Members of the South Dakota Board of Education Standards meet on May 4, 2026, at the DoubleTree convention center in Rapid City. From left are board members Linda Olsen and Tonia Warzecha, state Education Secretary Joe Graves, and board members Steven Perkins, Greg Von Wald, Phyllis Heineman and Rich Meyer. (Photo by Seth Tupper/South Dakota Searchlight)
PIERRE, S.D. (South Dakota Searchlight) – The South Dakota Board of Education Standards unanimously approved revisions to the state’s math standards Monday in Rapid City, even as a math teacher flagged some problems state officials acknowledged they’ll have to fix.
The board, the state Department of Education and math educators throughout the state have gone back and forth over the last six months on the standards. The department accepted more than 50 changes to the original proposal over that timeframe.
Crystal McMachen, a middle school math teacher in Rapid City, told board members she worried the standards were oversimplified and rushed, leading to errors in the final product. She flagged three errors at the meeting, including duplicated standards, inconsistent wording and misalignment between grade levels.
“If I found these errors in an hour on a Saturday — and this was on a Saturday — I can’t believe these have been combed through,” McMachen said. “So, I’m really urging you not to adopt these standards. They are not ready, and South Dakota is better than this.”
South Dakota Department of Education Secretary Joe Graves told the board the current standards, which were copied from the national Common Core standards, are “unnecessarily complex” in some areas. The new standards don’t oversimplify the standards, he said.
“It simply changes the language so that it is heard and understood by more people,” Graves said.
A 20-person revision committee reviewed the original proposal after it was developed by a statewide advisory group last year. The proposal pulls from other states’ standards across the nation, and from the Archimedes standards, which were written by an assistant professor at Hillsdale College. The private Christian college in Michigan was also involved in South Dakota’s revised social studies standards, approved in 2023 and implemented this school year.
Sharon Vestal, a mathematics professor at South Dakota State University and president of the South Dakota Council of Teachers of Mathematics, attended every standards hearing held across the state for the new math standards. She said the standards fundamentally “prioritize procedures over concepts” and make mathematics “less precise” in the quest to make the standards easier for parents and elementary educators to understand.
“Mathematics is a language. It is universal, structured and exact,” Vestal said. “Like any language, it has vocabulary, grammar and syntax. When that structure is removed, meaning is lost.”
Earlier in the standards revision process, Graves told board members South Dakota students “lack significant progress” on math testing since the COVID-19 pandemic, which he attributed to the current standards. About 44% of students were proficient or above on the state test annually over the last five years, he said.
Math standards alone won’t raise test scores, said Shannon Malone, the department’s director of learning and instruction, while introducing the latest version of the standards.
“It’s clear that we also need all our educators to increase efforts and attention to mathematics,” Malone said. “Achievement requires excellent instruction in the classroom, parental support, professional development at all levels, solid instructional materials, school and district support.”
Malone added that a “more simplified set of standards and robust set of supports” could help South Dakota students “realize their true potential in math.”
The department accepted more than 80% of the actionable changes recommended by opponents throughout the process.
Board President Steve Perkins acknowledged that the adopted standards would need minor corrections, but wanted to approve the standards so the state Department of Education would “move forward” with implementation.
Graves told the board that the department can bring back errors that “are not content changes” to be fixed at a later date. Addressing McMahon’s concerns about the misalignment would be a “substantive change,” Graves said.
“We can look at those and come back to you at a later time, but at this point we’d like to get the standards approved,” Graves said.
The exchange was evidence of a rushed process, Vestal told South Dakota Searchlight after the meeting.
“I suspect there are a lot of issues within the standards,” Vestal said. “I’m pretty sure there are more than the ones Crystal pointed out today. I want to make sure if we’re using these standards for multiple years that they’re done right.”
Vestal said the misalignment between concepts taught at different grade levels will “cause a lot of problems” within districts. As a university instructor, she plans to keep an eye on whether incoming students will be prepared for college-level courses.
“Mathematics is just too important to not do it right,” Vestal said.
Comments