How Oregon Progressives Went around the Public to Eliminate Graduation Requirements in the Name of Equity

Oregon’s recent decision to extend a Covid-era suspension of a major graduation requirement for high-school seniors was driven by a dubious equity effort that many parents and educators argue is “fraudulent,” unpopular, and a disservice to minority children.

During the pandemic, Oregon temporarily dropped its essential-skills evaluation for its 2020 and 2021 graduating classes. In October, the state board of education unanimously voted to prolong the pause again until the 2027-2028 school year on the grounds that the standards exacerbated racial inequality.

The equity-driven overhaul of Oregon’s graduation benchmarks began in 2021, when the Democrat-dominated state legislature passed senate bill 744. The law directed the Oregon Department of Education (ODE) to review graduation requirements and recommend changes.

In Oregon and 17 other states, students’ graduation readiness is judged by grades and a separate assessment. Under the pre-Covid system, in order to receive a diploma, students must earn 24 credits and demonstrate mastery of nine “essential skills,” including reading, writing, math, critical thinking, technology usage, and civic and community engagement. This can be done via state standardized tests, another approved test, or a special project.

A 183-page ODE report released in September 2022 indicted Oregon’s graduation-requirement system as systemically racist.

White and Asian students have consistently outperformed black and Latino students on standardized tests for years. In the 2022-2023 school year, 49.7 percent of white students and 62.5 percent of Asian students achieved proficiency in English Language Arts compared with just 24 percent of black students and 26.5 percent of Latino students.

Attributing the disparities to racial bias, ODE urged the elimination of testing as a prerequisite for graduation.

“Oregon’s data shows that districts consistently graduate students identifying as Hispanic/Latino/a/x, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Black/African American, and American Indian/Alaska Native, and Multi-Racial at a lower rate than their White peers, though the gap is narrowing over time,” the report read.

ODE also claimed the skills requirement was redundant, given the credit quota, and did not necessarily guarantee better post-graduation outcomes.

“Oregon’s state summative assessments . . . were not designed to be sufficiently reliable for high stakes, individual student level decisions such as graduation,” the ODE report said. “The Assessment of Essential Skills requirements in reading, writing and math were implemented in a manner that led to disparate outcomes. In addition, there is no evidence that the policy was effective in ensuring that Oregon students were better positioned to pursue their postsecondary goals because of the implementation of the policy.”

The legislature didn’t address ODE’s recommendations in the last session. ODE then appealed directly to the state board of education.

“They bypassed the legislature, and the reasoning was, ‘Since the legislature didn’t take action, we are asking the board to take action,’” Jeff Myers, a parent of two in the Beaverton school district in Oregon and author of blog Save Oregon Schools, told National Review. “They wanted to get rid of these proficiency skills requirements, and they did it without the legislature, without the public.”

Simply earning class credits is not sufficient to prove a students’ command of essential subjects, Myers said, pointing out that Oregon has fallen victim to the progressive push to do away with stringent grading systems.

“The problem with Oregon is that they’re making it easier to get those credits,” Myers said. “That’s the part that nobody is talking about. ODE and certain districts have been pushing ‘equitable grading.’”

While not yet universal in the state, some districts, such as the Springfield school district, have entirely adopted the state-recommended “equitable” grading system, which discourages teachers from assigning bad grades as a means of addressing performance failures.

In the Beaverton district, the third largest in the state, kids can no longer receive an “F” grade, Myers said.

“That’s been banished,” he said. “My kids joke about this. We’ve heard this from other parents, where if a kid doesn’t turn in an assignment, it’s not like they’re marked down. They just get asked to turn it in later. And if they don’t finish all the requirements of a course, they’ll get marked with an ‘N’ or ‘I,’ and then they’ll have opportunities to make up the credit.”

Perhaps it’s charitable that teachers don’t flunk children and do give them many chances to redeem their grades, Myers said. But it’s devaluing public education in Oregon.

“When kids don’t have a standard to strive for, when there aren’t consequences for missing assignments, late assignments, doing poorly on a test that you can retake multiple times, they’re going to try less hard because no one is looking over their shoulder expecting them to do well,” Andrea Esuk, a mother of three biracial kids in Beaverton, told National Review.

Her kids also poke fun at the absurdity of removing academic accountability entirely. But Esuk worries when she reads their writing, which she said is very poor compared to the caliber she remembers from her school days.

“Oregon has not prepared them well,” she said. “In math, their progress reports look pretty good. But once the standards are lowered, and you start talking to them, then you find out more.”

The proficiency assessments functioned like checkpoints for academic competency. Myers, who works with a lot of education data, charted trend lines for graduation rates against skills testing in Oregon. As proficiency test scores have declined, graduation rates have increased.

