The End of an Era--Reflecting on 19 Years of REMAST

After 19 years of National Science Foundation funding, the REMAST Scholarship Program has reached the end of an era. As I completed the program's final NSF report, I found myself reflecting not only on the numbers, but on the people, relationships, and legacy that REMAST has created.

When I arrived at SDSU in the fall of 2006, I had some experience coordinating an NSF-funded scholarship program at my previous job. When our Provost (Carol Peterson) suggested we pursue a grant under the NSF Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program, I was eager and willing to lead the cause. We submitted the grant in March 2007, got several more questions from NSF in July, and the grant was awarded in September 2007. Because we were creating the Rural Enhancement of Mathematics And Science Teachers (REMAST) Scholarship Program, we spent the 2007 – 2008 academic year planning and recruiting scholars. The first cohort was selected in the spring of 2008 and received the first scholarships in Fall 2008. Little did I know what this program would become!

Over almost two decades, NSF support allowed REMAST to make a substantial contribution to science and mathematics teacher preparation in South Dakota and beyond. Consider just a few outcomes:

• Awarded 94 math and science majors $1,580,000 in forgivable loans (for each semester of the scholarship, they paid it back through service by teaching for one year in a “high-need district”).
• Produced 88 math and science teachers (6 students decided not to teach); 26 Biology majors; one Biology & Chemistry double major; 8 Chemistry majors; 52 Mathematics majors; and one Physics major.
• Created 14 cohorts of scholars; Cohorts were created based on the first semester that the student received the scholarship, so Cohort 1 was students whose first semester of funding was Fall 2008.
• Of the 88 teachers produced, 42 are teaching high school, 15 are teaching middle school, 2 are enrolled in graduate school full-time, 3 are involved in higher education, 2 are middle school administrators, 1 works for a state department of education, 1 is a school counselor, and 1 is working as a school paraprofessional. This equates to a 76% retention rate in Education.

While this data is impressive, it does not illustrate the complete picture of the program. To do that, we need to discuss the people. After all, they are the heart of the program. This includes my co-PIs, Larry Browning (Physics) and Matt Miller (Chemistry), who have been involved since we wrote the first proposal. From Biology, two faculty were involved, Jerry Krueger and Madhav Nepal. Teacher Education has had several faculty involved in the project, including Kristi Russow, Ken Emo, Katherine Bertolini, Troy White, Laura Hasselquist, and Patrick Hales. I would be remiss not to mention our External Evaluator, Robert Burke, who is a Professor Emeritus in Psychology. These colleagues helped create surveys, mentor scholars, conduct research, interview applicants, coordinate conferences, and strengthen the program in countless ways. More importantly, they supported me and kept me sane over the years.

In 2011, we requested and received supplemental funding to host a REMAST summer conference. Even when the supplemental funding ran out, we continued to fund the conference through each project grant. The summer conference became the hallmark of our Noyce program—the best idea that we had over those 19 years. For two days each summer, we brought together current and future scholars, alumni, area teachers, and invited speakers. Invited speakers have included Penny Noyce, daughter of Robert Noyce, Tom Bloch, former CEO of H.R. Block, Dave Burgess, author of Teach Like a Pirate, and countless other authors. In recent years, we have selected conference themes based on the keynote speaker, and if they were an author, participants received a copy of their book. While the keynote speaker was the main attraction, that wasn’t what kept alumni coming back. It was the relationships, the conversations, sharing ideas, discussing student issues, solving problems, joking, and lots of laughing. All faculty involved not only told our future teachers that being a good teacher is about building relationships with students, but we also modeled it. These relationships are the heart of the program. It is about the community. Many of us call it the REMAST family!

One alumni commented this about the conference:

It is such a privilege to be able to return each year and see friends and professors from college. This opportunity is so rare for others, and I am very thankful to be able to do this. Getting to see everyone each year is the number one reason why I attend. We have formed our own little REMAST family, and we are so lucky to have friends and professors we can trust and rely on not just during the conference but during the entire year. I truly love this program.

