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Oregon Gov. Signs Law Allowing Students to Graduate Without Proving They Can Write or do Math

Oregon Gov. Signs Law Allowing Students to Graduate Without Proving They Can Write or do Math

“SB 744 gives us an opportunity to review our graduation requirements and make sure our assessments can truly assess all students’ learning”

https://youtu.be/WDS-jyOWdeo

What is the point of even going to school if you don’t at least learn to read and write?

The Washington Examiner reports:

Oregon governor signs bill ending reading and math proficiency requirements for graduation

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown privately signed a bill last month ending the requirement for high school students to prove proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic before graduation.

Brown, a Democrat, did not hold a public signing or issue a press release regarding the passing of Senate Bill 744 on July 14, and the measure, which was approved by lawmakers in June, was not added into the state’s legislative database until more than two weeks later on July 29, an unusually quiet approach to enacting legislation, according to the Oregonian.

Secretary of the Senate Lori Brocker’s office is responsible for updating the legislative database, and a staffer tasked with dealing with the governor’s office was experiencing medical issues during the 15-day time frame it took the database to be updated with the recently signed law, Brocker said.

“SB 744 gives us an opportunity to review our graduation requirements and make sure our assessments can truly assess all students’ learning,” Charles Boyle, a spokesman for the governor, said in an email to the Washington Examiner. “In the meantime, it gives Oregon students and the education community a chance to regroup after a year and a half of disruption caused by the pandemic.”

The bill, which suspends the proficiency requirements for students for three years, has attracted controversy for at least temporarily suspending academic standards amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Backers argued the existing proficiency levels for math and reading presented an unfair challenge for students who do not test well, and Boyle said the new standards for graduation would aid Oregon’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”

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Comments

Combine this with SAT optional admission and you have people that can get into college without proving that they can read, write, or calculate.

What could go wrong?

Eye gutz mi 5 pointses to make:

1. Dis be smhat cuz it stoooped not to measuring motional tellygents

5. Whom needz math wit all dem computas?

This pack will get us to the Moon and Mars. sarc

The first step is to graduate from H.S. without knowing anything. Then run for office—mayor, governor, senator and finally president—all without knowing anything.

Hey! Wait! I think I may have that backwards.

Every [unPlanned] Child Left Behind

They are flushing the backlog of damaged goods out of the pipeline to make room for the next round of hapless victims.

    Exactly, given that I read that the Covid educational deficits might not be corrected by the end of High School.

      MajorWood in reply to jb4. | September 11, 2022 at 6:56 pm

      So by their math, someone in 12th grade doesn’t need to be able to read at the 6th grade level because of the last 3 years. Is that also 9.3% inflation?

What’s new? They’ve been graduating students who couldn’t read, write or do math for decades.

    malclave in reply to txvet2. | September 10, 2022 at 8:47 pm

    Maybe they’re worried about school districts being sued by its “graduates” for not teaching them?

    txvet2 in reply to txvet2. | September 11, 2022 at 6:02 pm

    That wasn’t a joke. I was dealing with college graduates who couldn’t write a coherent sentence or do simple math problems as far back as the ’70’s.

      This is true, well, I don’t know about back to the 70s, but I can attest to the fact that colleges and universities started “writing labs” and other BS because college students did not know basic grammar, punctuation, or sentence structure. This was in the ’90s, though they may have started earlier, I saw this then as both an undergrad and grad student. Teaching writing as a separate thing was, to me, insane. People with any education at all should know how to write, but it turns out that it’s really really hard to write words. And a whole industry was set up to prove how hard it was. Crazy. Should have been nipped in the bud back then.

The way back to serfdom

Equality at its best, all idiots until proven otherwise on the job.
Great going

irishgladiator63 | September 10, 2022 at 2:54 pm

Boyle said the new standards for graduation would aid Oregon’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”

So many questions.
So it won’t help White students?
Also, is she saying that litany of people are too stupid to learn to read?
Do they realize how this gives a rational excuse for racism? Cause the official policy of the state of Oregon is that if you’re not white, you can’t hack it.

    It’s “too white” to do math or read. White supremacy, don’t you know…

    The obvious answer is to enforce the educational standards on the white kids but not the “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.” Right Boyle?

    Meanwhile, since we have grossly failed in educating the students during the covid years and they would have to work hard to get back on track we’ll just give up on their basic freaking education and destroy their chances to advance in life (legally at least). Right Boyle?

Some personal responsibility is required to learn. High school is the new daycare for older kids formerly know as adults.

