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 comparison to the y-axis (the line x = 0), and the y-coordinate represents the location in comparison 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.