We have had a private REMAST Facebook group since September 2009. What do we post about? We celebrate faculty, scholar, and alum accomplishments. Alumni post funny memes, job openings, and interesting articles. I post more than anyone else--not surprising for those who know me. I like to post words of encouragement because teachers need those, and articles with ideas they can use in their classrooms. We also celebrate when people get married (yes, two REMAST alumni are married), when they have kids, and when they win awards. We also share struggles because teaching is hard. On more than one occasion, an alum has thanked me for a post because “they really needed it that day.”

As I write this, it is hard for me to put into words how much this program has meant to me, both professionally and personally. While NSF funding has come to an end, the true legacy of REMAST can be found in classrooms across South Dakota and the region. Every student taught by a REMAST graduate is part of that legacy. The scholarships may be ending, but the impact and heart of this community will continue for generations.

Let's Talk about the Math Standards that the Board of Education just Passed

On Monday, I attended the last hearing for the Health Standards and Math Standards. The Board of Education passed both unanimously. I was actually disappointed on both counts, as the opponents of the Health Standards had some great arguments on the need to add information about caregiving as well as human trafficking to the health standards. Obviously, I was disappointed with their vote in favor of the new math standards. Especially since Crystal McMachen testified about an issue with vertical alignment in 6th through 8th grade. Some of the board members were concerned about what she pointed out. They expect the SD Department of Education to go through and fix the issue. I hope the Board of Education follows up on it.

One thing that I haven't brought up about my dislike of the new standards is the lack of emphasis on data analysis and probability. The timing of this recent article from TIME magazine seems appropriate. In fact, if you read the article, it indicates that we should focus more on data and financial literacy and statistical reasoning. It says we shouldn't focus on rote math--but our new standards seem to do more of that. In fact, the article states:

        Our schools could teach the math that matters, that shapes what we watch, read, and believe. Math underlies consequential financial and healthcare decisions that all Americans make. Math can help civil society flourish, or our ignorance about math could tear us apart. The right math can engage, empower, and elevate students. We could equip our populace with the math skills to navigate life-defining challenges. 

I will say this--I think that our current standards could be improved, and I have some ideas on how to go about doing that. However, I would not have done what the Dept of Education did. I would have started with what we have and worked from there--that isn't what happened. They completely rewrote everything and then asked the review committee to make revisions. Teachers should have been involved in the writing process, rather than just revising what they were given.

We are not the only state that is rewriting its math standards. North Carolina recently redid theirs. Their proposed standards are also being met with criticism because they are actually emphasizing more data science and placing less emphasis on geometry. I will give North Carolina credit for creating some progression documents throughout the process. Our Dept of Education still needs to make a crosswalk with the old standards, and then they will need to create the unpacked standards. This will be a lot of work so I hope that they are ready for that.

The SD Dept of Education keeps bringing up a $3.7 million grant to help with the transition to the new standards. However, this grant that the Dept of Education received is an SPDG grant, which is funded by the U.S. Dept of Education, and is to "assist State educational agencies (SEAs) in reforming and improving their systems for personnel preparation and professional development in early intervention, educational, and transition services to improve results for children with disabilities." In fact, the SD Dept of Education has already funded 8 schools in SD with this grant money. Each school will receive about $125,000, so that is $1 million of the $3.7 million. I also found a contract to Measurement Incorporated in Albany, New York, who will provide the evaluation of the grant. The contract allocates over $206,000 to evaluation of the project. It will be interesting to see what the Dept of Education does with the remaining $2.5 million over 5 years.

All in all, I am disappointed that there was unanimous approval by the Board of Education, but I did everything that I could possibly do. I worked hard to provide accurate data and information to the Board. And I would do it again because it was the right thing to do. If our math scores go down when they were holding steady, I think it will be because now there is a misalignment with our state assessment, the Smarter Balanced Assessment for grades 3 through 8, and the Math ACT for 11th graders.

