A statewide committee is finalizing revised standards for social studies education. The revisions are publishing soon with a public-input period to follow.
Stephen Jackson is an associate professor of history at the University of Sioux Falls. He is on the revision committee.
“Standards are sort of a state, state way of saying here’s a minimum amount of things that we expect our students to know when they come out of their total K-12 experience,” he said.
Jackson said the group spent eight days crafting the revisions.
“In many cases, we left a lot of this alone,” he said. “We made relatively minute changes to others, sometimes we added some new things. Most of what we added was to include more perspectives from indigenous Native Americans, to have more South Dakota content available in our standards.”
The proposed revisions will be available online next week.
This story comes from a recent interview on SDPB's weekday radio program, "In the Moment." Listen to the full interview below.