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Susan Gilkerson, a math teacher and school bus driver, stood before a South Dakota education board and issued a warning. 

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.  

Joseph Graves, South Dakota’s education secretary, countered: Teachers and parents don’t understand the current standards because they’re so complicated. “Our whole goal was to simplify, simplify, simplify,” Graves said. 

That exchange this past October marked the opening salvo in an escalating battle over South Dakota’s math standards. 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.

Math, with its black-and-white rules and rigid structure, might seem to be beyond politics. But the National Association of Scholars says the Common Core has injected too much confusion into math education and lacks rigor. The group aims to instead introduce more memorization of math facts and pare down the number of words used to describe the knowledge that students should be taught at each grade level.

Supporters of the current standards say that shortening them eliminates useful information that teachers can use to guide how they teach. And there’s no proof that changing the standards in this way will actually move the needle on math achievement, they say. 

“Simpler doesn’t necessarily mean more rigorous,” said Jon Star, an education professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. 

Related: One state tried eighth grade algebra for all. It hasn’t gone well

All but five states initially adopted Common Core, a state-led initiative developed by a bipartisan group of policymakers, scholars and educators. But it soon faced pushback from conservatives and liberals alike. 

Parents in blue states, troubled by what they saw as Common Core’s excessive focus on testing, started opting out of core-aligned annual state tests. Red-state politicians and tea party activists protested that Common Core intruded on state control of education; the Obama administration’s support for the standards intensified that opposition. 

As Common Core was politicized, many states started revising, reviewing or pulling away from the standards altogether. In releasing the Archimedes Standards last June, the National Association of Scholars wants more to follow their lead. 

The 39-year-old organization has focused in recent years on revising state standards, which it says are “the single most influential documents in America’s education systems,” affecting curriculum, teaching training, textbook content and more. It started in 2022 with social studies standards, releasing model standards that call liberty an “American birthright” and describe civics instruction advanced by mainstream groups like the National Council for the Social Studies as a “recruitment tool of the progressive left.”

The National Association of Scholars then turned to science standards in 2024 and math standards last year. In 2026, it unveiled new model standards for English language arts.   

In introducing the Archimedes math standards, the association says that while Common Core has “useful elements,” it isn’t demanding enough and “was rushed into public use without sufficient testing and evaluation.” The group says that the Archimedes standards will improve students’ ability to do math in their heads by requiring more memorization, contrasting them with the Common Core’s “deemphasizing” of math facts. The standards ban the use of calculators before high school.  

Their key goal, though, is “lucidity” — standards that are easier for teachers and parents to understand. In an introduction to the Archimedes standards, the association contrasts a Common Core second grade standard on addition and subtraction that takes 67 words to explain with Archimedes’ 24-word version. 

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.

That simplicity gives teachers more freedom to tailor approaches for their classrooms, said Gregg. “You can’t overprescribe. Teachers are the ones in the room, the ones facing the students,” he said. Standards are flags that everyone — students, teachers, parents, policymakers and researchers — can get behind, he said. For that to happen, all those groups need to understand them, he said. 

Related: States were adding lessons about Native American history. Then came the anti-CRT movement

In South Dakota, that accessibility attracted Graves, the state education secretary. With the state’s Common Core-aligned math standards, parents and teachers “are absolutely at sea,” he said in an interview. “They have no idea what those standards mean.” So last summer his department, using the Archimedes document and a few other state standards as examples, produced the dramatically slimmed-down rewrite. 

The state’s math standards dispute has been sharpened by Hillsdale and the National Association of Scholars’ involvement in a contentious update of the state’s social studies standards. During that review, in 2022, then-Gov. Kristi Noem purged members of the standards commission, replaced them with political allies, and appointed a retired Hillsdale College professor to facilitate a rewrite. 

The state board of education approved the new version in 2023. South Dakota Native American groups said those left out essential topics related to the culture and history of the state’s tribes. Teachers lambasted what they saw as a focus on memorization of historical facts over inquiry. But the National Association of Scholars wrote a letter praising South Dakota’s rewrite for among other things, taking “a clear stand against both the discriminatory ideologies commonly referred to as Critical Race Theory and the subordination of social studies instruction to political activism.” 

The math standards have drawn similar fire from teachers and university education professors. An education department survey drew 44 comments on the rewrite, all but four of them critical. 

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. 

Sharon Vestal, president of the state’s Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which represents math teachers, and a South Dakota State University associate professor of math and statistics, called on Graves at a November hearing to scrap the rewrite. “They’re poorly written, and a lot of the math content has been lost by simplifying the language,” she said of the revised standards.  

