I find an oddity among the bills that have flooded the Legislative hopper this week. House Bill 1153 would prohibit South Dakota's Department of Education and Board of Education from developing or adopting any history standards promulgated by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. The CCSSI is a collaborative state effort to standardize curriculum across the nation.
Now I'm not big on curriculum standards being set by anyone higher up than your local department chair, or maybe a reasonably educated local school board. I've found that, on K-12 education, I'm probably more committed to local control than our Republican legislators. I might read HB 1153 as a sign that some of my favorite Capitol conservatives (like co-sponsors Reps. Haggar, Hickey, Hubbel, and Liss) are coming to Jesus on local control. But South Dakota signed on to the existing CCSSI math and English standards last November, and HB 1153 doesn't mention those. The CCSSI hasn't published history standards yet, but the English standards include some standards for literacy in history/social studies. What could be our legislators' beef with standards coming from the same outfit whose standards we've helped develop and adopt in other core areas?
Might the sponsors of HB 1153 be thinking the same thing as their conservative counterparts in Texas, who have refused to take part in the CCSSI? Or might these legislators be taking their cues from the Texas textbook lobby?
...[T]he CCSS also challenge Texas—and any states similarly inclined to skew history—by embracing another dramatic pedagogical change. The new emphasis on the use of primary documents in the teaching of K-12 history will drastically reduce the ability of any state to develop its own version of history. The rising cost of textbooks and the ubiquity of the internet mean that it is growing far easier and cheaper now to teach history directly from primary sources than from textbooks. This emphasis on primary sources shows up in the CCSS [Heather Cox Richardson, "History and the Common Core Standards," The Historical Society, 2010.09.14].
Hmm... isn't more emphasis on primary sources a good thing? Fifteen of the 24 sponsors of HB 1153 are also sponsoring HB 1170, the state-mandated teaching of several primary documents in our public schools.
There thus appears to be support among our legislators for exactly the teaching approach that the Common Core standards embrace. At the same time, there does not appear to be support among our legislators for rejecting on principle standards set at the state or multi-state level. I thus can't figure out what is motivating HB 1153. Can you?