Speaking of curriculum standards, the Department of Education has issued yet another rewrite of the Hillsdale College social studies standards that the Board of Education Standards will rubber-stamp for Governor Kristi Noem later this month. The March 30 draft is the fifth draft of social studies standards issued in this review cycle and the third issued in the past eight months.
The document has swelled from 127 pages as issued last August to 130 in its January form to 178 in the March 30 edition. The Department of Education provides two change-summary sheets, but the second change-summary sheet appears to lump all changes from January and March together without indicating clearly what has changed in January and what was changed in March. Anyone wishing to testify at the final public hearing on the standards (April 17 in Pierre) must thus go line-by-line through all three drafts to see if anything they identified as a problem in the first draft has been fixed or whether any new errors or bad standards have been snuckl in since August or January.
The need for time to scrutinize all of the changes made in this latest draft underscores the point I made in January: by revising the standards twice during the review process but offering no additional hearings to the four originally scheduled for the August draft, the Department of Education and the Board of Education are violating state law. SDCL 13-3-89 requires four public hearings on any new curriculum standards over a period of at least six months. The Board of Education Standards held two hearings on the August standards and one hearing on the January standards. It will hold one hearing on the March 30 standards. None of these proposed standards has received four public hearings; thus, none of these proposed standards may be legally adopted.
The Legislature enacted that six-month review period to protect teachers and students from insufficiently reviewed standards and last-minute changes sneaking error and bad curriculum into our schools. The only way the Board of Education may legally approve the latest draft of the curriculum standards is to hold three more public hearings, in Sioux Falls, Rapid City, and Aberdeen, on the March 30 draft. The last of those hearings can happen no earlier than October 17. And the Department cannot change the standards again. The Department must settle on a draft and let the process run for six months.
South Dakota’s march toward Hillsdale mediocrity is really funny Ian. Did or do the Hillsdorian’s have a comedy club? I’m leaving this wide open Ian.
Cooler heads are starting to have an impact….stretch this thing out and try to temper the insanity with some reasonable discourse. Probably won’t work, as the Governor will intervene to assure adoption and fulfillment of her Hillsdale contract.
Violating state statutes is not a great way to go about setting an example for students. You are correct that they are violating
SDCL 13-3-89. The words are “…the standards being proposed….” must go through four hearings. Changing the proposal resets the hearing schedule. Yeah, it’s incredibly bad construction, but that’s the law as written.
Why don’t we ignore all this Hillsdale nonsense and just go back to the old days of a hardcover Houghton Mifflin civics book you could pound nails and use as a cutting board when fishing after school?
Good question Grudznick…I guess the answer is:” Because Governor Noem has committed the tax money of South Dakotans, to the tune of hundreds of thousands, to adopting a worthless piece of propaganda authored by a fringe group of fundamentalist Christians and their greedy college administrators from somewhere in Michigan, for rote learning by our children from Buffalo to Elk Point, Milbank to Edgemont and between.” Sounds insaner than most….yes?
I use mine to crumble hairy scary mary and twist a scud on to this day. Aside from how your text book is used, Hillsdale needs to go back home.
Arlo’s right: Kristi Noem is bringing us the Hillsdale nonsense. I’d take a reliable Houghton Mifflin textbook over Hillsdale’s propaganda in our classrooms any day.
Bill in Montana will ban teaching of gravity and evolution in Public schools.
https://youtu.be/jSNjTrWrdbY
What scares me is speaking to my son’s school administrator on the reservation and hearing him say we tried. So of course I shared what I know about the state law and all I can do is hope but it shocks me still that my own tribe has no authority over what we teach our kids and we’re supposedly sovereign.