But a few educators support the rewrite. “The simplicity is nice,” said Susan Fairchild, a veteran math teacher at Watertown High School who served on a state committee that reviewed the new version. “As a new teacher, you don’t have to try and figure out what all of these fancy words mean.”

Monte Meyerink, another committee member and an assistant professor of math education at Northern State University, led a review of research on effective education standards to guide the department in preparing its revision. He said he doesn’t know of research supporting the connection between standards’ lucidity and student proficiency. But simplifying standards is a new trend, one whose effects on student outcomes won’t be understood for another 15 or 20 years, he said.  

Once the standards are finalized, the department will roll out an expanded or “unpacked” version that has more detail, he said. That doesn’t comfort Vestal. “My concern is the quality of those unpacked standards because of the quality of the proposed standards,” she said.

Similarly, some national math education researchers reject the Archimedes Standards’ assumption that simpler standards mean better teaching. Ball State education researcher Michael Steele points to the Common Core standard for fourth grade fractions: “Explain why a fraction a/b is equivalent to a fraction (n x a)/(n x b) by using visual fraction models, with attention to how the number and size of the parts differ even though the two fractions themselves are the same size. Use this principle to recognize and generate equivalent fractions.”

The Archimedes Standards version reads, “Find equivalent fractions and reduce fractions to their simplest form.” Steele said that while the Common Core version takes a moment to understand, it reminds teachers of how they learned to use fractions and makes them better able to teach the concept.

“What this group calls lucidity in many cases, I might call an oversimplification of mathematics,” he said.   

A final vote on South Dakota’s rewrite will come after a May 4 public hearing. 

The National Association of Scholars wants to get other states on board. Gregg, the author of the Archimedes standards, said he’s helping to advise the Louisiana Department of Education on its math standards review, begun last year. 

In those standards, “I think there are places where you’ll see — probably not as directly as you’ll see in South Dakota — some of the influence the Archimedes community has had,” he said. 

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965 or preston@hechingerreport.org.

This story about math standards was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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After fights over social studies standards, conservative activists come for math

