. Teachers from all over the world can also use the materials for free.
“The Texas State Board of Education members have given Texas the best opportunity in decades to have highly-effective, content-rich TEKS [Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards] for social studies,” Jordan Adams told Bradley Haley for The Federalist.
Adams is one of nine content advisors the board selected after its September meeting. A Hillsdale and University of Dallas graduate who consults for School Boards for Academic Excellence, Adams has helped several states develop standards. The other advisors include NAS Research Director David Randall, David Barton of Wallbuilders, and four Texas university professors. One of the professors insists the board protect “ethnic studies” courses.
Texas Council for the Social Studies, a chapter of the DEI-promoting NCSS whose former president ran the failed Iowa standards rewrite, is attempting to neuter Texas’ in-development history curriculum reforms. The organization demands DEI-laced “world cultures” instruction throughout K-12. TCSS has many contracts with Texas school districts that could be replaced by the creation of the free Bluebonnet curricula. Democrats on the board are also criticizing the majority’s efforts to significantly upgrade Texas kids’ history and civics education.
Adams says the board’s goal is to make young Texans “by far the best educated citizens about their national and state heritage of any students in the country, not only today but in the last 60 or 70 years.”
Bradley Haley contributed to this report.
