Oregon Drops Essential Skills Requirements to Graduate High School, Citing Harm to ‘Marginalized Students’

Business owners, beware of students with high school diplomas from Oregon.

They may not be able to read or do basic math.

According to Oregon Public Broadcasting, in 2020, the Oregon Department of Education suspended the “essential skills” requirement to accommodate students who had fallen behind because of school shutdowns and online learning — or so they said.

Oregon schools suspended testing requirements for high school
students to graduate. This ceasing of testing students will only
hurt them, passing them through the system even if they have not acquired the knowledge to succeed in life in general. Read more and support in our bio! pic.twitter.com/EUiPMOh5FF

— Friends of Lowell (@FriendsofLowell) August 14, 2021

The state changed letter grades to a pass-incomplete system. There were little to no attendance requirements, and the essential skills requirements were suspended, according to OPB.

Although the suspension was supposed to end in 2021, the Oregon board has decided to extend the pause on the essentials skills test until at least 2029 because of — you guessed it — racism.

Leaders in the Oregon Department of Education and the state school board say that requiring all students to pass standardized tests or create teacher-judged in-depth assignments as graduation requirements are “harmful hurdles” for “historically marginalized students.”

In other words, math and reading are racist.

The Oregon Board of Education says competency assessments in reading, writing, and math harm students of color.https://t.co/dTofxjYwOK

— KATU News (@KATUNews) October 20, 2023

The state DOE says state-mandated tests will still be given to the students — they just won’t be used to determine whether the students have the skills to graduate, which makes the tests as pointless as a weathervane in a hurricane.

The Oregon Dept. of Education is defending a controversial decision to continue a pause on a high school graduation testing requirement for another six years, saying the state still has some of the nation’s toughest requirements for a diploma. https://t.co/GN6mnAe4mO

— KTVZ NewsChannel 21 (@KTVZ) October 22, 2023

According to the Oregon DOE, a higher number of students of color, students learning English as a second language and students with disabilities had to take intensive writing and math courses in their senior year to prove their eligibility for a diploma, and “there was a lack of evidence the extra academic work helped them in the workplace or at college.”

Dan Farley, ODE’s assistant superintendent of research said the outcomes of the testing could be predicted by “race, ethnicity, [learning disability] status, multilingual learner status.”

“We have to do what we can to disrupt those basically racist outcomes,” Farley said, according to KATU-TV in Portland.

It would be interesting to know what “evidence” was used to measure whether having essential skills like reading and math helped students in their lives after high school.

How are kids who have never had the pressure of studying for tests or keeping a required grade average supposed to handle the pressures of college and competing with students from other schools who have had these experiences?

Dozens of Oregon residents, including Christine Drazan, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate, submitted public comments pointing out that extending the pause on essential standards would lower the value of an Oregon high school diploma but the measure still passed, according to the Philomath News, an online news outlet in Philomath, Oregon.