I am in my 50s, and when I graduated high school in Washington state there was no standardized test involved. Yet somehow I know how to read, write and do math. The lack of a standardized test did not mean that there were no standards.
I am glad we had no such test. My brother never would have passed it, since he has a learning disability that wasn’t diagnosed until college. It makes many-hours-long exams virtually impossible. Not graduating would have thrown him into a different path. That would have been a shame - he is a very smart man and is very successful. And yes, he can read, write and do math.
If my current state of residence did away with the standardizes test requirement I would not freak out. All the kids in private schools are already exempt.
The concern with sliding education standards for me and many others is that kids spend so much time learning other things instead. Things we don't like and find less than useless. Actually offensive and dangerous. A few examples of how some see it..
"American schools are ‘going down the tubes’ because they have been ‘infected’ with ‘
woke culture’ that has ‘
sacrificed the idea of excellence’ by ‘
indoctrinating’ students, according to a leading critic.
Vivek Ramaswamy spoke out in response to two separate controversies that impacted elite
New York City prep schools where parents complained their children were being brainwashed with anti-racism ideology.
Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur and the author of Woke, Inc, compared the wave of ‘wokeness’ in schools to
China’s Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s, when the people were indoctrinated with Maoism by the Communist Party"
Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and author of Woke, Inc, told Fox News on Sunday that American students are 'indoctrinated' similar to what took place during China's Cultural Revolution.
www.dailymail.co.uk
"
In Ontario, the Halton District School Board keeps making the
news but for the wrong reasons—namely, a
teacher who’s become infamous for wearing giant prosthetic breasts while teaching shop classes.
This teacher’s attire is such an obvious breach of professional decorum that media outlets around the world have breathlessly reported the story and published photos of this teacher. No reasonable person who sees these photos can think this teacher is appropriately dressed for work.
But in the latest twist, the Board’s director of education recently submitted a
report concluding that there’s
nothing the district can do about this situation. Apparently, imposing any sort of dress code on teachers “would expose the Board to considerable liability.”
In other words, not only can the district not do anything about this teacher’s obviously inappropriate attire, but it shouldn’t even try to formulate a staff dress code at all. One can only hope that teachers don’t start showing up to work wearing Speedos or bikinis.
How have we reached the point where school boards cannot impose something as simple as a staff dress code? Simply put, Ontario’s public schools are in the grip of woke ideology.
Woke ideology, or
wokeism, focuses on being sensitive to social and political injustice. At first glance, this appears to be a positive thing. After all, no sensible person wants to be insensitive to injustices in our country and around the world. The problem, however, is that wokeism demands
total ideological conformity.
For example, former Ottawa high school teacher Chancel Pfahl is being investigated by the Ontario College of Teachers, the body that grants teaching certificates, for
voicing her opposition to critical race theory in a private teachers’ Facebook group. Tellingly, Pfahl was not accused of engaging in unprofessional conduct in her classroom or doing anything inappropriate with her students.
The fact that any teacher could be at risk of losing her professional licence for expressing a political opinion in a private forum—designed for discussion and engagement—should concern all Canadians. When woke activists demand ideological conformity from teachers, they undermine the core purpose of education, which is to help students become critical thinkers.
To make matters worse, some school boards are so obsessed with personal identity they’re trying to gather as much data as they can on the identities of their students. The Toronto District School Board recently sent out a
survey to its Grades 4-8 students that contains an
inordinate number of questions about race, gender and sexual orientation. Among other things, the survey
asks students
whether they are bisexual, transgender, queer/gender expansive, intersex, asexual or pansexual. And whether or not they’ve learned in school about “binding, packing, tucking, or padding options.” Remember, the students who received this survey
aren’t even in high school yet.
Meanwhile, the Waterloo Region District School Board recently forced one of its teachers, Carolyn Burjoski, out of her job
for raising questions about the age-appropriateness of the sexualized content found in some elementary school library books. Instead of taking Burjoski’s concerns seriously, the district placed her on
home assignment until she resigned."
When activists demand ideological conformity from teachers, they undermine the core purpose of education.
www.fraserinstitute.org
So one should be able to see that compounding such things with what appears on the surface to be a dumbing down on the education basics, they would raise yet another eyebrow. Anti-Christian anti-family blasphemy and indoctrination that is coupled with adult sexualized perverted curriculum as well undermining parental authority. All this with an increasing time and emphasis shifted from the basics, in other words.