Oregon governor signs bill ending reading and math skill requirements | Hacker News Reader

Oregon governor signs bill ending reading and math skill requirements

news.yahoo.com

29 pointsjseliger11 comments

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

This sort of (arguably) well-intentioned paternalism comes across as incredibly racist to me.

On a not unrelated note, Kate Brown has been under fire for Oregon's awful HS graduation rates. While all of the changes are being made as "a response to the pandemic and a reassessment of our current graduation requirements"...it all stinks of gaming the numbers so that it looks like graduation rates are better than they should be.

https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2021/01/oregon-graduati...

None of this is new, though. Two decades ago my high school had an _enrollment_ rate of 60%. Even with education mandates and legal consequences, Oregon has a problem with poverty and equitability that disincentivizes school attendance. We still lead the nation in malnutrition, for instance.

So I don't see this as Kate Brown cooking the books, but more of an opportunity for a realistic assessment of what our goals should be for education and how to expand access and participation.

I went to HS in rural Oregon where the "you need to go to college to succeed" didn't work for most of the students. Trade options like metal shop, wood shop and construction slowly got less funding or were dropped all together. Those things kept a lot of HS kids interested enough to stay long enough to graduate, let alone have a future career.

Don't worry, Oregon tried a new test and sent every HS student at Lincoln High School a $1400 debit card a few months ago "accidentally". I'm sure that will help reduce poverty and nutrition. Don't worry...it just came at the expense of federal tax payers.

https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2021/11/oregon-accident...

> "I worry that by adopting this bill, we're giving up on our kids,"

That’s not the part that’s worrisome to me. I care whether a student can get to 12th grade or age 18 without being able to read and do basic math.

If they’ve failed to achieve that, that’s the problem, not that they’re given a high school diploma anyway. The giving up happened years earlier and over time, not at graduation.

As someone who _actually_ graduated from a high school in Oregon, I fully support this.

Every single state requirement that I had to complete was little more than a BS checkbox that transparently had little value as an actual assessment tool.

Measurements have costs associated with them. When the value is minimal it makes sense to cut the fat.

If there is no requirement to prove that, you know, you learned anything....why bother with high school at all?

Source is Washington Examiner: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/oregon-bill-ending-r...

Though I believe the story first broke here[1].

1: https://archive.md/9x8bs

Why bother with schools then ???.

This is something of a non-story

There was a specific testing requirement at the end of HS

Students still have to attend by state law (or have some alternative allowed by law).

This test is an old law not good education practice and policy. It’s old nanny state thinking. The test format does not align with optimal problem solving behavior.

Source: ex wife and her colleagues are teachers in Oregon.

There’s always debate tabloids will omit to manufacture the right question in readers thoughts; well why bother with education?

Who stands to win when people are asking that question?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com