Various South Dakota Tea Party folks (bothersomely anonymous on their website and Facebook page, so I can only assume they are South Dakotans) are raising fuss and feathers over the Common Core standards. I wouldn't mind if they got some traction: the Common Core standards do more to distract my teaching colleagues and my administrators from making your kids smarter than to help us improve our daily practical public service.

But when the opponents' complaints include the fact that the South Dakota Department of Education has changed its Common Core logo from a sort of Howard Johnson's blue-orange spirograph to a snappy red flame with eye-catching text, I can only shake my head.

If the Tea Partiers really want to challenge Common Core, they should focus on analyzing and refuting the propaganda offered by Common Core backers like Pam Haukaas, president of the Associated School Boards of South Dakota. Her May 8 column (part of an increasing flow of Common Core explications and defenses I'm seeing from South Dakota education officials, an apparent effort to counter the surging Glenn Beck karaoke against the standards) cloaks the Common Core standards in all sorts of glowing statements that are really backhanded insults to the work we teachers work hard to do independently of whatever bureaucratic distractions the powers in Pierre impose upon us.

Students won’t just memorize facts, but will be able to master increasingly difficult problems and text [Pam Haukaas, "What Is Common Core?" ASBSD: Open Forum, 2013.05.08].

This statement fails on three levels:

1. It implies that we teachers are just making students memorize facts right now. That implication is wrong.
2. In addition to the problem-solving and critical thinking that we teach regularly without Common Core, we do teach a fair amount of memorizing facts. What's wrong with memorizing some facts? For instance, on page 60 of my French 2 textbook, I give my students a list of sixteen French verbs that use être instead of avoir has their past tense helping verb. I don't need them to think critically about that; I need them to memorize that list so they can get on with building sentences, telling stories, and engaging in conversations.
3. The Common Core standards don't magically make fact-memorization go away or make kids better at reading tougher texts. Good teachers will keep doing that, as we have been since before Common Core was born to recodify our professional practices.

As districts begin to implement these standards, professional development time will be required for teachers to become familiar with the standards and to collaborate with peers to design district appropriate curricula [Haukaas, 2013.05.08].

Translation for Tea Partiers: Your school district will spend time and your money pulling teachers away from your kids and your classrooms to spend time reinventing the pretty good curriculum wheels they already have.

The Common Core will focus on the student as learners with teachers teaching for understanding and mastery of core areas [Haukaas, 2013.05.08].

Focus on the student as learners—not only does that sentence lack number agreement (one student is multiple learners?), but it doesn't say anything new. Did we not focus on students as learners pre-Common Core? Hasn't learning always been our main enterprise? Don't we always teach for understanding? Haven't we already built our curricula around mastery of core areas? This isn't a brave new world forged by Common Core; this is the kind of fluff folks in education (including, sometimes, we teachers) start saying to ourselves when we have to make the latest, greatest education reform sound like some new and useful revolution.

No longer will a text be followed from page one simply plodding through until the end; teachers will use multiple resources so that students will experience a curriculum which has meaning as well as depth and rigor. Students will develop the ability to apply learned knowledge to solve new problems and think critically [Haukaas, 2013.05.08].

Again, the insulting implication is that teachers right now plod through their textbooks, and that Common Core standards will save your children from such dull incompetence. Au contraire: I get the distinct impression that the whole point of Common Core is to make curriculum more uniform across the state and across the country. Common Core is supposed to make it easier for children to move from school district to school district without discontinuities in their learning. That advantage accrues only if different school districts align the scope and sequence of their classes more closely to standards. Publishers will provide textbooks closely aligned to the standards, complete with recommendations for and links to multimedia resources to satisfy Common Core. To thus prove their fidelity to Common Core, teachers and administrators will stick even more closely to their new textbooks with the little tabs on each page proving exactly which standards we are teaching in each lesson.

See, Tea Partiers? That's how you tackle Common Core. Forget the logo; attack the logos.

The good folks of Chamberlain held their high school graduation ceremony yesterday. Students sat through the standard White/Western formalities organized by the majority culture inside the high school. After that ceremony, students received a second ceremonial recognition from members of the minority culture. Members of the Crow Creek and Lower Brule tribes, who said they were forbidden from assembling on school grounds, stood across the street from Chamberlain High School and drummed out their Lakota honor song, not just for the one third of the graduating seniors who are Indian, but for all of Chamberlain's graduates.