by Steven Yoder, The Hechinger Report
March 17, 2026

<h1>After fights over social studies standards, conservative activists come for math</h1> <p class="byline">by Steven Yoder, The Hechinger Report <br />March 17, 2026</p> <p class="has-drop-cap">Susan Gilkerson, a math teacher and school bus driver, stood before a South Dakota education board and issued a warning.&nbsp;</p> <p>The proposed math standards the board was considering —&nbsp;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.&nbsp;</p> <p>“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.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>Joseph Graves, South Dakota’s education secretary, countered: Teachers and parents don’t understand the current standards because they’re so complicated. “Our whole goal was to simplify, simplify, simplify,” Graves said.&nbsp;</p> <p>That <a href="https://boardsandcommissions.sd.gov/Meetings.aspx?BoardID=32">exchange this past October</a> marked the opening salvo in an escalating battle over South Dakota's math standards. 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 <a href="https://www.nas.org/blogs/press_release/the-national-association-of-scholars-and-freedom-in-education-release-the-archimedes-math-standards">model math standards</a> 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.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>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.</p> <!-- RTT removed image (115201) --> <p>Math, with its black-and-white rules and rigid structure, might seem to be beyond politics. But the National Association of Scholars says the Common Core has injected too much confusion into math education and lacks rigor. The group aims to instead introduce more memorization of math facts and pare down the number of words used to describe the knowledge that students should be taught at each grade level.</p> <p>Supporters of the current standards say that shortening them eliminates useful information that teachers can use to guide how they teach. And there’s no proof that changing the standards in this way will actually move the needle on math achievement, they say.&nbsp;</p> <p>“Simpler doesn’t necessarily mean more rigorous,” said Jon Star, an education professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Related: </strong><a href="https://hechingerreport.org/one-state-tried-algebra-for-all-eighth-graders-it-hasnt-gone-well/"><strong>One state tried eighth grade algebra for all. It hasn’t gone well</strong></a></p> <p>All but five states initially adopted <a href="https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/common-core/">Common Core</a>, a state-led initiative developed by a bipartisan group of policymakers, scholars and educators. But it soon faced pushback from conservatives and liberals alike.&nbsp;</p> <p>Parents in blue states, troubled by what they saw as Common Core’s excessive focus on testing, started opting out of core-aligned annual state tests. Red-state politicians and tea party activists protested that Common Core intruded on state control of education; the Obama administration’s support for the standards intensified that opposition.&nbsp;</p> <p>As Common Core was politicized, many states started revising, reviewing or pulling away from the standards altogether. In releasing the Archimedes Standards last June, the National Association of Scholars wants more to follow their lead.&nbsp;</p> <!-- RTT removed image (115200) --> <p>The 39-year-old organization has focused in recent years on revising state standards, which it says are “the single most influential documents in America’s education systems,” affecting curriculum, teaching training, textbook content and more. It started in 2022 with social studies standards, releasing model standards that call liberty an “American birthright” and describe civics instruction advanced by mainstream groups like the National Council for the Social Studies as a “recruitment tool of the progressive left.”</p> <p>The National Association of Scholars then turned to science standards in 2024 and math standards last year. In 2026, it unveiled new model standards for English language arts.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>In introducing the Archimedes math standards, the association says that while Common Core has “useful elements,” it isn’t demanding enough and “was rushed into public use without sufficient testing and evaluation.” The group says that the Archimedes standards will improve students’ ability to do math in their heads by requiring more memorization, contrasting them with the Common Core’s “deemphasizing” of math facts. The standards ban the use of calculators before high school.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>Their key goal, though, is “lucidity” — standards that are easier for teachers and parents to understand. In an introduction to the Archimedes standards, the association contrasts a Common Core second grade standard on addition and subtraction that takes 67 words to explain with Archimedes’ 24-word version.&nbsp;</p> <p>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.</p> <p>That simplicity gives teachers more freedom to tailor approaches for their classrooms, said Gregg. “You can't overprescribe. Teachers are the ones in the room, the ones facing the students,” he said. Standards are flags that everyone — students, teachers, parents, policymakers and researchers — can get behind, he said. For that to happen, all those groups need to understand them, he said.&nbsp;</p> <div class="wp-block-group is-style-border"> <p class="has-text-align-center"><strong>3^rd grade standard for multiplication and division</strong> </p> <div class="wp-block-columns is-style-borders"> <div class="wp-block-column"> <h5 class="wp-block-heading">Common Core </h5> <p>Determine the unknown whole number in a multiplication or division equation relating three whole numbers. <em>For example, determine the unknown number that makes the equation true in each of the equations 8 x ? = 48, 5 = _ ÷ 3, 6 x 6 = ?.</em>&nbsp;</p> </p></div> <div class="wp-block-column"> <h5 class="wp-block-heading">Archimedes</h5> <p>Find unknown values in multiplication and division equations.</p> </p></div> </p></div> </p></div> <p><strong>Related: </strong><a href="https://hechingerreport.org/states-were-adding-lessons-about-native-american-history-then-came-the-anti-crt-movement/"><strong>States were adding lessons about Native American history. Then came the anti-CRT movement</strong></a></p> <p>In South Dakota, that accessibility attracted Graves, the state education secretary. With the state’s Common Core-aligned math standards, parents and teachers “are absolutely at sea,” he said in an interview. “They have no idea what those standards mean.” So last summer his department, using the Archimedes document and a few other state standards as examples, produced the dramatically slimmed-down rewrite.&nbsp;</p> <p>The state’s math standards dispute has been sharpened by Hillsdale and the National Association of Scholars’ involvement in a contentious update of the state’s social studies standards. During that review, in 2022, then-Gov. Kristi Noem purged members of the standards commission, replaced them with political allies, and appointed a retired Hillsdale College professor to facilitate a rewrite.