Let's Talk about the South Dakota K - 12 Proposed Math Standards, Part 7

In Steven Yoder’s article in the Hechinger Report, Dr. Monte Meyerink, Assistant Professor at Northern State University, indicated that simplifying standards is a trend and we won’t know the effects for 15 to 20 years. The proposed SD high school standards are largely based on those from Arkansas. Arkansas actually simplified its standards in 2023. So, how are they doing with their simplified standards?

To give you some historical perspective, in 2010, Arkansas adopted the Common Core Math Standards, just like most other states. They started using these during the 2011-2012 school year. When national assessments came out, there were two assessments used for Common Core, the Smarter Balanced Assessment (which we still use in SD) and the PARCC assessment, which Arkansas adopted. Arkansas decided to leave the PARCC group in 2015, and started using the ACT Aspire assessment instead. Shortly after that, they modified their standards and called them the Arkansas Math Standards, but they were largely the Common Core. These “new” standards were fully implemented in the 2017 – 2018 school year. Finally, in 2023, Arkansas decided to “simplify” their standards and move away from the Common Core. Their simplified standards match the Common Core about 37.4%, according to the Edgate Standards Comparison site. They began full implementation of the new standards during the 2023-2024 school year. At that same time, they changed to a different state assessment, partially because the ACT Aspire was being discontinued. Their new assessment, Arkansas Teaching, Learning, and Assessment System (ATLAS)

While the ACT Aspire served as more of a measurement of college and career readiness, the ATLAS assessment measures how well the students perform on their grade-level standards. Those are definitely two different ways to view things. The ATLAS seems to be more similar to the Smarter Balanced Assessment that South Dakota uses, as it focuses on grade-level standards, and it has proficiency levels: Limited, Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. The Smarter Balanced proficiency levels are Below Standard, Near Standard, Met Standard, and Exceeded Standard. In both assessments, states would like students at Levels 3 and 4, indicating that students have at least met their grade-level standards.

I did some digging and looked at the state assessment scores for Arkansas for grades 3 through 8. In this post, I am only going to look at grades 4, 6, and 8. The graph below indicates the percentage of Arkansas students in each grade who are at Levels 3 or 4 in mathematics. 

The big change between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 years was the change in the state assessments. So, it is hard to make these comparisons because the assessment changed to a completely different test. Again, the new test was created by educators in Arkansas, and those educators worked on the assessment as well as the cut scores. So, for the last two years, those students have been evaluated on how well they understand the “simplified” math standards. The same data is below in table form.

Looking at the data more closely, you also notice a large drop in proficiency levels between 2018-2019 and 2020-2021—the year of COVID-19 data is missing because the tests were not administered that year. But the drop the following year is likely due to a loss of content knowledge during COVID-19. COVID-19 has had a huge impact on student learning throughout the country. The good news for Arkansas is that the proficiency levels for these three grades all increased during the 2024-2025 school year. 

Since SD gives the Smarter Balanced Assessment, which is similar to the ATLAS in the sense that it measures their knowledge of the standards, let’s look at a comparison between states for these same two years. SD has standards more than 80% similar to the Common Core and Arkansas’ “simplified” standards are about 37% similar to the Common Core.

The table below compares the two states. You can see that the percentage of students at or above proficiency is about the same for Grade 6, but for Grades 4 and 8, SD has outperformed Arkansas in the past two years. Keep in mind these are different assessments but both are designed to measure students understanding of the math standards at their grade level.

Our Department of Education & Governor Rhoden wants us to “simplify” the standards so they look more like Arkansas’s. In fact, the proposed high school standards for Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II are very similar to those from Arkansas. I don’t think “simplifying the standards” is a good move for students in South Dakota! Our students and teachers deserve better. 

