Reading, Writing Proficiency No Longer Required in State Schools
October 25, 2023 | Oregon
The Oregon Board of Education on Thursday voted unanimously to remove requirements for students to be proficient in reading and writing in order to graduate—joining the long line of ill-advised moves to cut academic expectations for American students.
The Oregon Department of Education released a statement calling the reading and writing proficiency standards “burdensome to teachers and students.” Dan Farley, Oregon’s assistant superintendent of research, assessment, and data with the Education Department, said the standards simply “did not work.”
There’s no evidence that suspending those standards is going to improve the academic performance of any student—quite the contrary. Had the Oregon Board of Education done 15 minutes of research, it would have found that relaxing academic performance standards has had drastic adverse consequences. (Excerpt from The Daily Signal.)