Maybe I'm just a colonialist poser, but the sound of Lakota voices raised in sincere, passionate, and defiant song stirs me more than any mechanical, occasionally flat rendition of Edward Algar's orchestral work. It's more authentic and dignified than marching students out to a recording of the Black Eyed Peas. (Such were the processional and recessional music choices here at Spearfish Sunday.) The Lakota honor song is music from the land we inhabit/occupy. It is a powerful reminder to the graduates of the challenges their home state faces and the reconciliation they must work to forge as they join us as full adult members of South Dakota society.

Meanwhile, Spearfish graduates, teachers, family, and friends, were treated to a different show of majority culture arrogance. There was no controversy leading up to the Spearfish graduation. Salutatorian Samantha Sleep came to the podium to make a speech with fellow salutatorian Elise Reid. After thanking Mr. Pat Gainey for his excellent Constitutional Government class, Miss Sleep called on everyone in the public school gymnasium to bow his or her head in prayer with her. With her father, school board member Jeff Sleep, duly bowed in his seat behind her at the podium, Samantha invoked the Heavenly Father (just one, just male). She quoted Jeremiah from the Christian Bible. She thanked that Heavenly Father for "granting us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," thus conflating the Bible and the Declaration of Independence.

Most of the audience applauded this public display of majority piety, giving Miss Sleep that collective, smug, winking pat on the back that says, "Boy, you showed them!"... where the only them being showed is decent folks who recognize the wisdom of the Founding Fathers in protecting the integrity of both church and state by keeping them separate.

The Lakota honor song can include all students. The tribal members who offered their voices in praise of Chamberlain's graduates could have broken the rules, brought it inside, and interrupted the graduation ceremony with an act of civil disobedience. Instead, they respected the stated policy of their school board and offered their song afterward, off school grounds.

A Christian prayer excludes some students. The graduate who snuck her prayer (and she had to sneak it through, without school review, for it to have a chance of being legal) into the ceremony took advantage of public resources to engage in the sort of subtle psychological coercion that, if conducted by school officials like her dad at the very same microphone would have violated the Constitution.

We don't need more prayers in school. We could use more Lakota honor songs.

Area students and a Lakota/Dakota drum group will honor all Chamberlain High School graduates with a Native song at Sunday's graduation ceremony. They'll do it outside the high school as graduates leave the building.

For not accepting that honor song as part of the formal graduation ceremony, Crow Creek Sioux tribal chairman Brandon Sazue is calling on us to boycott Chamberlain:

Sazue said he already has begun to boycott businesses in Chamberlain and is urging the tribe and individual tribal members to do the same.

“I love Chamberlain. I went to school there. I shop there. But right now I’m boycotting it, because of the school board’s decision.

“How do you make change? You make change by action. I will boycott until they let our kids have an honor song,” he said [Peter Harriman, "Tribal Leader Wants Boycott of Chamberlain," that Sioux Falls paper, 2013.05.16].

A local economic boycott of Chamberlain will be hard to sustain. Local folks looking to respect Chairman Sazue's call to protest will have to drive 22 miles east to Kimball or 30 miles west to Kennebec just to get groceries. That's a lot of driving to ask of local folks for daily needs. Folks urging a boycott may want to to focus on tourist traffic, which is about to kick into high summer gear. Get the word out, tell folks bound for Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone to plan ahead, bypass Al's Oasis, and get their gas and grub in Mitchell or Murdo.

The police response to an armed suicide threat at the St. Joseph Indian School in Chamberlain Monday shows more reasons that this year's House Bill 1087, the school gunslinger law, creates unnecessary risks at our schools.

The Chamberlain Police Department was called to St. Joseph’s at 2:21 p.m. after dispatch received a call that a former school employee was on campus threatening to take his own life, Hutmacher said.

“We arrived within about a minute,” Hutmacher said. “And the school went into lockdown.”

Law enforcement spotted the man standing outside his vehicle near the entrance to the school along Main Street. When the man saw officers approaching, he ran away.

Officers pursued the man on foot and in vehicles. He refused to comply with law enforcement and was shot with a stun gun and taken into custody, Hutmacher said [Anna Jauhola, "Allegedly Armed Man Detained After Chamberlain School Incident," Mitchell Daily Republic, 2013.05.14].

Pay attention to what didn't happen here. After calling police, no one in the school had to take any risk other than lock the doors and duck. No one had to pull the trigger on any firearm.

