The Department of Education appears to have kept the press out of its first big Hillsdale standards indoctrination session. But one social studies teacher who attended the show a couple weeks ago in Sioux Falls sensed an unusual level of spectacle:
In Sioux Falls, hundreds of teachers gathered for a summertime history and civics summit.
The Department of Education event sought to get teachers together and set the stage for the rollout of the new social studies standards.
After heated debate surrounding those standards this spring, Rapid City teacher Carrie Huber said the meeting was something of a spectacle.
“Initial impressions was this was just so different from a lot of the professional developments I had done through the Department of Education,” Huber said. “The Department of Education was definitely putting a lot into hosting a really nice event and pushing the bounds of what really is necessary. I mean, we’re teachers. We’re happy with pretty much anything” [CJ Keene, “Some Educators Apprehensive over Implementation of Social Studies Standards,” SDPB Radio, 2023.06.25].
But all the flash and dash and bacon donuts in the world won’t change the fact that the Hillsdale standards are impractical:
“I think it’s intimidating to think about what implementation looks like. I teach an AP course which, I at least, think there is a lot of question of how do the new standards function with AP courses – just not knowing,” Huber said. “Looking up the new standards for my course, we would have to tick off a standard every 25 minutes” [Keene, 2023.06.25].
Administrators agree the new standards don’t look promising from a practical educational perspective:
Spearfish Middle School principal Don Lyon said conversations have already started in school districts.
“The best thing about South Dakota educators, we’re really good soldiers,” Lyon said. “We do what we need to do to help kids. As always, the superintendents, the principals and the teachers will work it out, we’ll streamline things, we’ll all work together and put the best product out there for our kids. It will take a lot of work, but you’ve got the right people in there to do it.”
Lyon said he wants teachers to remember they, their administrations and their communities are the ones that drive education more than any set of standards. However, the question of developmental appropriateness remains for some.
In the Tea Area School District, elementary principal Samantha Walder surveyed her staff’s response to the standards. In that document, educators were able to offer their thoughts on the proposal.
“And I had teachers’, kindergarten through twelfth grade, that reviewed the standards to determine if it was something we could teach easily, if it was something that’s not currently at the grade level but we could make work, or we marked it red and said, ‘there’s no way this is really possible in that grade level.’ That work will really lay the foundation for what we do as a team next, and we will certainly be guided by the teachers that are closest to the work,” Walder said [CJ Keane, “School Administrators Prepare for New State Social Studies Standards,” SDPB Radio, 2023.06.26].
Teachers won’t make a spectacle of themselves or of the new standards. I suggest they keep their heads down and find ways to subvert the bad standards by sticking with the good social studies they’ve always been teaching… and I suggest principals and superintendents help protect their teachers and their students from the Hillsdale spectacle that the Governor is trying to foist upon them.
Your Governor can tout her implementation of ultra conservative Hillsdale College educational standards and your teachers and administrators can teach what needs to be taught. – “It is the way … “
Just being picky, but there are several grammatical and punctuation errors in Samantha Walder’s statement and she’s a Principal??
P. Aitch- boy, I sure hope the blatant racism and fascistic actions of KN and Hills-have-eyes-dale receive the public’s scorn and ridicule and condemnation in KN’s lifetime. The preposterousness of their actions deserve to be written in the history books before she’s dead. There’s no other place for such passive aggression against the youth of the nation.
Btw- I reported KN’s little business transaction with Hillsdale College for the new teacher-opposed whitewashed standards to the ACLU. Whether it’s civil liberties or something else, a good portion of our state feels violated and the perpetrators need reckoned with.
There is a large exchange of cash going on here. To put teachers in the middle of what is, in the main, a monetary exchange between the State of South Dakota and Hillsdale College and it’s faculty is exploitation at it’s worst. To warp children in the process proves everything is for sale.
Is the big show being put on by DOE staff, or have outsiders been brought in for the vent?
I’ve seen this rodeo before. I think, really, this will follow the way these things have gone for the last 40 years or so. It will be the students who dictate that these standard are going to work. When they disappoint, you will have the inevitable blame game, and, of course, Republicans will, as always, blame teachers and administrators for any deficiencies, and the ultimate failure of this effort. Since the Reagan/Janklow years, there have been these sorts of top-down attempts to “reform” various parts of education rolled out every 4-6 years. Governors seem to think they are education experts, or they get caught up in some special interest group’s ideas for “reform.” A lot of money is dropped into the “reform” effort, which always fails. By that time the next governor comes in with the next goofy idea, and away we go again.
It is too bad because students are used as pawns for rampant gubernatorial egos. Huge amounts of taxpayer dollars, teacher effort and student futures are wasted for nothing.
Here’s the way to go about such reforms. Find small pilot projects to test out a number of different ideas. See which ones engage students and which bore the pants off of them and which ones advance their understanding of and interest in the subject. Don’t try to make big changes all at once, but let teachers come to understand over time what works and what doesn’t.
Mountain Springs, you may wish to direct your pickiness at whoever edits the SDPB news page, not Walder. She’s being quoted by the reporter; Walder does not appear to have written the text herself.
O, DOE put on the event, but they brought in a number of outside speakers, especially historical impersonators.
At the risk of holding up and bashing a strawman . . . consider the grains of truth in George Will’s latest, Why K-12 education’s alarming decline could be a dominant 2024 issue, gift article / maybe paywall: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/28/education-decline-campaign-issue/
Will cites the legacy of the too well known back-sliding and failures of public education since the 40-year ago release, and updates to: A Nation at Risk Report. The Report and updates catalog the back-sliding of k-12 educational achievement. The pandemic accelerated the declines.
Will’s wishful thinking that the republicants grab and run with the issue. Will’s fatal flaws include: 1) there is no republican led jurisdiction in this nation (that I know of) that mastered the k-12 education challenge of achieving first world excellence. None. 2) the republican led jursidictions’ legacy is accelerating the decline of higher achieving education systems. Witness Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota outside of the Twin Cities, and of course, the Dakotas.
The solutions to the state’s and national education challenges are easy. Those challenges were and are being mastered by first world nations. What this state and this lack is the will. It’s not merely dumping trainloads of money as Senator Rounds and the Air Force are doing at Ellsworth.
John–you are correct. Will is quite elderly now and he has watched initiatives be proposed and ultimately fail in the Education Department for years under both Democrats and Republicans. Republicans tend to launch certain initiatives, campaign on them, then chronically underfund them, and say they are turning them over to the states…and then, of course, its the funding starved states that have failed, not the Republicans. The Democrats aren’t much better. Their initiatives make more sense to me, but they fund them meagerly and are willing to bargain away the appropriation in various “budget battles”.
I think that’s a shrewd and accurate assessment, Arlo Blundt. My “takeaway” (sounds like some restaurant food) is most legislators and legislation waste time and money. I’m occasionally cynical, though.