Oregon is latest state to dumb down education. Talk about the soft bigotry of low expections

The Oregon Board of Education voted unanimously in October to remove requirements for students to be proficient in reading and writing in order to graduate—joining the long line of ill-advised moves to cut academic expectations for American students.

The Oregon Department of Education released a statement calling the reading and writing proficiency standards "burdensome to teachers and students." Dan Farley, Oregon’s assistant superintendent of research, assessment, and data with the Education Department, said the standards simply "did not work."

There’s no evidence that suspending those standards is going to improve the academic performance of any student—quite the contrary. Had the Oregon Board of Education done 15 minutes of research, it would have found that relaxing academic performance standards has had drastic adverse consequences.