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Oregon’s education establishment has quietly adopted a cynical shortcut: they will no longer require students to prove basic mastery of reading, writing, and math before handing out diplomas. The State Board of Education has effectively paused the Essential Skills assessment that once stood between a high school seat and a real credential, and that decision tells you everything about which side the elites are on.
This rollback wasn’t born yesterday — it traces back to emergency measures in 2020 and has been extended repeatedly so that cohorts now face no real test of competence through at least the late 2020s. Officials insist this is temporary and that standardized tests will still be administered in some form, but removing the requirement to demonstrate proficiency is nothing short of lowering the bar for an entire generation.
The explanation from the education bureaucracy is as predictable as it is poisonous: the assessments allegedly “marginalize” students of color and therefore must be shelved in the name of equity. That argument sounds compassionate until you realize it is just a polite way of admitting failure — rather than helping students meet the standard, the state has decided to stop measuring whether they reach it.
Let’s call this what it is: a political dodge that trades real education for woke talking points. Business leaders, parents, and common-sense citizens are right to worry that diplomas divorced from demonstrable skills will cheapen the credential employers rely on and leave young Americans unprepared for honest work. Oregon’s kids deserve rigorous classrooms and accountability, not the ceremonial conferral of meaningless paper.
Some defenders of the move will point out that credits and coursework remain part of diploma requirements, trying to dress up this surrender as nuance. That is a weak consolation when the practical effect is that a student can graduate without being required to show they can read a college-level text or do basic algebra, and it’s an affront to parents who expect schools to teach fundamentals.
Conservatives and responsible policymakers should push back hard: demand the restoration of objective standards, insist on transparent plans to raise achievement rather than erase it, and empower parents with real choices if local schools refuse to teach basics. America was built on the idea that standards matter and excellence is attainable — we should not let bureaucrats replace that conviction with a permanent pass for mediocrity.
