Susan Gilkerson, a math teacher and school bus driver, stood before a South Dakota education board and issued a warning.
The proposed math standards the board was considering — just 36 pages, less than half the length of standards adopted in 2018 — were so scant that teachers won’t know how to use them, Gilkerson said. The existing standards detail not just which math concepts should be taught but also the specific skills students need to demonstrate to show they understand them, said Gilkerson, who teaches in the rural Oldham-Ramona-Rutland district.
“When I talk to my students, I want them to understand it,” she said of a concept like the Pythagorean theorem. But the new standards contain little guidance on how students can demonstrate they grasp that math concept or countless others, she said.
Joseph Graves, South Dakota’s education secretary, countered: Teachers and parents don’t understand the current standards because they’re so complicated. “Our whole goal was to simplify, simplify, simplify,” Graves said.
That exchange this past October marked the opening salvo in an escalating battle over South Dakota’s math standards. One source the department consulted in creating its new draft — part of a review that happens every seven years — was a brand-new set of model math standards produced by the National Association of Scholars, a conservative group on the front lines of the education culture wars. The group’s document, named the Archimedes Standards for the ancient Greek mathematician, urges states to do what South Dakota is trying with its standards rewrite: eliminate Common Core math.
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