Oregon Drops Performance Tests for Students

(Scott Threlkeld/The Advocate via AP)

What do you do if your schools can’t help students improve their academic achievement?

There is only one thing to do if you are an education bureaucrat: quit measuring student achievement and use competency to determine whether students graduate.

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There. Problem solved.

Anybody still under the impression that schools exist to do anything but subsidize teachers’ unions, provide campaign workers for Democrats, and propagandize children with insane Left-wing ideology needs to wake up. The education establishment is utterly uninterested in teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic.

That requirement, put into place in 2012, was suspended during the pandemic. The Oregon Board of Education voted Thursday to continue the suspension until 2027.

They say the way the assessment results were being used was marginalizing students of color and students with disabilities.

“We are unable to ethically make a different decision at this point. It is also unethical for us to continue to require this when we know it can continue to cause harm and has had no change in how students are performing,” said Guadalupe Martinez Zapata who chairs the board.

Some parents feel removing the requirement is devaluing Oregon’s diploma by giving students an easy pass.

Mary Miller was one of two parents who spoke against the decision at the meeting. Others submitted testimony against it online.

The move is an admission that schools are incapable of actually teaching students of color in the basics. We have long had evidence that students of color suffer from a dramatic achievement gap, performing well below the standards of White and Asian students. Billions, perhaps Trillions over the years, have been poured into the schools to close this gap, and Oregon is just giving up.

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Many will assume this means that these students are incapable of performing academically, but there is plenty of evidence that other types of schools are capable of teaching them to do so. Students who do not perform well in public schools often do much better in private schools, but the public school establishment wants to keep them trapped in the failing system.

It’s all about the Benjamins, as Ilhan Omar would say.

Many younger school teachers and most education bureaucrats are ideological groomers, completely uninterested in the academic performance of their students. There is a generational split between the people who went into teaching to, you know, teach, and those who see their role as destroying Western society.

The only smart thing to do is to implement school choice and pressure private schools to reject the freaks who care more about teaching sexuality and intersectional oppression than reading and math. Firing public school teachers is nearly impossible, and the education bureaucrats are almost impossible to get rid of.

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So go around them. Slowly starve the public schools of funds. They are nothing but a drag on the nation.

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David Strom 5:20 PM | May 01, 2024
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