Iowa bill targets colleges that teach New York Times' 'racist' and 'historically inaccurate' 1619 Project
Two Iowa state representatives proposed a bill to defund schools that use the New York Times' 1619 Project.
The bill would cause public schools and community colleges that use the curriculum to lose funding within 180 days.
Republican legislators in Iowa proposed a bill to defund any school that teaches the New York Times’ 1619 Project.
The bill — sponsored by state Rep. Skyler Wheeler (R-IA) — provides for the “reduction of certain funding and budgets for public schools, community colleges, and regents institutions” that utilize the curriculum.
If passed, the legislation would declare that the state’s assembly “has a strong interest in promoting an accurate account of this nation’s history through public schools and forming young people into knowledgeable and patriotic citizens.” Accordingly, it would bar schools from using the 1619 Project and “similarly developed curriculum.”
[RELATED: U Iowa threatens probation for student who criticized Critical Race Theory, backtracks amid lawmaker’s involvement]
For each day that a given school continues to use the curriculum, the state legislature will withhold 1/180 of its budget, effectively granting the school half a year to stop using the curriculum before it is fully defunded.
If a community college has utilized history curriculum during the previous fiscal year derived from the 1619 Project “in whole or in part,” the state will reduce the school’s final total budget “by an amount proportionate to the number of days during that fiscal year that the curriculum was used.”
The 1619 Project — named for the year in which African slaves first arrived in the modern United States — aims to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative.”
Wheeler told Campus Reform that “The 1619 Project is riddled with errors and has been shredded by historians all over the country.”
“This Project seeks to tear down America, not build her up,” he explained. “It seeks to divide, not unify. It distorts truth, and does so while pushing a Leftist political agenda.”
The legislature therefore “has an interest in keeping this racist, divisive and factually and historically inaccurate Leftist political propaganda masquerading as history out of taxpayer-funded history classes.”
Campus Reform has reported on American universities’ adoption of the controversial curriculum, developed by New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones.
[RELATED: 1619 Project writer Nikole Hannah-Jones says American flag outside childhood home ‘embarrassed’ her]
Though Hannah-Jones told Campus Reform in November that “the 1619 Project has, of course, always recognized 1776 as our official and literal founding,” a prior version of the New York Times’ website likewise declared that 1619 was the year of the nation’s “true founding.”
Campus Reform reached out to Hannah-Jones; this article will be updated accordingly.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @BenZeisloft