&nbsp;</p> <p>The state board of education approved the new version in 2023. South Dakota Native American groups <a href="https://hechingerreport.org/states-were-adding-lessons-about-native-american-history-then-came-the-anti-crt-movement/">said those left out</a> essential topics related to the culture and history of the state’s tribes. Teachers lambasted what they saw as a focus on memorization of historical facts over inquiry. But the National Association of Scholars wrote a letter praising South Dakota’s rewrite for among other things, taking “a clear stand against both the discriminatory ideologies commonly referred to as Critical Race Theory and the subordination of social studies instruction to political activism.”&nbsp;</p> <p>The math standards have drawn similar fire from teachers and university education professors. An education department survey drew 44 comments on the rewrite, all but four of them critical.&nbsp;</p> <p>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.&nbsp;</p> <div class="wp-block-group is-style-border"> <p class="has-text-align-center"><strong>8^th grade</strong> <strong>standard for scientific notation&nbsp;</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-columns is-style-borders"> <div class="wp-block-column"> <h5 class="wp-block-heading">Common Core </h5> <p>Perform operations with numbers expressed in scientific notation, including problems where both decimal and scientific notation are used. Use scientific notation and choose units of appropriate size for measurements of very large or very small quantities (e.g., use millimeters per year for seafloor spreading). Interpret scientific notation that has been generated by technology.</p> </p></div> <div class="wp-block-column"> <h5 class="wp-block-heading">Archimedes</h5> <p>Convert numbers into and out of scientific notation.</p> </p></div> </p></div> </p></div> <p>Sharon Vestal, president of the state’s Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which represents math teachers, and a South Dakota State University associate professor of math and statistics, called on Graves at a November hearing to scrap the rewrite. “They’re poorly written, and a lot of the math content has been lost by simplifying the language,” she said of the revised standards.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>But a few educators support the rewrite. “The simplicity is nice,” said Susan Fairchild, a veteran math teacher at Watertown High School who served on a state committee that reviewed the new version. “As a new teacher, you don't have to try and figure out what all of these fancy words mean.”</p> <p>Monte Meyerink, another committee member and an assistant professor of math education at Northern State University, led a review of research on effective education standards to guide the department in preparing its revision. He said he doesn’t know of research supporting the connection between standards’ lucidity and student proficiency. But simplifying standards is a new trend, one whose effects on student outcomes won’t be understood for another 15 or 20 years, he said.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>Once the standards are finalized, the department will roll out an expanded or “unpacked” version that has more detail, he said. That doesn’t comfort Vestal. “My concern is the quality of those unpacked standards because of the quality of the proposed standards,” she said.</p> <div class="wp-block-group is-style-border"> <p class="has-text-align-center"><strong>Algebra I standard for quadratic equations&nbsp;</strong></p> <div class="wp-block-columns is-style-borders"> <div class="wp-block-column"> <h5 class="wp-block-heading">Common Core </h5> <p>Use the method of completing the square to transform any quadratic equation in <em>x</em> into an equation of the form (<em>x – p)</em>² = q) that has the same solutions. Derive the quadratic formula from this form.</p> </p></div> <div class="wp-block-column"> <h5 class="wp-block-heading">Archimedes</h5> <p>Solve quadratic equations by completing the square.</p> </p></div> </p></div> </p></div> <p>Similarly, some national math education researchers reject the Archimedes Standards’ assumption that simpler standards mean better teaching. Ball State education researcher Michael Steele points to the Common Core standard for fourth grade fractions: “Explain why a fraction a/b is equivalent to a fraction (n x a)/(n x b) by using visual fraction models, with attention to how the number and size of the parts differ even though the two fractions themselves are the same size. Use this principle to recognize and generate equivalent fractions.”</p> <p>The Archimedes Standards version reads, “Find equivalent fractions and reduce fractions to their simplest form.” Steele said that while the Common Core version takes a moment to understand, it reminds teachers of how they learned to use fractions and makes them better able to teach the concept.</p> <p>“What this group calls lucidity in many cases, I might call an oversimplification of mathematics,” he said.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>A final vote on South Dakota’s rewrite will come after a May 4 public hearing.&nbsp;</p> <p>The National Association of Scholars wants to get other states on board. Gregg, the author of the Archimedes standards, said he’s helping to advise the Louisiana Department of Education on its math standards review, begun last year.&nbsp;</p> <p>In those standards, “I think there are places where you'll see — probably not as directly as you'll see in South Dakota — some of the influence the Archimedes community has had,” he said.&nbsp;</p> <p><em>Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965 or preston@hechingerreport.org.</em></p> <p><em>This story about <a href="https://hechingerreport.org/social-studies-standards-conservative-activists-math/">math standards</a> was produced by </em><a href="https://hechingerreport.org/"><em>The Hechinger Report</em></a><em>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for </em><a href="https://hechingerreport.org/k12/"><em>the Hechinger newsletter</em></a><em>.</em></p> <p>This &lt;a target=&quot;_blank&quot; href=&quot;https://hechingerreport.org/social-studies-standards-conservative-activists-math/&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; first appeared on &lt;a target=&quot;_blank&quot; href=&quot;https://hechingerreport.org&quot;&gt;The Hechinger Report&lt;/a&gt; and is republished here under a &lt;a target=&quot;_blank&quot; href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;img src=&quot;https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;amp;ssl=1&quot; style=&quot;width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;&quot;&gt;</p> &lt;img id=&quot;republication-tracker-tool-source&quot; src=&quot;https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&amp;post=115199&amp;amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H&quot; style=&quot;width:1px;height:1px;&quot;&gt;&lt;script&gt; PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: &quot;https://hechingerreport.org/social-studies-standards-conservative-activists-math/&quot;, urlref: window.location.href }); } } &lt;/script&gt; &lt;script id=&quot;parsely-cfg&quot; src=&quot;//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js&quot;&gt;&lt;/script&gt;

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