    Dimsdale in reply to r2468. | September 11, 2022 at 12:36 pm

    Soon to be passed over to the warm womb of higher maleducation, further trained to be useful idiots (read it: wokerati) to train future apparatchiks. Ever wonder why the hard sciences are filled with Chinese and other foreigners, while the (insert idiocy) studies are filled with American children?

    Quite an assembly line the leftists have set up. Didn’t the Dark Ages start with the fall of civilization and a plague?

    I am going to donate to my local parochial school and Hillsdale…

Subotai Bahadur | September 10, 2022 at 4:17 pm

Any business’s first reaction to receiving a job application from anyone who graduated from an Oregon public high school after this year [remember, this is a statewide law] should be to discard it. If they graduated before this year, there should be a bias towards discarding it. If you are an Oregon student not in a “dark ages” district, you need to get out of the public school system. If you are a parent of an Oregon student not in a “dark ages” district, you need to either get your kid out of public schools and/or consider moving out of the state.

DISCUSS.

Subotai Bahadur

PS. in re helping Asians and Pacific Islanders. I am Chinese. I learned the alphabet in kindergarten, and taught myself to read in the first quarter of first grade.

    Assumes said application could be read in the first place. As to its being completed???

      Dimsdale in reply to fscarn. | September 11, 2022 at 12:43 pm

      About nine years ago, I was teaching a college class, and I told the students about how “perforins” were something that destroyed the cell walls of pathogenic cells, thus killing it (the country’s border correlation not missed).

      I said it came from the word “perforate.” Nobody in the class of 56 students knew what the word meant.

      I am pretty sure I saw the handwriting on the wall then….

This is why she became Governor.
She can’t read, write, do math and has been a total failure as governor!

“Gov. Kate Brown signed a law to allow Oregon students to graduate without proving they can write or do math. She doesn’t want to talk about it.” — Headline, Oregonlive.com, August 3, 2022.

Obviously, Governor Brown is so proud of herself and the Legislature.

Honestly, I thought it would be hard to come up with a governor worse than Barbara Roberts and John Kitzhaber, but we’ve managed to do it, thanks to Portland, Salem, Corvallis, and Eugene voters. And to imagine this imbecile survived two recall attempts…..

For the left, the mission of school is not to think for yourself. It’s to do what you’re told by The State.

2+2=5, right?
Yes, master.

    #FJB <-- Disco Stu_ in reply to Colonel Travis. | September 11, 2022 at 7:37 am

    Plus also provide generous government funding and secure employment to all govt.-certified members of the education-industrial complex.

The racism the left gets away with is breath-taking and it’s no surprise how some people are too ignorant to notice they are being insulted:

Boyle said the new standards for graduation would aid Oregon’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”

No. The new complete lack of standards for graduation helps NO ONE and attempting to turn this into some sort of racial thing is grossly offensive to all races.

This moron thinks a HS diploma is like the participation trophies she and her like hand out. That it has some sort of meaning just because it exists, not because of the level of learning it is supposed to represent.

Incompetency breeds incompetence.

I want to be the first in line to sell some of these ‘graduates’ a used car… “so there are a few extra zeroes in the odometer reading (or price) – zeroes are nothing… any high school graduate knows that…”

Despite Brown’s claimed reason for signing this bill, it’s primary purpose may not be relaxing graduation standards.

Per this opinion https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/for-equity-oregon-ditched-a-standardized

Oregon already had ways other than this test to qualify to graduate. The primary purpose of the test was not to qualify a student to graduate but to provide data to assess the performance of schools in educating. The test scores consistently showed Oregon public schools doing a poor job of educating. It looks like Brown et al simply took advantage of the current fascination with DIE to ditch a program that highlighted how poor performing Otegon schools are

    henrybowman in reply to Christopher B. | September 11, 2022 at 5:20 pm

    Her “claimed reason??”

    “SB 744 gives us an opportunity to review our graduation requirements and make sure our assessments can truly assess all students’ learning”

    This is nothing but Chewbacca Defense verbal diarrhea.
    The same as is about 80% of what I’m hearing from dozens of Democrats in or running for high office these days.
    Half of America doesn’t have the brainpower to think, “Waitaminnit, what the hell does anything in that statement even have to do with anything that is actually happening?”
    The half that has the brainpower never gets an answer because the MSM panders only to the other half.

“Oregon Gov. Signs Law Allowing Students to Graduate Without Proving They Can Write or do Math”

Or arithmetic.

Slaveholders never wanted their slaves to know how to read!

Who does she think will hire them for anything except lawn care. They are on the fast track to homelessness.

“Backers argued the existing proficiency levels for math and reading presented an unfair challenge for students who do not test well, and Boyle said the new standards for graduation would aid Oregon’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”

So then… when Joe Biden said that “poor kids are just as bright as white kids,” he was lying?

