The latest draft of new math standards for Minnesota schools suggests the addition of material related to American Indian tribes and other cultures won’t have a major impact on what students are taught.
The initial draft, released in February by a committee writing the new math standards, yielded an overwhelmingly negative response from educators and the public at large for the way the committee integrated tribal references, as a 2007 state statute requires them to do.
In that first draft, five of the 20 proposed “anchor standards” included tribal references.
In the second draft, published this week, seven of the 11 anchor standards include the words “cultural perspectives” and/or “historical and contemporary Dakota and Anishinaabe communities.”
However, the second draft also includes a great deal of detail about the specific skills and knowledge students are expected to gain. And those details, called benchmarks, have little to say about tribes or other cultures.
Out of 535 benchmarks from kindergarten through high school, just six mention American Indian tribes:
- Kindergarteners would “classify and sort objects, including historical and contemporary objects from Dakota and Anishinaabe Tribal Nations and other communities.”
- First-graders would use data from tribal peoples and others to “make predictions using patterns from data visualizations.”
- Second-graders would “generate measurement data, including historical and present day ways of measuring from Dakota and Anishinaabe Tribal Nations and other communities, with whole unit lengths (using a variety of tools and the body) and display data on a line plot.”
- Third-graders would learn that when using data, including data from tribal nations, they should analyze “where it came from, who collected it, its purpose and what and whose perspective may be missing.”
- Fourth- and fifth-graders, similarly, would learn how to “select the appropriate variable to answer the statistical question, analyzing where the data came from, who collected it, its purpose and what and whose perspective may be missing.”
May Vang, a math coach and member of the standards-writing committee, said during a March committee meeting that people who read the first draft got the impression that half the curriculum would cover “historical contributions or Native American math.” She predicted that once the benchmarks were published, it would be clear that’s not the case.
To read the drafts and provide public comment through June 13, visit the Minnesota Department of Education’s website.
A third and final draft is due in August for the education commissioner’s approval. Schools likely will implement the new standards by fall 2027.
