DEI Booster Revamping K-12 History Curriculum In GOP-Run Iowa

Last year, Iowa’s Republican-controlled legislature and governor signed a law requiring the state to develop new history curricula for K-12 public schools. It requires the forthcoming curriculum map to be “the best in America” and “focus on United States history, western civilization, and civics.” Yet the consultant coordinating this social studies revamp has a long, public history of pushing anti-Constitution prejudices about American history.

2024’s House File 2545 requires the new Iowa K-12 social studies curriculum due at the end of this year to teach “Important historical and founding documents to the United States and the state of Iowa, including but not limited to the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the amendments to the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and the Emancipation Proclamation.”

Currently, Iowa’s social studies requirements include essentially nothing about U.S. history in grades K to 8, and very little substance in high school, according to a 2021 review by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The 2024 law also requires the Iowa Department of Education’s (IDOE’s) director to review and recommend improvements to high school graduation requirements, curriculum and testing requirements called “state standards,” and core curriculum.

Iowa Senate Education Committee Chairman Lynn Evans, R-Aurelia, told The Federalist lawmakers aim to refocus IDOE more on teaching excellence and less on regulatory compliance under new Director McKenzie Snow. Snow, a former Donald Trump education official, was confirmed over Iowa Democrats’ objections last June. She is a school choice proponent who has worked for education departments in Virginia and New Hampshire under Republican governors Glenn Youngkin and Chris Sununu.

History Rewrite ‘Lead Facilitator’ Deep Into DEI

A January 1, 2025 preliminary IDOE report names Stefanie Wager as the department’s “Standards and Practices Administrative Consultant” in its K-12 division. An appendix identifies her as the “lead facilitator” for the committee rewriting Iowa’s social studies curriculum and testing regulations. She is also a “co-facilitator” running the committee currently redesigning Iowa’s science curriculum.

Stefanie Rosenberg Wager is a former Iowa social studies teacher and, from 2020-2021, president of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), a far-left lobbying group. Before that, Wager was also a NCSS vice president and board member starting in 2015.

Wager’s professional work and public advocacy are rife with identity politics. Her professional affiliations publicly proclaim that the United States’ founders and founding documents are inherently bigoted and in need of Marxist reframing, indicating how any curricula she influences will frame these documents to Iowan children.

The preliminary report hints at more to come in a section containing committee members’ “feedback” on what the new curriculum must contain: “Ensure the revised social studies standards include a broad knowledge base, including the historical, legal, economic, and cultural contributions of a variety of Americans representing diverse backgrounds.” To Wager and the kind of social studies teachers NCSS trains, “diverse backgrounds” does not mean exemplary Americans from all walks of life, but activists and otherwise unimpressive people highlighted primarily for their race, sex, and deviant sexual acts.

Professional History of Far-Left Activism

In 2021, Wager listed elevating “issues of racial justice, equity, and inclusion” as one of her three top priorities as NCSS president. She celebrated helping create a “a standing committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Social Studies” in that role to “promote equitable and inclusive practices in the social studies.”

“[W]e must get back to a place (or perhaps we were never there) in which we see criticism as central to patriotism,” she wrote. “A place where we see it possible to both love our country and very much critique it. This idea is central to quality social studies instruction and a central tenant [sic] in healthy democratic societies.”

In that letter, Wager also highlighted that while she was NCSS president, the organization fiercely advocated against state legislation that would prevent public schools from teaching critical race theory. She also highlighted NCSS’s work insisting that government schools and funds keep promoting The New York Times’ 1619 Project. That curriculum effort exists to push the falsehood that the United States is inherently racist and thus teach American school children to despise their own country and families. Scholars have found it contains numerous other key historical errors.

Wager’s work ceaselessly focuses on identity politics and intersectionalism. In 2022, she gave a talk at an NCSS conference titled, “Double Displacement: American Indian and Japanese American.”