For a Democrat, even a marginally educated electorate is not desirable. Just do as you’re told. They know how to live your life better than you.

Next will be doing away with mandatory attendance. Then these “diplomas” won’t even be worth as much as a “Certificate of Attendance”. They’ll just be birthday cards.

Wolverine: “Maverick, I need help up here. I got MiGs on my tail and they just holed my fuel tank.”

Biden administration: “Wait one. We just launched ground crew that can’t do math or spell.”

Guy in charge of yellow gear on the carrier: “The on off switch is on the left. Your left. Your left. YOUR OTHER LEFT! SWEET JEZUZ!

Carrier skipper: Uhh, we just launched an aircraft tug off Cat 2. It’s our last one as we lost the other 3 due to mandatory intersectionality stand down training. Return to Port? interrogative, over.

Welcome to the new normal. Abolish government schools.

Well, I guess that in addition to NEVER hiring an applicant with an Ivy League degree, I will also now avoid hiring anyone from Oregon.

Governor Brown, she’s a real looker is she not. GASP!

guess oregon hasn’t considered the downstream consequences for johnny and lavon–not being able to read, write or calculate they are virtually unemployable–their options would seem to be unemployment or a career in crime–imagine the “teacher’s” unions in oregon as they petition for yet another pay increase—lord, as a taxpayer would have to say “no”–if teachers can’t (or won’t) fulfill even their most fundamental purpose, fire them and all of the high-paid “administrators”–they’ve become an outright useless burden to the taxpayers–forcing me to pay for your nonperformance is simply not sustainable

SB 744 might as well be called the “If You’re Not White You’re Too Stupid To Learn So We Give Up” Act.

The condescension of the Left towards those who are not white, straight, Christian and (usually) male, never ceases to appall me. As a classical liberal, it infuriates me that the bigotry of low expectations has now become what people think of when they hear the word “liberal”. There was a time when the liberal notion of a real education – facts, reason, diversity of ideas and opinions, science – for all was at the heart of the Democratic movement. Unfortunately, “there was a time” was sometime thirty or more years ago, and now what seems to matter is the fee-fee’s of the Downtrodden and the diversity of pronouns.

You may celebrate that in recent years the loudest champions for destroying a traditional education are on the Left, but do not be too smug, there are many folks on the far Right who are eager to return schools to being an antebellum extension of Bible vacation camp that runs all year. For the entire decade of the 1990’s I taught science at a state university in Mississippi. Many of my students came from “Christian Academies” (read that as “No science and no blacks”) or from impoverished public schools called “Attendance Centers”. Attendance centers are to high schools as day care is to elementary school. Needless to say, few of my college students (only about 30% of Mississippi high school grads went to college back then, and more than 80% of our university students were white) could start to study science until they had taken at least a semester of remedial mathematics (what I learned in 8th and 9th grade), and most of the kids had science ideas that needed to be unlearned. (“No one has been to the moon, because it is up in Heaven. and God won’t allow that.” “Girls can get pregnant swimming in public pools at the same times as boys.” “Only white gay men and Haitians get AIDS.”) I left Mississippi twenty years ago, but my colleague who still teaches there tells me all that has changed is that there are fewer professors, more administrators, lower pay adjusted for inflation, and more student insolence. And a very conservative public that more than ever hates all higher education that isn’t obviously vo-tech.

When your lifeboat is taking on water, asking whether the guy with a full bailing bucket is a Democrat (or a Republican) before you will pour the bucket over the gunwale is stupid. We need to fight against all politicians who believe that less thinking and more rote recitation of some particular set of political “facts” is the secret to national success.

Hey folks, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s 2022. We should not be measuring student success by outdated racist standards like the ability to read, write and do math.

What REALLY matters is whether students know their pronouns, whether they have learned to recognize and reject white privilege, and that they fight like good little Young Pioneers Red Guards Social Justice Warriors to eliminate systemic racism.

Am I the only one who sees racism in this quote: “Backers argued the existing proficiency levels for math and reading presented an unfair challenge for students who do not test well, and Boyle said the new standards for graduation would aid Oregon’s “Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”??

Assuming they have data (a BIG if) showing uniformly poor performance in testing by those groups, how does it help those groups by – rather than finding ways to improve their performance – these “educators” just punt and effectively say, “The fact you can’t read or write is all the evidence I need to prove you deserve a diploma.”

The linked Washington Examiner article is over a year old. The SB 744 bill was passed and signed in April 2021.

This is OLD NEWS, folks!

Math is hard.

Hence Math is racist! QED.