It was such a wondrous time to be a kid. I learned so much from TV in my early years. It makes me sad that once we valued things like reading and writing as a society, as we recognized it benefited all of society, but seem to be going the opposite direction in some places.
> Oregon Gov. Kate Brown privately signed a bill last month ending the requirement for high school students to prove proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic before graduation.
> (b) Notwithstanding paragraph (a) of this subsection, the State Board of Education may not require a student who has successfully completed the credit requirements prescribed by paragraph (a) of this subsection or by rule of the board to demonstrate proficiency in any skill or academic content area.
Reading the statute doesn’t give any context. Also, people incorrectly and misleadingly quote snippets of law all the time on the internet because they don’t know how to read and interpret a statute.
My experience with standardized exit testing in California was just that all the relevant classes would temporarily pause teaching more advanced material to review the more basic material that was on the exams.
Perhaps the experience was more useful to those with more marginal academic retention, but inserting standardized tests doesn't inherently improve a student's education.
And we wonder why we’re losing out to other economies and have to import skilled labor (not a bad thing per se, where it makes sense) but throwing your own under the bus is malfeasance.
Importing immigrants is the easy way out. Improving schools is a non-starter. At least for most public schools. Instead of focusing on the basics like math and language proficiency we have the stranglehold of the teachers unions and the academic sports complex (where there 80 million dollar high school football stadiums):
I’m not sure how more low bar state standardized testing really plays much of a role in our competitiveness. Students in Oregon already have to pass certain classes to graduate.
There's more context to it than most people report.
Those requirements haven't always been there - they were added at some point not too long ago - so at worse they're going back to older standards.
Also, those particular requirements are/were a bit unusual - I believe many/most states don't have them. So as backward as it may seem, it's not more backward than the rest of the country.
> Oregon Gov. Kate Brown privately signed a bill last month ending the requirement for high school students to prove proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic before graduation.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/oregon-governor-signs-bill...