Constitutional History in Iowa Public Schools

As an expatriate Iowan, who visited my Midwestern homeland as recently as President's Day weekend, I try to keep up abreast of how far the state's politics have traveled from those of my youth in Dubuque.  Usually, I don't burden LHB readers with reports, but a recent post by Rick Morain, formerly the publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, on the blog "Bleeding Heartland" on a bill in the Iowa legislature speaks to a general trend in primary and secondary public education.

House File 2544, which is available for floor debate, mandates topics that the state's social studies teachers would be required to cover at some point in grades five through twelve.  These include thirteen documents and six U.S. Supreme Court cases.  The thirteen documents are:

The Mayflower Compact
Common Sense, the essay published by Thomas Paine in 1776
The Declaration of Independence
The Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1777
The Pennsylvania Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery
The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom
The Northwest Ordinance
The U.S. Constitution
The Federalist Papers, including Federalist No. 10 and Federalist No 51
Washington’s Farewell Address
relevant excerpts from Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
a transcript of the first Lincoln-Douglas debate
and The Emancipation Proclamation

Morain did not object to these, although he wondered about the opportunity costs, in light of the time needed to discuss them properly.  He also agreed that Iowa students should know about five of the six cases mandated by the bill: Marbury v. Madison, McCulloch v. Maryland, Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Brown v. Board of Education.  (He did not comment on the omission of one of Iowa's contributions to constitutional law, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District.)  He was stumped by a sixth case, however: Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining and Milling Company v. Pennsylvania (1888).  Upon inspection, he learned that it was a landmark in the granting of corporations the status of persons under the Fourteenth Amendment.  

The editor of the Bleeding Heartland pursued the matter by asking the bill's Republican sponsors about the bill but received no response.  A Democratic representative on the subcommittee that approved it reported that one of its sponsors mentioned the Civics Alliance and the National Association of Scholars in describing its origins.

The American Historical Association has opposed the bill in a letter to the Iowa House of Representatives. 

--Dan Ernst