1. United States
2. Iowa
3. Letter

As someone who has lived in Iowa for over 35 years, raised my children in Iowa while they attended Iowa schools and universities, and is an educator in higher education myself, I am embarrassed and appalled by the raft of legislation that mimics legislation in states whose education rating is at the bottom of the country. Iowa used to be in the top tier of education, and Republican legislators want to drag Iowa down among the states as low as 41 out of 50? (World Population Review (https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/public-school-rankings-by-state)) Why on earth would we mimic legislation from Texas (#41) and Florida (#40)? Iowa has slipped to #22 and now with this legislation we will become even worse!   If we enact any of this legislation, people will leave Iowa in droves. Part of the imagined reasoning behind the legislation is to supposedly keep people in Iowa. I have children in their 30s and one has left and another is thinking of leaving precisely because they do not want to live in a state that is enacting legislation based out of previous slave states (especially the bills requiring public university students to take courses in American history and American government that explicitly can’t be “primarily devoted to the study of subgroups of Americans or other nationalities;” mandating that public universities seek accreditation from the Commission for Public Higher Education, a university accreditor founded by a group of Southern universities that hasn’t yet received federal government approval to accredit). This legislation rhymes with “we will only teach students about white history”. Please stop these and other attacks on Iowa higher education.