Oregon Called The Outcomes Racist. Then It Removed The Test.

The state suspended proof of reading, writing, and math as a condition of a high school diploma. The stated reason was harm to students of color. This is what actually happens to an adult who cannot read.

The Record, Precisely

Get the chain of custody right, because the people who did this will try to hide inside the vagueness. This was not one governor with a pen. It was a legislature, a governor who signed quietly, and then an appointed board that extended it without a single dissenting vote.

In June of 2021 the Oregon Legislature passed Senate Bill 744. On July 14 of that year Governor Kate Brown signed it into law. She held no signing ceremony. Her office issued no press release. The public did not learn the bill had been signed until later, and the record of the signing did not appear in the state database for two weeks because of a system error.

Read that again. A governor changed what an Oregon high school diploma certifies, and did it without telling anyone.

The bill suspended the Assessment of Essential Skills for the graduating classes of 2022, 2023, and 2024, and ordered a review of graduation requirements. Then, on October 19 of 2023, all seven members of the Oregon State Board of Education voted to extend that suspension through the 2027 to 2028 school year. That board is appointed. It is not elected. Hundreds of members of the public submitted comments opposing the extension and asking that the standards be restored. The vote was unanimous anyway.

Be precise about the scope, because precision is the only thing that survives an argument. Oregon did not eliminate all graduation requirements. Credit requirements remain in force. Students still need four credits in language arts, three in mathematics, three in science, and three in social studies. The statewide summative tests are still administered.

What ended is the requirement that a student demonstrate proficiency before receiving the diploma. Seat time still counts. Learning no longer has to be proven.

That is the whole story in one sentence. The Oregon diploma no longer certifies anything measurable.

A diploma that certifies attendance and calls itself an education is not a credential. It is a receipt. Black Intervention Forensic Audit

The Divergence

Here is what the numbers did after the measurement was removed.

Oregon's four year graduation rate for the class of 2025 hit 83 percent, the highest in the state's recorded history, surpassing the previous record of 82.6 percent set by the class of 2020. More than 40,300 students received diplomas. The rate climbed nine percentage points over the previous decade. Nineteen of the twenty three student groups the state tracks posted record graduation rates.

Now the other number. An Oregon Department of Education report found that roughly 40 percent of the state's third graders are proficient readers, a figure still below where it stood before the pandemic.

Six out of ten Oregon third graders cannot read at grade level. Eight out of ten Oregon seniors receive a diploma. Those two facts live in the same state, in the same school system, in the same year.

Now follow the same children up through the system, because this is the number that ends the argument about whether they catch up later.

Oregon does not test twelfth graders. Grade eleven is the last look the state ever takes, and this is what it sees. Statewide, 44.4 percent of eleventh graders reached proficiency in English language arts.

Read the line across. A child enters the system reading at roughly 40 percent proficiency in third grade and leaves it at roughly 44 percent proficiency in eleventh. Eight years of instruction, four percentage points. The line is not a climb. It is a shelf.

Then, one year after that final measurement, 83 percent of them receive a diploma.

Be fair about one caveat, because your opponents will raise it and you should raise it first. The state notes that eleventh grade participation in the assessment falls below the threshold it considers adequate for comparison. Districts report that high school families increasingly treat the state test as an interruption of SAT, ACT, and Advanced Placement testing. That is a real limitation on the eleventh grade figure.

It is also not a rescue. The state has spent five years pointing at participation rates while declining to fix the thing participation would have measured. And if the students skipping the exam are the ones stacking Advanced Placement courses, as districts themselves describe, then the missing test takers are not hiding a better number. They are hiding a worse one.

The state's own director, Dr. Charlene Williams, was asked about the mismatch. She attributed the divergence between rising graduation rates and stagnant proficiency less to learning problems than to attitudes among Oregon schools and parents toward state testing, pointing to participation rates.

Consider what that answer requires you to believe. It requires you to believe that six in ten third graders appear unable to read because of who chose to sit for the exam, and that the diploma numbers are the honest ones. It asks the public to trust the measure that was made easier and to distrust the measure that was not.

To her credit, Williams also said the earlier grades demand urgency, and her department has indicated it does not anticipate extending the suspension again. That is worth acknowledging. It is also five years late and it does not undo a single diploma already issued.

In Their Own Words

This is the part that requires no interpretation from me. The people who removed the standard explained why they removed it, on the record, in a public meeting.

