Are some districts devaluing diplomas?

If high school graduates can't read, write, and multiply, then their diploma is meaningless.

Originally published in the Moultrie News.

What do you think of Oregon’s suspension of reading and math standards as a condition of graduation?

Like any state, Oregon students must earn a certain number of course credits to receive a high school diploma. Prior to COVID, they also had to demonstrate basic proficiency in reading, writing, and math. Proficiency was measured by passing one of a number of standardized tests or a teacher-evaluated in-depth project.

That doesn’t sound unreasonable. In fact, passing the test or project should be the easiest part of graduation. It’s only an evaluation of basic skills, not a mastery test in pre-calculus. It’s like the vision part of your driver’s test. It’s not meant to be a mountain to overcome. It’s just to make sure licenses (or diplomas) don’t fall into the hands of those who shouldn’t have them.

Nevertheless, the Oregon State Board of Education suspended the reading-writing-math requirement in the aftermath of COVID; a few weeks ago, they suspended it again until 2029.

Parents and teachers opposed to the suspension say it devalues diplomas. If I tell you I’m a high school graduate, and you don’t have confidence that I can at least read, write, and multiply, then the diploma is meaningless. The requirement helped make sure this didn’t happen.

One could argue, of course, that a diploma still signifies basic skills. We don’t need a test to prove it. A student couldn’t pass all those courses without reading and writing on a basic level.

Or could they? Let’s talk about the abysmal level of competency required to pass the lowest-level high school courses. A passing grade of 60 is easy to attain in a class with no homework, no due dates, fluff assignments, test retakes, and a minimum grade of 50 — practices encouraged by many states, including Oregon. Why, a student who can barely read could pass under those conditions!

That, in fact, is exactly what the statistics bear out. Since Oregon suspended the basic skill requirement, graduation rates have soared. In 2022, 81.3 percent of students earned a diploma. However, only 43 percent of those students were proficient in English and less than 31 percent in math.

Maybe those proficiency tests are unfair. That’s what Oregon’s state board argued. They claimed it was a “harmful hurdle for historically marginalized students” because higher rates of English language learners, students of color, and students with disabilities had to take senior-year remediation courses to get them up to speed, causing them to miss out on taking an elective.

Well, yeah, that’s one of the benefits of the proficiency requirement — that schools are forced to provide under-educated students the opportunity to acquire the basic skills they lack. It would be great for those kids to take interpretive dance instead of a literacy course, but isn’t literacy the more important skill? Yes, it’s certainly regrettable that those most impacted are students who have been historically marginalized, but isn’t this a good way to ensure they don’t become perpetually marginalized? Won’t sending those kids into the world without basic skills only increase their likelihood of becoming stereotyped and ignored? What am I missing?

Suspending basic requirements, failing to remediate unskilled students, and enacting grading practices that make it so anyone can pass are all signs of a diploma mill. According to Oxford Languages, that’s “an institution or organization that grants large numbers of educational degrees based on inadequate or inferior education and assessment of the recipients.” When 80 percent of your students graduate, but only 43 percent can read and write proficiently, I’d say you’re in the zone.

But what’s really going on here is an open cover-up. It’s an absurd disguise for school systems that continually pass students to the next grade without learning fundamental skills and for parents who don’t make their kids go to school, study, and learn. The result will be legions of high school graduates possessing a historically unprecedented level of ignorance, laziness, and fragility. Soon, a diploma will be as utterly worthless as a losing lottery ticket.

But don’t dismiss Oregon’s policies as too far away to matter. It’s likely that the same principles driving education’s cover-up there are already taking root a lot closer to home.

Read the original column here.