By Rob S Schläpfer
Test scores released last month from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show Oregon students rank at the very bottom nationally. The results are alarming: Almost half of the fourth graders tested scored “below basic” in reading. The national average is 41%. A full third scored “below basic” in math. The national average is 25%.
See the report at myeagle.us/reportcard.
The bad news was met with silence from the governor’s office, as well as her politically appointed State Board of Education. And no comment from Oregon Department of Education Director Charlene Williams, who was recently hired for her expertise in “Culturally Responsive Teaching,” a concept based in Critical Race Theory. Yet they are all complicit in Oregon’s continued education decline in the post-pandemic era.
While states like Louisiana – which now leads the nation – have been razor-focused and heavily invested on the basics of reading (literacy) and math (numeracy) over the past few years, Oregon Education has gone “woke”: The Oregon Department of Education has been busy transforming K-12 schools into centers for social justice activism. The focus is politics, not education.
Comparing the curriculum investments of both states is telling. Louisiana has invested in high-quality instructional content for reading and math driven by “the science of learning” – the best research from cognitive psychology about how kids obtain knowledge and skills. They have 90% of their schools using this curriculum and now lead the nation in proficiency, according to the latest tests.
Oregon, on the other hand, has developed a set of low-quality curriculum standards designed to produce “critical consciousness” in students (“wokeness”). The 2024 Social Science Standards and 2023 Transformative Social & Emotional Learning Framework and Standards are designed to make students acutely aware of “systemic oppression,” transforming themselves into “change agents” for “equity” and “social justice.”
Those are political aspirations, not educational ones. They’re driven by Oregon’s extreme, progressive political culture, not the science of learning from cognitive psychology. Is it any wonder Oregon is at the bottom?
This is what ODE has been spending its record education budget on for the past few years.
According to one report: “Over the last two years, Oregon has trained 1,000 educators and staff at universities and nonprofits that work with schools to implement these new standards. The state has awarded grants to organizations to provide professional development, instructional materials, affirming drop-in spaces for homework help and youth summits, and it requires districts to have formal community engagement processes.”
Imagine what we could achieve if those dollars were spent on high quality instructional content for reading and math, like in Louisiana?
Key to Louisiana’s success is their relentless focus – especially post-pandemic. They refused to be taken in by the latest fad in education. Like other fads – replacing phonics with “Whole Language” comes to mind – Woke Education undermines the learning process by ignoring research and relying upon ideas about the world. It replaces critical thinking with critical theorizing; knowledge with imagination.
A group that may not remain silent much longer are Oregon classroom teachers. Many are frustrated by the direction ODE has been going. Most struggle to focus their students on basic education in competition with iPhones. Now they have state mandates to inculcate their students with abstract concepts like “power and privilege” and “settler colonialism.” Younger teachers are ill-prepared by schools of education that have long been captured by this ideology, failing to provide science-based training that will lead them to succeed themselves.
Oregonians need to resist Woke Education and work to restore the kind of education that took us to the moon. I call that American Education. It’s grounded in merit, excellence and success. It’s decidedly science-based, not driven by ideas. It bridges the partisan political divide, rather than feed it.
It’s time to get politics out of our schools and return to success.
Rob Schläpfer is the Creator and Director of the Oregon Education Project and a member of the National Association of Scholars. To learn more about “Woke Education” go to: http://OregonEd.info