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.