Sit with the structure of that argument, because it is the entire case and it collapses under its own weight.

The state's chief research officer looked at the data and found that Black children, disabled children, and children learning English were failing the reading test at higher rates. He correctly called that outcome intolerable. He then recommended, and the board unanimously adopted, a remedy that changed nothing about whether those children can read.

The children who could not read before the vote could not read after the vote. What changed is that Oregon stopped writing it down.

Farley also presented data showing that student proficiency in the essential skill areas had not improved between 2015 and 2019. That finding was offered as evidence that the requirement needed reevaluation. Understand the logic being deployed. The instrument showed no progress for four straight years, and the conclusion drawn was that the instrument was the problem.

A thermometer that keeps reading one hundred and four degrees is not malfunctioning. The patient is burning.

They found that Black children were failing the reading test at higher rates. Then they removed the test. The children still cannot read. Oregon just stopped writing it down. Black Intervention Forensic Audit

The Totem Pole

Everything above is procedure. This section is consequence, and it is the reason this article exists.

An adult who cannot read does not simply have a gap on a resume. Illiteracy is the single most reliable predictor of where a person lands on the American totem pole, and the research on this has been consistent across decades and across administrations of both parties.

Start with the national picture. The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies is the federal government's measure of adult skill. Its most recent round found that average adult literacy in the United States fell by twelve points between 2017 and 2023. In 2023, 46 percent of American adults scored at or above Level 3, the threshold generally treated as functional competence for a modern workplace. Roughly 43 million American adults have low literacy skills.

Now the destinations.

Forty three percent of adults with the lowest literacy skills live in poverty. One third of them are unemployed. Three out of four people receiving welfare benefits score in the lowest two literacy levels. Roughly three in five people in the American prison system have low literacy skills.

Then there is the wage line, which is the one that should end this debate on its own.

An employed adult with low literacy skills earns an average of about 34,000 dollars a year, which is close to half of what a worker with stronger literacy earns. That is not a gap. That is a ceiling, installed in the third grade, and it holds for a working lifetime.

The generational transfer is worse. Children raised around adults with low literacy are substantially more likely to read poorly themselves. A mother's reading ability is among the strongest known predictors of her children's academic outcomes, outweighing neighborhood and family income. This is how a policy decision made in Salem in 2021 reaches a child who has not yet been born.

And the aggregate bill lands on everyone. Low adult literacy is estimated to cost the American economy as much as 2.2 trillion dollars annually in lost productivity, forgone earnings, and public expenditure.

One more finding belongs here, because it points toward the solution rather than the wound. Incarcerated people who participate in correctional education programs are 43 percent less likely to return to prison. Literacy is not merely a predictor of the outcome. It is a lever on the outcome. It can be taught at any age, and when it is taught, the trajectory bends.

Which is precisely why refusing to measure it is indefensible. You cannot pull a lever you have decided not to look at.

Forty three percent in poverty. Seventy five percent on welfare. Roughly sixty percent behind bars. Illiteracy does not produce a bad outcome. It produces a predictable one. Black Intervention Forensic Audit

The Hiring Floor

There is a comfortable assumption buried in most writing about literacy, and it is wrong. The assumption is that an adult who cannot read simply does not get hired.

He gets hired. That is the trap.

Eighty eight percent of American adults with low literacy skills are in the labor force. They apply, they interview, they are selected, and they show up. The American economy has an enormous appetite for labor that does not require reading comprehension, and it absorbs these workers without hesitation.

What the economy does not do is let them up.

The most useful evidence on this comes from the employers themselves. The Adult Literacy and Learning Impact Network, working with FTI Consulting, surveyed 500 frontline employers across logistics and transportation, retail and consumer goods, wholesale and distribution, and food and beverage. The findings are not ambiguous.

Understand precisely what that first number means. One in three of these employers is describing workers already on the payroll. Already hired. Already clocking in. The screening did not catch it, because the screening was never designed to catch it. Reading ability is discovered on the floor, after the offer, when the safety sheet, the shift schedule, the inventory manifest, or the customer complaint arrives and cannot be processed.

The scale underneath this is national. Twenty eight percent of American adults, roughly 59 million people, score at or below Level 1 in literacy, meaning they may struggle to locate simple information in a short text. More than half of adults aged 16 to 65, roughly 120 million people, score below Level 3, the level treated as the minimum for integrating and evaluating complex information.

