The state is lowering expectations to mask its abject failure to educate students, particularly students of color.
The state is lowering expectations to mask its abject failure to educate students, particularly students of color.
T he Oregon State Board of Education, a governor-appointed panel that makes policy for the state’s beleaguered public-school system, recently extended the pandemic-era suspension of a requirement that students demonstrate proficiency in reading and math in order to graduate. The board claims that the extension — students will not have to demonstrate proficiency until 2029 at the earliest — is necessary to foster racial and ethnic equity.
The extension ran into a buzz saw of public opinion in Oregon, where policies implemented during and after Covid in the name of equity have now defined, in a bad way, the state’s politics. The Board approved it, unanimously, anyway. Oregon has had only Democratic governors for decades. They have appointed increasingly radical, and increasingly teachers’-union-affiliated, members to the board, mirroring a hard-left shift throughout state-government institutions in recent years.
That shift created an educational establishment that is queasy with the state’s requirements for granting a high-school diploma, including that high-school students must demonstrate, via testing or the creation of a workbook, proficiency in reading, writing, and math. Those requirements were adopted as part of the state’s effort to hold students and educators to a higher standard in 2009.
By 2020, the ethos of the educational establishment in Oregon and other progressive states had turned sharply against graduation standards when they were perceived to disadvantage members of racial minority groups.
Covid provided an opportunity to jettison the skills-assessment requirement in Oregon. The Oregon Department of Education suspended all testing requirements in 2020 and 2021, while the state’s schools were largely shuttered to in-person instruction on account of the pandemic.
Democratic state representative Zach Hudson, a former high-school teacher in Troutdale, Oregon, told Oregon Public Broadcasting in September 2021 that it “felt like a relief” when the skills-assessment requirement was “paused” for Covid in 2020 and 2021. Hudson’s Democratic house colleague Teresa Alonso Leon added:
If we’re going to look at our graduation requirements, this is the time. This is the time to really make that assessment, and look at it from an equitable standpoint. I don’t know if that was the lens that was used back in 2007.
The “equity lens” is a term of art in Oregon public education. The Oregon Department of Education, which devotes a page on its website to the term, says “the equity lens confirms the importance of recognizing institutional and systemic barriers and discriminatory practices that have limited access for many students in the Oregon education system.”
And the powers that be in Oregon deemed the essential-skills requirement decidedly inequitable, because it disadvantaged students of color who, they asserted, were less capable of demonstrating proficiency in reading, writing, and math. Hudson explained:
It certainly wasn’t an easy or straightforward way to show mastery for many of the students whom I was working with. And I’d have students be very very stressed, for instance, because they knew the math, and could get the right answer, and yet they had difficulty writing a step-by-step explanation of how they got their answer.
Hudson and allies took advantage of the opportunity to dispense with the stressful graduation requirement by passing a law requiring the Oregon Department of Education to evaluate the skills-assessment requirement, signed into law by then-governor Kate Brown with little (though some) public attention. The Department responded with a report entitled “Community-Informed Recommendations for Equitable Graduation Outcomes,” which summarized its view of the graduation requirements in a truly remarkable passage, considering its source:
The most recent period of substantial changes to high school diploma regulations in Oregon was completed in 2008 and phased in through 2013. These changes made the pathway to a diploma one of the most challenging and demanding in the nation, and unintentionally exasperated [sic] and revealed inequities in our education system.
Fortunately for the state’s exasperated inequities, the Oregon State Board of Education, the department’s overseer, extended the “pause” in the essential-skills requirement in 2021 and, again, earlier this month.
The board’s most recent extension landed in a much different political environment than did prior anti-requirement efforts. Oregonians, it turns out, have soured on their state government’s decision to largely get out of the standards-and-consequences business beginning in 2020. The state government’s reaction to that year’s stew of Covid, prolonged protests and riots putatively focused on racial equity, and the state voters’ approval of the nation’s first hard-drug-decriminalization law led to many of Oregon’s current crises, including widespread homelessness, skyrocketing drug-overdose deaths, and a cratering public-education system.
On one day last week, the top three education stories on the website of the Oregonian, the biggest newspaper in the state, were, in order:
- “Oregon’s abysmal chronic attendance problem grew even worse last year, state reveals”
- “College-going dropped for Oregon’s class of 2021, deepening a pandemic plunge”
- “Oregon again says students don’t need to prove mastery of reading, writing or math to graduate, citing harm to students of color”
Fed-up Oregonians have flooded the board with comments supporting the skills-assessment requirement. Foundations for a Better Oregon, a Portland-based, equity-focused education-advocacy group, opposed the board’s extension:
When state leaders remove or pause existing graduation requirements without proposing more effective and equitable alternatives, it risks leading Oregonians to believe that our state is lowering expectations to artificially mask disparities and improve outcomes. This impression sadly reinforces a false and deeply prejudiced narrative that certain student groups are inherently unable to meet high expectations based on their identity, zip code, disability or circumstances. Nothing could be further from the truth.
That’s right. The state is lowering expectations to mask its abject failure to educate students, particularly students of color, on the false premise that requiring students to demonstrate proficiency in core skills is unfair to students the board believes are unable to meet high expectations.
The anti-standards movement in Oregon public education arises from, and is inseparable from, what was once called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It is the state’s official position, now, that racial minorities are incapable of meeting graduation standards. That position is factually and morally wrong, and it’s helping destroy public education in Oregon and elsewhere.