Let's Talk about the South Dakota K - 12 Proposed Math Standards, Part 6

Did you watch the GOP Primary Debate on Keloland last Tuesday? When they got to the topic of Education, our current governor, Larry Rhoden, mentioned ways that the state was improving K - 12 education, including the Science of Reading. Then he went on to say, "We have gotten rid of Common Core, we have written new math standards so our parents can be involved and engaged in their kids’ education. We have went from Common Core to Common Sense, and that’s a few of the things we have done in South Dakota. The one thing we won’t do is what other states have done as far as lowering the bar when their test scores are not what they should be.”

Wait--he was talking about the proposed math standards as if they have already been approved. The Board of Education has one more hearing scheduled for May 4 in Rapid City at the DoubleTree by Hilton at 10 AM Mountain Time. Does the Board of Education know that Governor Rhoden is speaking as if the proposed math standards will be passed? At the February 23rd hearing in Pierre, President of the Board, Steve Perkins, made it very clear that the Board is not just a rubber stamp. I hope the governor understands that there is one more hearing and the Board will vote at that hearing.

In other news, the SD Dept of Education has updated the proposed standards and included a set of Precalculus Standards instead of the 4th-year standards in the current set. One thing I noticed from the latest version is that there is still an error in one of the Grade 5 standards.

5.G.14 Understand the 𝑥-coordinate in an ordered pair is the horizontal movement and the 𝑦-coordinate in an order pair is the vertical movement. 

In the last edition of the public comments, on page 6, Melanie Jacobson points out that 5.G.14 has an error when she says, "This standard has a typo.  In both instances, the standard needs to refer to 'an ordered pair' instead of 'the order pair.' The correct terminology is 'ordered pair.' " Jacobson's comment occurred before the November meeting and while they fixed the first instance of "ordered pair" and the "an" before the second one, they never fixed the second instance of "ordered pair." Then, another educator, Ann Noyes, made the comment on page 21 about the same standard when she said, "In the proposed standard 5.G.14, the last part of the standard should read “and the y-coordinate in an ordered pair…”

Yet, the text copied above is from the more recent draft of the proposed standards. The Dept of Education has asked for specific comments, but then when they are given very specific comments, they aren't fixing them. The other part about this specific standard that I don't like is that it refers to the x-coordinate as "horizontal movement" and the y-coordinate as "vertical movement." The coordinates are a location in the Cartesian plane, where the x-coordinate represents the location in relation to the y-axis (the line x = 0), and the y-coordinate represents the location in relation to the x-axis (the line y = 0).

I noticed the issue with this standard in January and saw the public comment from Melanie Jacobson. Then, when I saw another comment about the standard from Ann Noyes, I figured that it would get fixed. However, it still has the ordered pair issue and the movement issue. I will submit another public comment to see if it gets fixed before the May 4th hearing.

Let's Talk about the South Dakota K - 12 Proposed Math Standards, Part 5

Yesterday, The Hechinger Report released an article related to the South Dakota proposed math standards. The author, Steven Yoder, contacted me in early November to discuss his idea for an article focused on the Archimedes Standards. I spoke with Mr. Yoder on two occasions and emailed with him a few times as he was writing the article. I didn't see the final article until it came out, and there are some statements in the article that puzzle me.

From the article, Dr. Joseph Graves, SD Secretary of Education said that "teachers and parents don’t understand the current standards because they’re so complicated. 'Our whole goal was to simplify, simplify, simplify.'" The Department of Education keeps saying that parents and teachers don't understand the standards. Where are they getting that information? Did they do a survey? Is it anecdotal evidence?

The Archimedes Standards were produced by the National Association of Scholars. This conservative group is urging states to eliminate Common Core math. They got the help of Jonathan Gregg, an Assistant Professor in Education from Hillsdale College, to write the Archimedes Standards. Yes, this is the same college that helped craft the current SD Social Studies Standards. Dr. Graves liked the simplicity of the Archimedes Standards so "last summer his department, using the Archimedes document and a few other state standards as examples, produced the dramatically slimmed-down rewrite." The proposed high school standards draw heavily from the Arkansas Math Standards.