That is not a fringe population. That is the majority of the American workforce operating below the threshold the OECD considers necessary for a modern economy.

They get hired. The market has enormous appetite for labor that does not require reading. What it does not have is a way up for anyone who cannot. Black Intervention Forensic Audit

Now the ceiling, in federal numbers.

A worker without a high school diploma had median weekly earnings of 708 dollars in 2023 and an unemployment rate of 5.6 percent. By 2024 those figures were 738 dollars and 6.2 percent, the worst unemployment rate of any education group in the country. A worker with a bachelor's degree earned 1,493 dollars weekly with unemployment at 2.2 percent.

But here is the number that matters most for Oregon, and it is the one that should have stopped this policy in the room where it was passed.

An employed adult with low literacy earns roughly 34,000 dollars a year regardless of what credential he holds. The wage tracks the skill, not the paper. A diploma awarded to a young man who reads at a sixth grade level does not move him up the earnings ladder, because the ladder was never measuring his diploma. It was measuring what he can do.

Reading comprehension sits among the fundamental skills that Pew Research analysis found important to job performance in roughly 70 percent of American occupations. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that nearly all jobs in 2020 carried a minimum formal education or literacy requirement. There is no large sector of the American economy waiting to reward a young person who cannot read.

So follow the Oregon graduate out of the building. He has the diploma. He gets the job, because the job exists and the employer is short staffed. Six weeks in, his supervisor notices he cannot read the shift board and starts telling him his schedule out loud. He is not fired. He is simply never promoted, never cross trained, never moved to the role that pays four dollars more an hour, and never told why.

He will spend thirty years believing he was unlucky.

The diploma got him through the door. It cannot get him across the room. Oregon handed out the first and quietly stopped verifying the second, and the gap between those two things is where a working life gets spent.

The wage tracks the skill, not the paper. A diploma issued without proof of reading does not raise a young man's earnings. It only delays the day he finds out. Black Intervention Forensic Audit

The Second Population

Farley named four groups whose outcomes the state wanted to disrupt. Race. Ethnicity. Disability status. And multilingual learner status.

That fourth category deserves examination, because it is large, it is growing, and it is almost never discussed in the coverage of this decision.

As of May 2024, Oregon public schools enrolled 542,735 students. Of those, 62,522 were current English learners, or 11.5 percent. Counting current, monitored, and former English learners together, the figure reaches 18.8 percent, which is nearly 102,000 students. Almost one in five Oregon students has carried the English learner designation.

The direction of travel matters as much as the level. In the 2017 to 2018 school year, Oregon identified 51,962 current English learners, about 9 percent of enrollment. Six years later that population had grown to 62,522 students at 11.5 percent, while total enrollment in the state declined. The share is rising and the base is shrinking at the same time.

The linguistic complexity is the part few people grasp. Oregon's current English learners speak Spanish at home in 76 percent of cases. The next four most common home languages are Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Arabic. But the tail is enormous. In the 2017 to 2018 reporting year the state documented 66 distinct home languages among English learners. By the 2021 to 2022 report that count stood at 199.

Now be disciplined about what that data does and does not establish, because this is where careless writers hand their opponents a free victory.

Here is what the record does support, and it is enough.

Oregon's education department explicitly named multilingual learner status as one of the four characteristics predicting which students met the graduation requirement and which did not. Nearly one in five Oregon students carries that designation. When the state removed the requirement, it removed a diagnostic that had been flagging, every single year, that this population was not reaching English proficiency.

A student who arrives in an Oregon classroom speaking Spanish, Russian, or Somali has one urgent need above every other. That student needs to learn to read and write English at a level that will support a working life in an English speaking economy. That is not assimilationist pressure. It is arithmetic. The wage data in Section Four does not carve out an exemption for students who arrived recently.

Oregon looked at a population that was not reaching English proficiency and eliminated the checkpoint that said so. Then it handed those students diplomas and called it equity.

The state's own graduation figures show what awaits. Students who recently arrived in the country graduated at 63.3 percent. Every one of those diplomas now certifies attendance rather than proficiency, and the young people holding them will discover the difference at their first job interview, not before.

