Governor Noem believes that South Dakota’s kids deserve the very best education in the country. Our kids deserve to learn America’s true and honest history, complete with both our triumphs and our mistakes.

By learning the stories of our great leaders and their examples, our kids can learn to emulate those lessons. However, those leaders were still flawed men and women, as are all of us. By learning their mistakes, hopefully we can learn not to repeat them.

Unfortunately, there is a liberal agenda afoot in this country that seeks to rewrite American history to ignore the triumphs and focus only on the mistakes. This agenda, often called Critical Race Theory (CRT), believes that America is a fundamentally racist nation. It teaches that members of the respective races are responsible for the actions of their ancestors. It divides Americans by race, sex, national origin, and more to divides us, rather than unite us around our common ideals.

This false narrative of our history is un-American, and it will not be taught to our kids in South Dakota classrooms. Governor Noem is blocking CRT by:

• Introducing and signing legislation to ban trainings and orientations based on CRT on our college campuses.
• Signing an executive order to restrict CRT in our K-12 school system.
• Signing another executive order blocking federal history grants tied to CRT.
• Working with the Board of Regents to ensure that CRT will not be the basis for education in our college classroom.
• Directing the South Dakota Department of Education not to approve continuing education credits for teachers from trainings that utilize CRT.

Governor Noem also rebooted the state’s social studies standards process to ensure that it was not tainted by CRT. She worked with parents, educators, college professors, historians, and members of Native American tribes to deliver standards that will teach our kids American history and civics without the influence of divisive concepts. These standards include the most robust emphasis on Native American history ever brought forward in South Dakota.