Some SD teachers do like the simplicity of the proposed standards. Susan Fairchild, a Watertown High School math teacher and member of the committee, said, "As a new teacher, you don’t have to try and figure out what all of these fancy words mean.” I am not sure what she means by "fancy words?" Does she mean mathematics vocabulary? All teachers who complete an accredited teacher preparation program take math content courses and a math methods course. Vocabulary is very important in teaching and learning mathematics. In fact, a recent study indicates that students perform better in math when teachers use math vocabulary.

Monte Meyerink, an Assistant Professor of Education at Northern State University, was also on the committee and provided research to the advisory group. Most of the research articles focused on intervention techniques that help students with disabilities. In The Hechinger Report article, it says about Meyerink, "He said he doesn’t know of research supporting the connection between standards’ lucidity and student proficiency. But simplifying standards is a new trend, one whose effects on student outcomes won’t be understood for another 15 or 20 years."

Are we really experimenting with standards that we won't know if they will work for 15 to 20 years? The students in SD deserve better than that. Our teachers deserve better than that. I am pleading with the Board of Education to NOT approve the proposed standards on May 4th. I request that the Department of Education start the revision process over and include more stakeholders in the process.  

Let's Talk about the South Dakota K - 12 Proposed Math Standards, Part 4

A November 22, 2025 article in The Dakota Scout talks about the U.S. Mint no longer producing pennies, which led the SD Education Secretary, Dr. Joe Graves, to talk about how money is used in early grades to teach math. In fact, counting pennies and knowing that they are worth 1 cent is a Kindergarten standard in the Current Standards. In the Proposed Standards, there are two standards listed in Kindergarten related to coins and counting.

• K.M.6 Identify pennies and dimes by name and value. 
• K.M.7 Count groups of pennies and groups of dimes by their values. (coins not combined) 

Later in the article, Dr. Graves was critical of our current standards, which are largely based on Common Core Standards, when he said: "...We believe that changing the math standards so that we can get away from a very complicated common core based system to one that is, that treats math like math, will improve that as well. So that's the direction that we're trying to go in and make."

However, a little over a year ago, at a Joint Appropriations Committee meeting of the SD State Legislature, Dr. Graves seemed more positive about Common Core. He talks about how math involves two skill sets: calculation and number sense. He goes on to say that he believes that some people can do calculations but not have number sense; and that people can have number sense but not do calculations. While I disagree with the second part of his statement, he does emphasize that number sense is important and that doing well in math involves both skill sets.

During that meeting, one of the legislators, Taffy Howard, asks, "Have we at least recognized that Common Core does not work?" Graves responds:

    "...Common Core fed deeply into the sense that we need to have number sense and an overall global understanding of what we're doing versus the ability to actually do calculation or decoding and those kinds of things. So, actually to me at least, Common Core is a great example of one side of the equation."

It seems that Dr. Graves thinks that Common Core has helped with improving number sense. I agree with that. Number sense is so important. In fact, a recent opinion piece in the New York Times talks about how the current U.S. administration tends to exaggerate numbers, and they do this because they must believe that Americans won't know enough to critique them. This is why we need people with number sense so that they can look at data and understand enough math to know when something doesn't make sense.

What has happened in the last year to make our Department of Education think that we need to change our math standards? When Shannon Malone gave the rebuttal to the opponents' testimony at the Board of Education hearing on February 23, she said, "This department is committed to replacing Common Core with Common Sense."

If we go back to that Dakota Scout article, it quotes Governor Rhoden echoing Dr. Graves criticism of Common Core when he says, "When I think about where we came from and where we are headed, I've surmised it by saying we're going to trade common core for common sense."

This makes me wonder if Governor Rhoden is the one who wants to get rid of our current math standards. This doesn't make me feel great, especially since this is an election year, and he is in a primary race with three other candidates. Today, the first polls came out and Rhoden is polling in third place. 

