08/09/21 Portland Oregonian:
Gov. Kate Brown signed a law to allow Oregon students to graduate without proving they can write or do math. She doesn’t want to talk about it.
Boyle said in an emailed statement that suspending the reading, writing and math proficiency requirements while the state develops new graduation standards will benefit “Oregon’s Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”
For generations American public schools educated the children of immigrants who spoke little or no English, blacks even in Southern states where funding and hours per year were inferior to what white kids enjoyed and still produced literate and numerate high school graduates. While not all became scientists, authors, or scholars, enough did to say that even with rough starting material, they were generally successful. Now Oregon is using COVID-19 as an excuse for their failure to teach basic skills to BIPOCs. Is there any greater indictment of the failure of progressive thought than for it to admit that what reactionary and racist systems could do, they cannot?
Also, the phrase "Latino, Latina, and Latinx" is a grammatical atrocity in Spanish. "Latino" (masculine form works fine for discussing mixed gender groups, and "Latinx " is pretty much a creation of woke white people that don't know anything about Spanish grammar. So one word could have been used instead of three.
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