Conservative college's curriculum gets foothold in S. Dakota

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — A few days before middle school teacher Shaun Nielsen joined a work group to develop South Dakota's social studies standards, he got a thick package in the mail.

Sent from Hillsdale, Michigan, home to a conservative private college enjoying outsize influence among top Republicans, it contained materials that would ultimately form what the state's public schools students could be expected to learn about American history and civics.

“Whoa -- these are already written,” Nielsen remembers thinking as he opened the document this spring.

Hillsdale College, which has sought in recent years to “revive the American tradition of K-12 education” by fostering a nationwide network of schools, won new prominence when then-President Donald Trump tapped the school to help develop a “patriotic education” project. Now, in a sign of Hillsdale's growing influence in public education, South Dakota has proposed statewide standards that contain distinct echoes of Hillsdale's material.

While Republican governors such as Tennessee’s Bill Lee and Florida’s Ron DeSantis have embraced Hillsdale’s education for K-12 students, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has been perhaps the most enthusiastic. Larry Arrn, the school's president, even said in a speech last year that Noem had “offered to build us an entire campus in South Dakota.”

That doesn't appear to be in the works. But it was Noem, widely seen as a 2024 White House hopeful, who turned to former Hillsdale politics professor William Morrisey to develop the state’s social studies standards. The state paid him $200,000, and he tapped Hillsdale’s material, according to members of the standards commission.

The college played an integral part in Trump's “1776 Report," a conservative response to work like the New York Times'...