Let's Talk about the South Dakota K - 12 Proposed Math Standards, Part 3

At the SD Board of Education meeting in Pierre on February 23, 2026, Shannon Malone was tasked with introducing the proposed math standards to the board, but she gave the floor to Dr. Monte Meyerink from Northern State University, who presented this slide show. Dr. Meyerink, who was a member of both the Math Advisory Group and the Standards Review Committee, presented the research that he said helped inform the writing of the standards. The slide below illustrates his role in the standards revision process. His last bullet point leads to a question from me: Where is this draft standards progression document?

It isn’t in the current version of the proposed standards. It wasn’t in the first version that the Board of Education discussed at the October 15, 2025 meeting, and it isn’t in the second version that was discussed at the November 10, 2025 meeting. I would love to see the standards progression document, as would all SD math teachers. I think many teachers are concerned about vertical alignment in the proposed standards, so this document might alleviate that concern.

If you look closely at the first version and the second and third versions of the proposed standards, you might also notice that the Introduction section in the first version is now missing from the second and third versions. That introduction explained the “collaborative process” that they used for the revision process. I do have some issues with some statements in that introduction. For example, the last sentence of the second paragraph says, “This group included K–12 educators and administrators from districts across the state, as well as representatives from higher education educator preparation programs.” I have seen the email list of the people in the math advisory group, and I think that there was only ONE representative (Dr. Meyerink) from higher education educator preparation programs.

The last sentence at the bottom of the first page also caught my attention. It says, “In lieu of identifying essential standards, the Department is creating a supplemental progression document that clearly outlines the development of mathematical skills across grade levels, organized by specific concepts.”  That sounds like the document that is mentioned in the last bullet on Dr. Meyerink’s slide. Where is that document? Again, I really feel like it would be helpful to all interested parties to see it, and it really should be included in the proposed standards.

It was nice to finally see the detailed list of research that Dr. Meyerink provided the group. I did read through the articles. The first three articles are all about research on math intervention techniques, primarily interventions used with students who have disabilities. This confused me because state mathematics standards are written for ALL students. I am not sure why that research would be used to write standards. The last article is about Direct Instruction (DI), and while it covers research done over 50 years (which Dr. Graves mentioned in the first hearing), those years are 1966 to 2016. Also, I am not convinced that DI is the best way for students to learn math. This quote from the article stood out to me, “…DI assumes all students can learn new material when (a) they have mastered prerequisite knowledge and skills and (b) the instruction is unambiguous.”  Since COVID-19, we see many students in classrooms that have gaps in their math knowledge, so they won’t have necessarily “mastered prerequisite knowledge and skills.” This poses a huge problem for teachers across our state as they need intervention techniques that they can implement while students are learning new material.

At the October 15th hearing, Shannon Malone mentioned that the Department of Education had just received a five-year $3.7 million SPDG grant. SPDG stands for State Personnel Development Grant. These grants are awarded from the Special Education Division of the U.S. Department of Education. On the U.S. Spending website, it says that the objectives of these grants are:

To assist State educational agencies in reforming and improving their systems for personnel preparation and professional development in early intervention, educational and transition services, to improve results for children with disabilities. As used in this program, "personnel" means special education teachers, regular education teachers, principals, administrators, related services personnel, paraprofessionals, and early intervention personnel serving infants, toddlers, preschoolers, or children with disabilities, except where a particular category of personnel, such as related services personnel, is identified.

So, the grant that they say will help implement the proposed standards is a special education grant. Dr. Meyerink’s research on intervention techniques now makes more sense. Now, my hard question is: How is this all related to the Standards Revision?

I want to remind everyone of the Goal of the Math Standards stated in the Board of Education Hearing, shown in the image below. We want ALL SD students to be mathematically proficient and able to problem-solve, think critically, communicate, and reason. I feel strongly that our current standards do that.