You cannot deliver a child into an English speaking economy without English and call it kindness. The market does not grade on intent. Black Intervention Forensic Audit

Their Best Argument, Answered

Weak writers attack the weakest version of the opposition. Let us take the strongest one, because it is genuinely serious and it deserves a serious answer.

The defenders of this decision make a real point. The Essential Skills requirement was designed, when it was created in 2007 and 2008, to measure whether students could apply learning to real situations through projects, essays, and demonstrations of work. In practice, districts overwhelmingly satisfied it by using standardized test scores. State Senator Michael Dembrow, who sat on the board when the requirement was approved, has said the assessment was never intended to establish whether students could read or write, but whether they could apply what they were learning.

There is also a fairness argument with weight. Students who did not clear the bar were required to take additional mathematics and writing courses in their senior year, which cost them an elective. Board members argued the burden fell disproportionately on students of color, students with disabilities, and English learners.

Both points are fair. Neither justifies what was done.

The remedy for an instrument being used incorrectly is to correct the instrument. Oregon could have built the performance based assessment it originally intended. It could have replaced a single high stakes cut score with a portfolio standard. It could have moved the intervention from twelfth grade to third grade, where reading is actually learned and where remediation still works. It could have funded the extra instruction rather than treating it as a punishment.

Instead it chose the only option that guaranteed the disparity would stop appearing in the paperwork.

And the fairness argument contains its own refutation. Yes, the students required to take additional reading and writing classes were disproportionately Black, disabled, and learning English. That is because those students were disproportionately unable to read and write at grade level. The extra class was not the injury. It was the treatment. Oregon looked at a group of children receiving remediation they needed, decided the remediation was stigmatizing, and canceled it.

They did not remove a barrier. They removed a ladder.

Who Pays

Every policy has a constituency that absorbs the cost. Let us name this one.

Oregon reported a graduation rate of 73.12 percent for Black and African American students in the class of 2023, below the state average. American Indian students graduated at 68.2 percent. Hispanic and Latino students at 78.6 percent. Students with experience in incarceration or detention graduated at 35.8 percent.

Look carefully at the top of that chart, because it contains the answer the state refused to adopt.

Students who completed two credits in a Career and Technical Education program of study graduated at 95 percent. In the class of 2025, CTE students graduated at 97.8 percent, nearly sixteen percentage points above the state average. Those students were not exempted from anything. They were given a reason to be there, a skill with market value, and instruction connected to a visible future.

Oregon had proof in its own files that engagement raises outcomes without lowering standards. It chose lowered standards anyway, because lowering the standard is faster, cheaper, and produces a favorable headline within a single school year.

Here is the part that should offend every Black parent in this country. The state of Oregon examined its data, observed that Black children were failing to demonstrate reading proficiency, and concluded that the appropriate response was to stop asking Black children to demonstrate reading proficiency.

Not better instruction. Not intensive phonics in the early grades. Not extended day literacy. Not tutoring at scale. Not a single additional dollar guaranteed to the classrooms where the failure was concentrated.

They lowered the bar and called the lowering an act of racial justice.

I want to be exact about the charge, because exactness is the only weapon that cannot be taken away. I do not believe the people who voted for this hate Black children. I believe something that in the long run causes more damage. They looked at Black children, decided the standard was beyond their reach, and adjusted the standard to spare everyone the discomfort of the gap.

That is the assumption underneath the vote. Not malice. Surrender, dressed as compassion, ratified unanimously.

They did not decide Black children were unteachable. They decided proving it was too hard, and that the proof was the problem. Black Intervention Forensic Audit

And understand who absorbs this. Not the board members. Not the legislators. Not the education officials, whose own children read fine. The cost lands entirely on a seventeen year old in Portland who walks a stage, accepts a diploma, is told by every adult in the building that he has earned it, and then discovers at the community college placement exam or the job application or the apartment lease that the document in his hand certified nothing at all.

He will be told he failed. He did not fail. He was passed.

The last word belongs to the standard itself.

A standard is not a wall built to keep children out. A standard is a promise that the paper means something, and the promise is worth the most to the child who has the least. A wealthy child does not need the diploma to certify his literacy, because he has a network, a family name, and a second chance waiting. The child in the poorest ZIP code in Portland has the document and nothing else. When Oregon hollowed out the document, it took nothing at all from the comfortable, and it took the only thing the poor child was holding.

Every adult in that room in October of 2023 knew how to read. Every one of them voted that other people's children would not have to prove they could.