Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com 

Many of us have experienced planning committees where loud, “big idea” people dominate. They’re the ones who believe all their ideas are gold and they’re not shy about sharing their genius. They have 50 ideas an hour, and 49 of those should be trashed.

I understand the rules for brainstorming. “There are no bad ideas.” But many of those ideas should die a natural death. They should rest peacefully buried in a closet with other bad ideas written on those big sheets of brainstorming paper.

But sometimes that doesn’t work.

Often loud, big idea people fall in love with their own thoughts—or worse, they fall in love with ideas that came from somewhere else, which they just know will work here.

When that happens, big ideas become bad ideas quickly implemented, because there’s not a brave leader to halt it. The rest of the group just goes along to get along.

Now, imagine those big, bad, ideas aren’t just ideas. They’re laws.

Welcome to both chambers of the Iowa legislature, where moderation and the Republican doctrine of small government go to die. Where bad ideas become bad laws, and “Iowa nice” is but a vague memory.

After the 2016 elections, Republicans finally captured the Iowa Senate majority, and with it a trifecta. Then Senate Majority Leader Bill Dix said in December 2016, “The message that I’m taking from the voters is that they expect us—for lack of a better term—to kick the door in. We don’t expect government to continue to do business the way we have.” 

They “kicked the door in,” and Iowa public schools were hit with the shrapnel. From 2017 forward, Republican legislators have been drunk on their “mandate.” 

Their first big, bad idea was gutting public sector collective bargaining. They borrowed that one was from Wisconsin, and they doubled down by also obliterating the teacher termination law. They did it quickly and mostly behind closed doors, with no input from the education family. Mandates trumped listening.

But that was just the beginning of the door kicking.

After 2017, attacking public schools became the main auditioning stage for politicians trying to gain favor with the MAGA movement. Governor Kim Reynolds pushed through an expensive, expansive, and unregulated private school voucher scheme, and sowed doubt in public schools by targeting what she regarded as “pornographic books.” If Iowa had a referendum system, neither would have been passed because they’re incredibly unpopular with voters. 

Senate File 496 (the governor’s wide-ranging education law adopted in 2023) banned books containing descriptions or visual depictions of a sex acts from school libraries and curriculum. A Courier Newsroom Data for Progress poll from 2022 found a whopping 76 percent of Iowa respondents agreed that “banning books at schools is a form of censorship and goes against American values of freedom of speech and expression.”

The private school voter plan was also unpopular with Iowans. In another Data for Progress 2022 poll, 60 percent of Iowans opposed the state funded scholarships for students attending private schools.

Still, the borrowed (or brainstormed) bad ideas keep coming. Here’s just one example of a bad bill waiting to become law.

There’s no doubt abortion remains a polarizing topic. Senate File 175 would force public, private, and charter schools to show students a fetal development video beginning in 5^th grade. It appears legislators pushing this are hoping to influence children on the abortion issue. The bill was inspired by the medically inaccurate “Meet Baby Olivia” video, produced by an anti-abortion group. House members amended Senate File 175 to prohibit schools from using “any book, article, outline, handout, video, or other educational material produced or provided by an entity” that performs or promotes abortions, or contracts with an abortion provider.

Many Republican legislators have long opposed sex education in schools. Now, they’re trying to use the class they’ve always hated to politicize 5^th graders. They don’t seem to trust parents. It’s a bad law and it takes curriculum meddling to a dangerous level.

Brainstorming and borrowing ideas are fine. But there needs to be a check and balance so bad ideas don’t become bad law. That’s why we have elections.

---

Editor’s note from Laura Belin: The Iowa House passed the amended version of Senate File 175 on April 17 by 60 votes to 31, with Republican Brian Lohse joining all Democrats present to oppose the bill. Iowa Senate Republicans gave final approval to the bill on April 28 in a party-line vote of 33 to 16.

---

Top photo is by PeopleImages.com – Yuri A, available via Shutterstock.