I mentioned last September that the proposed K-12 math standards currently under review in South Dakota are a second push by conservative activists to force public education into a mold written by Hillsdale College. With just one public hearing left (Rapid City, May 4) before the Board of Education Standards rubber-stamps this politically biased outsider document, The Hechinger Report picks up on that theme of conservative schemers putting political indoctination above good teaching:
One source the department consulted in creating its new draft — part of a review that happens every seven years — was a brand-new set of model math standards produced by the National Association of Scholars, a conservative group on the front lines of the education culture wars. The group’s document, named the Archimedes Standards for the ancient Greek mathematician, urges states to do what South Dakota is trying with its standards rewrite: eliminate Common Core math.
Almost from the time of their introduction in 2009, the Common Core State Standards — intended to create a set of academic expectations for students across the country — have prompted backlash from those who disliked both the content and the idea that standards supported by the federal government were usurping a role traditionally left to states. Now, some of the same groups that have criticized schools and universities for diversity efforts and history instruction that embraces the contributions of people from marginalized groups are turning their attention to the math standards.
…The standards were authored for the association by Jonathan Gregg, an assistant education professor at Hillsdale College, a small Christian liberal arts college in southern Michigan whose president chaired Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission on “patriotic education” in 2020. Gregg said in an interview that his background — undergraduate degrees in math and English, a master’s in humanities and a doctorate in math education — equipped him to write the draft standards in simple prose [Steven Yoder, “After Fights over Social Studies Standards, Conservative Activists Come for Math,” The Hechinger Report, 2026.03.17].
South Dakota Secretary of Education and perennial conservative hack Joseph Graves says the current standards leave parents and teachers “absolutely at sea…. They have no idea what those standards mean.” Oldham-Ramona-Rutland math teacher Susan Gilkerson understands the current standards just fine and says they beat the Hillsdale replacement:
The proposed math standards the board was considering — just 36 pages, less than half the length of standards adopted in 2018 — were so scant that teachers won’t know how to use them, Gilkerson said. The existing standards detail not just which math concepts should be taught but also the specific skills students need to demonstrate to show they understand them, said Gilkerson, who teaches in the rural Oldham-Ramona-Rutland district.
“When I talk to my students, I want them to understand it,” she said of a concept like the Pythagorean theorem. But the new standards contain little guidance on how students can demonstrate they grasp that math concept or countless others, she said.
…Gilkerson, the teacher, pointed to the rewritten eighth grade requirement on scientific notation, which explains what’s expected in 10 words versus 53 in the current standards. In an interview, Gilkerson, who has taught for 15 years, said she knows the specific skills students need to master that operation on the state test. But many new teachers won’t, she said, and she fears test scores will suffer [Yoder, 2026.03.17].
South Dakotans commenting on the proposed Hillsdale standards appear to mostly agree with Gilkerson. Yoder reports 40 of the 44 comments submitted to the DOE were critical of the Hillsdale standards.
The standards debate exemplifies the conservative Hillsdale agenda: like with Project 2025 (which Hillsdale helped write), these conservative plotters know their wingnut ideas would never win majority support through a fair, inclusive, democratic process, so they capture a few key executive branch posts and ramrod their bad ideas through backroom regulatory processes. South Dakota ends up saddled with, among other things, math standards that its own teachers didn’t write, don’t like, but have to follow.