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.

Let's Talk about the South Dakota K - 12 Proposed Math Standards Part 2

Today I attended the SD Board of Education Standards Meeting to once again testify as an Opponent of the proposed math standards. In her rebuttal to the opposition testimony, Shannon Malone, Director of the Division of Learning and Instruction, mentioned that they have made several changes that we have suggested and that they have been listening to us. And, I agree with that. At the end, she paraphrased Governor Rhoden, from a November 22, 2025 article in The Dakota Scout when she said, "This department is committed to replacing Common Core with Common Sense."

I know what Common Core Math is, but I have no idea what is meant by Common Sense Math. Of course, I went to Google and here is what I found. There is a website called commonsensemath.com, where it seems that they are trying to sell study aids to help students learn math. I cannot really tell who runs this site, but, guess what, their help is aligned to Common Core Math. I also noticed that they did reference some NCTM articles on the site. Then I went to commonsensemath.org, which redirects to a site run by Edric Cane, who has written some books about teaching math. He has a PhD from the University of Michigan, although I don't know what content area his degree is in. He has taught math and has some interesting ideas. In addition, the Standards for Mathematical Practice came up when I googled common sense math standards. That was interesting to me since those are part of the Common Core Standards.

But, I have digressed a bit as I wonder why Governor Rhoden thinks that we need to get rid of our current standards, which are largely based on the Common Core? It is an election year and he is in a primary race for the Republican nomination in June. What if he loses the primary? We are then stuck with his "common sense math" standards if the Board approves them.

Maybe the data shows that we need new standards? Nope--the data actually shows otherwise. Table 1 shows the top twelve ranking states on the 2024 NAEP in 4th-grade math. The second column in the table explains how close each state's math standards are to Common Core. Notice that South Dakota's current math standards match Common Core more than 80%. More importantly, South Dakota's 4th graders are 9th in the nation on this assessment. 

Table 1: 2024 4th-Grade Math NAEP Top Twelve States

Then I looked at the 8th-grade math rankings, which is shown in Table 2 below. Again, South Dakota ranks 6th in the nation! Now let's look at states that are in both lists: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Utah, North Dakota, Minnesota, New Jersey, and South Dakota. Of these seven states, five of them (71%) have math standards that match the Common Core more than 80%. So, it seems that the Common Core Standards are working just fine!

Table 2: 2024 8th-Grade Math NAEP Top Ten States

Again, I am going to ask the hard question: If our current standards are enough for our students to be placing in the top ten on the 2024 NAEP Assessment, why do they need to be rewritten? Notice that I said rewritten rather than revised. A revision would look more similar to what we have now, and the proposed ones do NOT resemble our current standards. Here are the current SD K - 12 math standards if you want to compare.

Data for the tables came from the following sites.

https://edgate.com/standards/us-comparisons 

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/

Let's Talk about the South Dakota K - 12 Proposed Math Standards Part 1

First of all, I want to thank the members of the Math Standards Review Committee for all of the work they have done and continue to do to try to get the proposed K - 12 math standards where they need to be. They were given quite a task and having only 2 days to work together in Pierre really wasn't enough time to do what they wanted--at least some members of the committee feel that way. I know that they are continuing to work on the standards, based on public feedback. 

I also want to thank all the wonderful math educators and parents that have submitted feedback on the standards. A special shout out to the Watertown school district for 3.5 pages of feedback on the K - 4 standards! In total, there are about 25 pages of feedback, but the link above has some comments cut off so it could be longer. The proposed standards themselves only make up 37 pages so the fact that there are 25 pages of public comment is incredible, and I want to thank everyone who has contributed comments. 

However, the fact that there are 25 pages of comments on a 37-page document says something about the document itself. It seems to say that there is a lot of stuff missing! While I understand why some wanted to "simplify" the standards, it seems like now they might be too simple. 

Math is a complicated subject and it is difficult to teach well. I doubt that people will disagree with that statement. Our current standards often give examples of how to teach some of the standards, which is helpful to teachers, especially new teachers. For reference, the current standards are about 81 pages. So, we have lost 44 pages, and I feel like that is a lot of information to lose.

If we look at states that do well on the 4th grade and 8th grade math portions of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the length of their K - 12 mathematics standards documents, we see that they tend to be long, as illustrated in Table 1. I want to point out that when counting pages, I didn't count the introduction pages or appendices, just the pages with the standards and any explanations at the beginning of the grade level.

Table 1: States that score well on the NAEP and page length of their math standards

Again, math isn't easy to teach, and teachers need guidance to help students learn and achieve their full potential. Minnesota recently rewrote their standards and their new document is actually longer, not shorter. Another thing that I find troubling is that I feel like there should be more emphasis on Data Analysis in our standards because we live in a data-driven world.