It’s been an exceptionally busy last couple weeks in the Iowa House where we’ve voted on well over 100 bills. Many of the most notable are listed in the article below. I’m especially excited to have supported legislation to expand cancer coverage for firefighters, protecting bicyclists in crosswalks, and improved access to state parks for persons with disabilities.
Unfortunately, a not insignificant number of bills were incredibly divisive and, in my opinion, not addressing the real challenges we have in Iowa. Last week was especially focused on education bills. In my column here, I’d like to highlight one bill in particular.
I spoke out against HF 2544, legislation that prescribes social studies curriculum that comes directly from a far-right organization. There are a lot of concerns I have about the bill, not the least of which is that it is not the job of the Legislature to determine curriculum; that comes from content experts. Putting a long list of topics to cover in Iowa Code is not a good idea because inevitably something is missed, or it makes it impossible for teachers to cover everything in a way that allows for critical thinking.
One of my biggest frustrations is the rejection of action civics, civic engagement, service learning, and political activism. The bill expressly prohibits schools from having requirements in their civics classes for these forms of active civic engagement. As I’ve said more times than I can count, student civic engagement is one of my favorite things and it’s something I encourage every chance I get. Not because I want to promote liberal political activism, but because we learn through doing and making real-world connections to the concepts and processes we read about in a textbook. In every possible way, our kids learn through experience and engagement in their communities and the world around them. What we have learned over the years is that we cannot be what we cannot see. Action civics is simply civics in real life.
Whether you realize it or not, we see action civics all around us. The House Pages we are fortunate to have supporting us and learning about how the Legislature works; the Iowa Youth Congress and other students who come to the Capitol to advocate on issues they care about; students who serve on school boards; the students in Ankeny who serve on the Mayor’s Youth Council who lead volunteer service opportunities in the community and provide input on youth perspectives to the City Council – all of it is action civics.
If you want another way to think about it, action civics is work-based learning. To expressly prohibit classes from having requirements that fall under that category of “action civics” is deeply concerning and to my mind, counterproductive for teaching our kids how to live in this country.
To be clear, I believe we can and should do more for social studies, history, and civics. In fact, the Iowa Council on the Social Studies reached out to legislators to remind us of what they have been advocating for. Those things include full time social studies consultants at every AEA to better support teachers and improve instruction, holding districts accountable for including dedicated time for social studies education in elementary schools, and arguing against the Board of Educational Examiner’s efforts to reduce credit requirements for the social studies license because the quality of instruction is dependent to a great degree on the knowledge and skill of the instructor.
The bill passed the House with only partisan support and bipartisan opposition. It is scheduled for a Senate subcommittee meeting next week.
