Academic Racism?

By Deacon Mike Manno

(The Wanderer) – When a bill is passed by Congress or a state legislature, the president or the state governor usually hosts a public signing ceremony. It is, of course, a way to get some good publicity for the executive — “See, I’m getting stuff done for you” — and it gets their names mentioned, mostly favorably, in the news.

That’s what happens most of the time. I suppose there are times when an executive is signing something very controversial where the signing is done behind closed doors, sometimes in the dead of the night, hidden in darkness. Those times are few and far between, but they do raise questions about what the legislation being signed into law really does.

This happened recently in Oregon where the Democratic governor, Kate Brown, privately signed a bill on July 14 that had passed the Oregon legislature last June. Why no public ceremony? Perhaps it is because the bill, SB 744, suspends the state’s proficiency requirements to graduate from high school for the next five years.

A spokesman for Gov. Brown said the suspension of proficiency requirements was to benefit minority students.

“Oregon’s Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color” will benefit, said the governor’s spokesman. “Leaders from those communities have advocated time and again for equitable graduation standards, along with expanded learning opportunities and supports.”

Equitable standards, okay, but eliminating standards, that’s something else.
What are those proficiency standards? Why do they matter and why are they being suspended? And how are they to be made more equitable? Those standards are described by the state’s Department of Education as “essential skills” and include:

1. Read and comprehend a variety of texts, and being able to demonstrate the ability to read and understand, critically analyze key points of the text, and be able to follow instructions from informational texts to perform tasks, answer questions, and solve problems.
2. Write clearly and accurately, which includes being able to adapt writing to different audiences, purposes, and contexts, be able to explain, summarize, and inform in business and personal communications, and able to use correct grammar, punctuation, capitalization.
3. Apply mathematics in a variety of settings, and be able to apply workable mathematical concepts where applicable, produce graphs, and communicate and defend the verified process and solution, using pictures, symbols, models, narrative, or other methods.

Kind of simple, right? Reading, writing, and arithmetic.

There are some other items listed such as being able to listen and speak clearly and coherently, and the ability to think critically and analytically, but these are the three that are first listed. Reading, writing, and arithmetic. Essential skills that educators believe that you should possess at least at a tenth-grade level before you graduate from high school — except not in Oregon, not now, not until at least until 2027. In the meantime, no standards, no essential skills because, apparently, this is the way to help minority students.

So what is really going on? You would think that if some students, due to language or cultural barriers, are not able to meet the standards of the educational establishment in the state, they would (or at least should) be working overtime to bring them up to proficiency. But alas, that is not what is being done; rather the standards are going to be modified over the next five years. How are they to be modified and why drop them completely?

I remember years ago when I was teaching at a local community college. Word came down that certain students were to pass, even if they had not turned in assignments, or taken and passed the course exams. In short, it was a no-fail policy and was in effect until the local paper got wind of it and published it in one Sunday edition. In other words, substitute a diploma for actual knowledge.

That, of course, explains why the governor signed the bill in the dark of night. Something is very wrong with this policy. And, in fairness, I should mention that there are plenty of other localities that have abandoned educational standards to make their graduation rates look more acceptable than they would if the whole truth were known.
And, in general, these lax policies, when they are defended, are defended because it is claimed that the standards somehow hurt minority students, except for the Asians — they excel despite their cultural backgrounds.

So I did a little looking at Oregon. It appears that several months ago the state Department of Education did a bit of warning about some of their standards and why they might need to be changed, especially in the area of mathematics. It was contained in an 82-page guide, A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction.

The educational culprit, the guide was happy to report, was white supremacy.
“White supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms in everyday teacher actions,” the guide reads. “Coupled with the beliefs that underlie these actions, they perpetuate educational harm on Black, Latinx, and multilingual students, denying them full access to the world of mathematics.” The guide went on to provide an outline on how to “deconstruct racism” in mathematics.

The guide alleges that certain teaching practices, which I always thought were normal, perpetuate white supremacy, such as asking students to show their work, focusing on the correct answer, tracking student progress, and grading students.

The guide explains that asking students to show their work is “a crutch” for teachers to understand what students are thinking. It is white supremacy because it reinforces “paternalism” and “worship of the written word,” an alleged foundation of white supremacy culture, which reinforces documentation and writing skills.

It continues: “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so . . . upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates objectivity.”

Okay, now I understand. This is political correctness run amok in academia.

The bill, secretly signed, orders the Department of Education to develop recommendations for changes in the “requirements for high school diplomas . . . with the goal of ensuring that the processes and outcomes related to the requirements for high school diplomas are equitable, accessible, and inclusive.”

It’s pretty obvious what the state is doing. Some students for a variety of reasons have difficulty mastering — even at a tenth-grade level — the essential skills necessary to be a high school graduate. But is this really the answer, lowering expectations? Schools should be raising expectations, demanding proficiency from students to give them a greater opportunity to succeed in real life, not in the artificial environment of Oregon’s flirtation with Never-Never Land.

“The approach for Senate Bill 744 is to, in fact, lower our expectations for our kids,” said Oregon House Minority Leader Republican Christine Drazan, and she is right.
No kid should be denied that basic education because helping them may be too burdensome or uncomfortable for the school. They are not a throwaway commodity that can be bandaged with a paper diploma. Education should demand the best from them, not the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

And we wonder what’s wrong with education today.

(You can reach Mike at DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every Thursday morning at 10 Central on Faith On Trial on IowaCatholicRadio.com.)