Who Benefits From Cancelling Achievement Standards?

Philip Carl Salzman In 2021 there’s an outright holy war against scholastic achievement.   Oregon has passed a bill that suspends the requirement that students must be able to read, write, and do math to graduate from high school. Mathematics should be replaced, we are told, by “social justice” mathematics, in which there are no correct answers, and students must not be asked to show the calculations that led to their conclusions. Standard American English should no longer be the standard, and students should not be judged on the quality of…