Alongside Portland State University professor Bruce Gilley, Myers fact-checked ODE’s claims. The ODE report blames deep racism in the Oregon education system for proficiency gaps among racial groups.

“They don’t investigate, they invert it,” Gilley said. “We’re exposing not just that the report is filled with basic errors but that its evidentiary basis is fraudulent.”

The pair found ODE’s report unscientific, poorly researched, and ideologically skewed. Yet, it served as the basis to again suspend the graduation requirement in October.

In the report, the department claimed systemic, cultural, and educator bias was driving graduation disparities without providing evidence. For example, the report alleged that the work samples, the third route for the Essential Skills assessment, could be a source of educator bias without proper monitoring.

“Any update to the Essential Skills must also be defined by community, as they may become vehicles for perpetuation of cultural biases if there are not shared, inclusive understandings for terms,” the report said.

ODE failed to substantiate their broad allegation of bias, only citing a random quote from an unnamed Oregon superintendent.

“Grades are completely subjective and an unreliable measure of student growth and potential from one year to the next,” the quote said. “Grading is inconsistent from teacher to teacher. Bias is heavily present in grading ESPECIALLY at the high school level. You will need to regulate grades [in the absence of a secondary validation system].”

ODE is in the process of formulating new graduation requirements, Gilley said, “which would give students high-school degrees largely for participation.”

The duo published their counter-report in September in an effort to caution the state against once again extending the Covid-era moratorium on enforcing academic standards. The state board of education, according to Gilley, called them a “cadre of bad actors” who were sowing bigotry and disinformation.

But the “bad actors” seem to have been speaking for a sizeable group of parents who flooded the September and October board meetings with public comments demanding the reinstatement of graduation requirements.

“Oregon’s student academic achievement is already at record lows, and further lowering the bar is a disservice to all Oregon students and would only fail to prepare them for their best future,” one comment read.

“I want to remind you that you could not have obtained your job without basic standards,” another commenter said. “You need to thank the ‘bigots’ in your life who pushed you to get where you are. It’s very sad that you don’t want people of certain races to be successful. However, if you suspend these standards, that’s what you are telling them.”

Former Oregon Republican gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan, who voted against senate bill 744 when she was in the legislature, chimed in to oppose the “watered down expectations.”

The backlash led to a one-meeting delay, after which the board ushered in the extension anyway.

Even though Asians are the highest-performing students in Oregon, Gilley said, ODE determined that differences in group-based outcomes must be the result of racism. But many minority families viewed their solution as dumbing down education standards for their kids.

Esuk, whose children are black, called the suspension “racist.” She has twin boys who are sophomores in high school.

“My children are just as smart or smarter than anybody else’s kids,” she said. “It is greatly insulting to think that someone of a different color is less capable.”

Albert and Elvira Faizriev, ethnically Tatars, a Muslim minority in Russia, have three kids in Beaverton. Residents of Oregon for eight years, they said the push to dismantle graduation requirements reminds them of the Soviet Union era, “when they were trying to make everyone equal, and everybody became equally poor.”

“It’s showing parents that the role of public education is not to raise educated children with critical thinking with high math and literacy skills,” Elvira said. “You don’t solve the problem of equity by making everyone stupider.”

It’s easier for politicians, the couple said, to lower standards rather than raise them while helping lift up disadvantaged kids. The latter strategy, though more expensive and challenging, “will guarantee that the students of Oregon will be competitive not only on U.S. soil but outside the U.S.,” Albert said.

At the October board of education meeting, Dan Farley, an assistant superintendent at ODE, said that race, ethnicity, sex, or other external factors should not be a predictor of success — a familiar, attractive phrase often used by DEI activists.

“ODE says these things that sound good and sound true,” Myers said. But ODE is using flawed, monocausal thinking, he said.

“It’s far more complex than the color of your skin predicting different outcomes,” he said. “I could point to districts in the state and say, ‘Black people in Portland, their assessment rates are sub 10 percent.’ But if I go to my district, Beaverton, they’re higher at like 20, 30 percent.”

Esuk said ODE needs to look at a child’s academic life holistically, also paying mind to their home environment and social activities. Conscientious parents who “expect their kids to get As and Bs and do well and hang out with good friends, who are not troublemakers, who are also studious, get involved in quality clubs and/or sports” are more successful, she said.

On average, a black student in Beaverton is outperforming a student in Portland, Myers said.

“And Beaverton’s doing better than Salem, but Beaverton is doing worse than Lake Oswego, which is a more affluent neighborhood,” he added. “Surprise, surprise. The results actually vary not by skin color but by socioeconomic status of different groups.”

“They know they’re lying because race isn’t a predictor of success,” he said.