EDITORIAL: Oregon cites equity in suspending graduation requirement

At some point, the left’s soft bigotry of low expectations gave way to the outright bigotry of eliminating expectations. Consider Oregon.

This month, the Oregon Board of Education unanimously voted to extend a pause on graduation requirements. Previously, the state made high school students take a test to demonstrate basic mastery of reading, writing and math. Oregon originally halted the requirement during the pandemic. Now, the earliest it will return is 2029.

Students who failed the test often took elective classes to create work samples that allowed them to meet the testing requirement. As a 2022 Oregon Department of Education report on the issue noted, this was “often at the expense of another elective course.”

Unless you’re in the education bubble, that makes sense. Elective classes may be fun, but a student’s future success hinges on his or her ability to read, write and do math.

But anyone following recent debates about the public schools can guess the backstory here. Some groups of students failed the tests at a higher rate than others. For many critics, this is de facto proof of racial bias in the system.

“Research shows that racism is ‘fundamental to racial disparities in educational attainment,’ ” the 2022 report reads.

This is nonsense. Race-neutral factors, such as disparities in poverty rates, family structure or school quality, matter greatly. Individual choices make a difference, too.

Yet rather than hold students to minimal standards and expectations, Oregon education officials have decided to lower the bar even further. Who is this supposed to help? The minority kids who are already struggling? Quite the opposite. It further sets them up for failure. The cynicism on display here is stunning.

“In Oregon, to allow all students the opportunity to learn, grow and achieve, we must remove all systemic barriers to lifelong success — including updating graduation requirements to reflect the varied and diverse backgrounds, heritages and life experiences of Oregonians,” the report reads.

Peel back the feel-good gobbledygook. Oregon education bureaucrats believe lowering standards gives students a better opportunity to learn and succeed. Perhaps they’ve never met a teenager before.

Further and more disturbingly, they don’t believe African American and Hispanic students are capable of achieving at the same level as their Asian and white peers. They want to lower standards so the learning disparities are less noticeable. The ones hurt most by this racist attitude are students who graduate without basic skills, who are disproportionately African American and Hispanics. Shameful.