On her LinkedIn account, Wager posted about a 2022 NCSS conference featuring Ibram X. Kendi, one of the foremost critical race activists. Kendi advocates for effectively erasing the U.S. Constitution and insists anti-white racism is necessary to redress anti-black racism. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University will close in June after the university investigated it for losing track of tens of millions of dollars.

Other LinkedIn posts from Wager encourage “antiracist” education “in the classroom.” “Antiracist,” Kendi says, means advocating for creating social hierarchies according to skin color.

In 2020, Wager told NBC News teachers shouldn’t say Christopher Columbus “discovered” America because, “You’re messaging that people were not here thousands of years before Columbus.” It appears Wager can’t consider multiple perspectives to understand that North America was indeed a discovery for Europeans.

In November 2022, Wager joined far-left extremists speaking at a conference at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. On her panel, she called it “an honor to be here” and described other presenters as giving “amazing examples of elementary education and elementary social studies in ELA [English language arts].”

Other presenters included New York Times columnist and riot excuse-maker Jamelle Bouie; Harvard University professor Danielle Allen, a DEI task force member at Harvard who serves on the board of the U.S. division of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation; Ohio State University professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries, whose far-left X account advocates DEI and calls Republican voters “Nazi’s [sic];”‘ and Gloria Ladson-Billings, a critical race theorist who pioneered race-conscious teaching techniques known as “culturally relevant pedagogy.” None of the presenters supported the American Founders’ views of citizenship, natural rights, justice, or law.

In 2018, as NCSS’s vice president, Wager signed a public statement opposing state bills to require Americans to take the U.S. citizenship test to graduate from high school. Rather than celebrating even a small step towards greater instruction in American government, the statement complained the citizenship test requires only “rote knowledge” and “a surface level of civic knowledge.”

NCSS’s board did not, however, for those reasons suggest dramatically increasing the expectations required to attain U.S. citizenship. Instead, they advocated “allowing students to play a role in the decision-making aspect of school governance,” “News Media Literacy Education” that would help students “distinguish so-called fake news from legitimate argument and news,” “Social and Emotional Learning,” “Addressing inequitable relationships within schools,” and “Action Civics,” which essentially harnesses public tax dollars to train students for leftist activism.

Leader of Far-Left Extremist Organization

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, when Wager was NCSS vice president, 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.”

“[S]ocial studies education has a responsibility to oppose colonialism and systemic racism that impact Indigenous Peoples [sic],” the statement says. It strongly rejects “assimilation,” supports the celebration of “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” and says social studies curricula and teachers should “Challenge Eurocentrism.” It says these precepts are incorporated into its recommended social studies state curriculum standards.

In 2019, NCSS put out a position statement on “Contextualizing LGBT+ History within the Social Studies Curriculum.” The statement calls for teaching children “evidence-based, academic discourse about LGBT+–inclusive topics” in publicly funded social studies classes.

The statement claims, “exclusions and misrepresentations have perpetuated a deficit-based narrative of marginalized cultural groups and have presented a subjective and singular interpretation of the story of America told through the lens of those who created—and continue to benefit from—American cultural institutions: white, financially secure, Christian, heterosexual [cisgender] males.” The document then cites Marxist lesbian writer Audre Lorde.

40-Person Committees Don’t Create the ‘Best in America’

Even absent coordination by a far-left activist, Iowa’s process for revamping its curriculum doesn’t set the state up to achieve the law’s mandate for “best in America” core curriculum. Exemplary works are never created by committee, as more Americans would know if most schools taught history. Even the U.S. Constitution, recognized globally as a pinnacle human achievement, was primarily written by one man, the great James Madison, with select contributions from just a few others and then some collaborative editing.

Iowa would easily achieve the law’s command if, instead of a bureaucratic process employing people shaped by incompetent and evil institutions such as NCSS, it simply selected best-in-country history curriculum outlines such as from the National Association of Scholars or Hillsdale College. Any thinking citizen can see either is quite obviously better than the current social studies curriculum mandated in every state in the nation.

To fulfill House File 2425, Iowa must stop employing the same kinds of people and processes that have failed American children for more than 50 years.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her latest book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.