Oregon Governor Kate Brown has “paused” – for years – requirements for schools to teach what schools are supposed to teach: calculating, reading, and writing.
The governor “paused” the requirements for the foreseeable future because it’s just not fair to make students prove they can add, subtract, multiply, conjugate the English language, or be able to read before they graduate. I mean, who needs to know that stuff? Pfft.
Brown suspended basic graduation requirements in order to jimmy the numbers from her inchoate and unscientific Covid shutdowns to make it look like things are going along swimmingly in public education. It’s the same mentality as California changing the definition of robbery and then glorying in the “reduction” in robberies in its crime stats.
It’s insane.
Related: Oregon Law Removes Requirement That Students Can Read or Do Math Before Graduating
As PJ Media colleague Rick Moran first pointed out in his piece on the dumbing down of Oregon schools, the far-Left governor extended the lower Covid standards in the metaphorical dead of night, without fanfare or signing ceremonies, and virtually without a public record.
Moran wrote:
The question is why Governor Brown and the radicals who pushed this Idiocracy Bill through the legislature aren’t bursting with pride at this singular achievement. It’s unprecedented. It’s revolutionary. It’s the culmination of 50 years of effort by progressives to not just have equality of opportunity but to engineer equality as a tangible result.
This is a good question. Why aren’t they proud of the “equity” achievement?
You’d think they’d want to ballyhoo there finally being “an example of a successful government program,” as my other colleague Charlie Martin quipped to me.
Indeed.
But they aren’t.
The governor’s spokesman refused to comment and then later told The Oregonian the move was to make it look like minority kids are succeeding when they’re not. He didn’t say it like that though, but that’s what he meant when he said this in an email:
Boyle said in an emailed statement that suspending the reading, writing and math proficiency requirements while the state develops new graduation standards will benefit “Oregon’s Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”
Successful attorney and Fox News contributor Leo Terrell said on Fox and Friends that the lower standards steal a better life from the minority students this dumbing down is meant to help.
Education is the key to break the poverty cycle. And she’s embarrassed about this and keeping it quiet because it insults people of color. They have eliminated a measuring tool to determine quality and competency in these skills. It is a victory for teacher unions because now the teachers don’t have to teach. … How is going to benefit people of color? My mother had an 8th-grade education, my dad a high school education. You lower the standards, you dumb down kids. I think it’s embarrassing, insulting and more importantly, it’s racist because it implies that just because of skin color, you can’t pass a test.
As Rick points out in his piece, these Covid changes in policy likely will continue until this year’s freshman class matriculates out of Stupid School, and only then will “standards” be reconsidered. The Oregonian reports that it means new standards won’t be in place until 2027 at the earliest.
Related: Fight Back: Here’s How People Are Legally Resisting Dystopian Diktats to Get a Covid Shot or Be Fired
Good thing they don’t require kids to know math or statistics or those kids would figure out what a load of abject BS this is.
Remember, kids, the best way to force everyone to get an expensive college degree is to degrade the standards for high school degrees to the point where they carry zero information to potential employers.#signalingtheoryhttps://t.co/mMVPcTnUxS
— Geoffrey Miller (@primalpoly) August 10, 2021
With this dumbing down, Kate Brown and her Democrats have admitted that schools aren’t required to teach anymore.
Get your kid out while you can.
