Oregon Governor Kate Brown quietly signed a bill on July 14 that suspends a requirement for Oregon students to demonstrate reading, writing, and math proficiency in order to receive a diploma.
Why the big secret about her signing?
The press only became aware a few days ago.
Gov. Brown is refusing to talk about it.
But others are talking. Even the far-left press is trying to understand what she is up to.
Be informed. Take a closer look.
Gov. Kate Brown, the Oregon Democrat, signed a bill last month with little fanfare that drops the requirement that high school students prove proficiency in reading, writing, or math before graduation.
The Oregonian reported that the governor has seemed to avoid discussing Senate Bill 744. Her move to sign the bill was "not public until recently because her office did not hold a signing ceremony or issue a press release."
Well, the paper pointed out that although the bill was first signed on July 14, but wasn't added to the state's database until July 29 due to a glitch in the system.
Speaking of a "glitch in the system."
The consequences of dumbing down the kids.
The newspaper says, "For the next five years, an Oregon high school diploma will be no guarantee that the student who earned it can read, write or do math at the high school level."
They also report that Brown was apparently undecided about actually signing the bill only a short time before she signed it.
Brown is personally avoiding the press on the issue---not taking their calls, nor responding to their email or texts.
However, the governor's deputy communications director says in an email that she suspended the reading, writing and math proficiency requirements while the state develops new graduation standards that will benefit "Oregon's Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color."
The paper says the bill could stay in effect for five years until new requirements. And it says their own editorial staff urged Brown to veto the bill. The editorial staff told Brown, "Our legislators should be focused on how to help students regain the ground they lost after a year and a half of distance learning and hybrid-learning---not lowering our standards."
Blacks don't want that kind of "help." Probably the other "people of color" don't either.
"Education is the key to break the poverty cycle. And she's embarrassed about this and keeping it quiet because it insults people of color. They have eliminated a measuring tool to determine quality and competency in these skills. It's a victory for teacher unions because the teachers don't have to teach...How is [this] going to people of color? My mother had an 8th grade education, my dad a high school education. You lower the standards, you dumb down kids. I think it's embarrassing, insulting and more importantly, it's racist because it implies that just because of skin color, you can't pass a test."
He wasn't finished. Then he said this:
"This is the progressive left's form of education, dumbing down kids. And Steve, more importantly, dumbing down kids of color because they don't believe that they can handle the skillset they required for everyone. You are taking away the only tool to get to break the poverty cycle: education. It is a way to move up in society. You no longer have to read or write or count because of---just because of your. skin color. It's insulting to anyone in this country."
Indeed it is.
National Review: "Destroy The 'Public' Education System."
What we're experiencing in government-run schools across the nation is producing thousands of entitled brats running the streets of Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere burning and breaking everything they don't like, while looting the things they do like. It's pathetic.
NR says, "State-run schools have undercut two fundamental conditions of a healthy, tolerant society. First, they created millions of civic illiterates who are disconnected from long-held values and national identity. Second, they've exacerbated the very inequalities that trigger the tearing apart of fissures."
They say "left-wing ideologues run most school districts and they decide what your children learn. They are the same ones that decide that your kid can protest the Second Amendment of the Constitution, but never in a million years march for any cause the Founders might have championed."
The embedded left-wing nature of big school districts is so normalized that parents rarely say a word.
It was one thing when these schools were producing mere Democrats, and it's quite another now that they're churning out hordes of chillingly ignorant voters.
A study found that 60% of Americans couldn't pass a US Citizenship test. The younger the test-takers, the less likely they were to pass.
About 60% of those tested didn't even know which countries their grandparents fought in World War II. And only 24% knew why American colonists had fought the British.
A different outcome than the "Father of public education" had in mind.
Noah Webster, an American Founding Father and father of our public education system, said "Discipline our youth in early life in sound maxims of moral, political, and religious duties."
Webster wrote in his "History of the United States":
"The brief exposition of the Constitution of the United States, will unfold to young persons the principles of republican government; and it is the sincere desire of the writer that our citizens should early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is the Bible, particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion."
The "father of public education" also said:
"If the citizens neglect their duty and place unprincipled men [or women] in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made not for the public good so much as for the selfish or local purposes."
In this case, the "selfish or local purposes" are to advance a broken, bankrupt so-called "progressive ideology."
Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Prayerful.