Consider the reaction of St. Joseph's director, Rev. Stephen Hufstetter:

Huffstetter said he’s still a bit shaken by Monday’s incident, as is his staff. He said the students seemed calm afterward because some may not have known the lockdown was real.

“Unfortunately, this is why we practice these things,” Huffstetter said. “We just hope the person who did this is able to get the help he needs” [Jauhola, 2013.05.14].

Would the suicidal former employee have a chance to get the help he needs if St. Joseph's had adopted the philosophy of our state legislators and put guns in the hands of its staff? Would the "school sentinel training course" required by HB 1087 have trained the school gunslingers not just in marksmanship, but in mental health, conflict resolution, and the good sense to use the least force necessary to subdue a perceived threat?

Chamberlain police protected the St. Joseph's students and staff with a swift, non-lethal response. Their effective capture of the potential shooter shows that there are many security steps schools can take before they commit the grave error of bringing guns onto their campuses and authorizing volunteers to play John Wayne around kids.

The Chamberlain School District remains committed to honoring the dominant European conquering culture over that of its large American Indian minority population. Last night the Chamberlain school board voted to uphold tradition and again reject inclusion of a Lakota honor song in its high school graduation ceremony.

Sometimes if you want to do things right, you have to do them yourself. Lakota neighbors, if you feel Chamberlain's Lakota graduates need an honor song in their own language, and if your school board won't let you offer that song as part of the ceremony, you still need to raise your voices.

So imagine this: gather a thousand American Indians outside the graduation ceremony. Surround the doors one hour before the ceremony begins. As the students enter the building, Indian and white alike, raise your voices in the Lakota honor song. Sustain that joyful noise until the exact moment that the ceremony inside begins. Then the moment the official ceremony ends and the students begin to file out of the auditorium, resume your singing. Raise that song, a thousand voices strong, until the last student has filed out of the building.

The Lakota honor song is as worthy a part of the graduation ceremony as "Pomp and Circumstance" or any other traditional European song that the high school band will toot from its horns. Local folks, if the board won't listen to you in a meeting, you'll have to make them listen on graduation day.

Once again, the South Dakota media drop Madison into a black hole. On Tuesday, the AP reported that two South Dakota students, Pierre Riggs senior Tessa H. Myren and Sioux Falls Washington senior Micah C. Shaffer, are among this year's class of 141 Presidential Scholars. KSOO noted the two award winners as well.

But there are three Presidential Scholars from South Dakota this year. Amy Shan from Madison is also headed to Washington, D.C., in June to receive a medal from President Barack Obama for being awfully darn smart. Usually each state gets two Presidential Scholars, one gal and one guy, but apparently South Dakota's applicants this year were impressive enough to win one of the at-large scholar slots. Well done, Amy!

Worth noting: like the last two Presidential Scholars from Madison, Amy Shan is a Bulldog debater. Micah Shaffer also has debate points under his belt. Way to represent, debaters! (And Pierre Riggs, how about getting that debate program going again?)

The South Dakota Department of Education is angling to charge me more for the privilege of holding my South Dakota teaching certificate.

My friend Ken Blanchard tells me that more money doesn't result in better outcomes. I can't imagine the state is going to provide me a better teaching certificate with the extra money they want me to throw at the bureaucrats in Pierre. So why, oh why must I throw more money at my teaching certificate?

And if the state does increase my cost of doing business, are my fellow teachers and I justified in turning to our school boards and asking that they throw more money at us to cover our increased costs, even as we continue to provide the same quality service as before?

The sequester will deny some 200 South Dakota kids the benefits of Head Start. It didn't have to: Senator Stanford Adelstein (R-32/Rapid City) proposed an amendment to the general appropriations bill in March that would have filled the sequester Head Start gap with $1.36 million in state money. The Daugaard Administration, however, had other priorities:

I submitted this specific data in good time and prepared an amendment (HB1185MX) to the general bill appropriation bill, HB1185.

The governor’s office still opposed the amendment, preferring instead to take back $4M that had been removed from his appropriation to the Future Fund for the development of the state. What could have been more important to South Dakota than to have children succeed in school? [Sen. Stanford Adelstein, "Cuts to Head Start Could Have Been Avoided," A Way to Go, 2013.05.02]

Ah, the Future Fund, just another example of our state's commitment to doing corporations' work for them over helping kids learn.