SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES

Dori: Changing graduation requirements the dumbing-down of our kids

Oct 15, 2019, 1:58 PM

graduation requirements...

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Hey, we’ve got good news, kids. If you can’t pass your high school graduation requirements, we’ll just give you a diploma anyway here in Washington.

According to another story we’ve got up here at MyNorthwest, “students will still be required to take federally-mandated exams. They just won’t be required to pass them.”

Finally, it’s the day we’ve been waiting for. The dumbing-down of our children is upon us.

Because so many kids are not passing the mandatory exam, the schools are freaking out, since it’s hurting their graduation rate. The schools, of course, just want to pass the kids through. If the schools were really honest, they’d be holding back 50 or 75 kids per class. Or, more likely, the kids would just drop out. But the school needs some measure of achievement, so they will just let these kids graduate — even if they horribly flunk the exam.

Dori: Seattle Public Schools want to take away AP, Honors classes

Just like with the strikes, the teachers union is claiming they’re changing the graduation requirements “for the children,” as they told KIRO Radio’s Seattle’s Morning News. It’s for the quality of their education.

Uh, I’ve got news for the teachers union. The quality of education in this state isn’t just going downhill. It jumped off a cliff without a chute.

If the schools have got more money from McCleary, why aren’t our children learning? It’s pretty easy to answer that. Government-run schools are failing our kids in so many ways.

I particularly liked this comment on the MyNorthwest story: “If you laid out a plan to destroy a country from within, allowing students to remain stupid would be near the top of that plan.”

There are a lot of kids who are diligent and high-achievers. But we also have an increasing number of kids who aren’t capable of basic math or spelling, who know nothing about history or literature or science, when they get out of school.

Here’s one thought. Maybe, instead of spending all your time on social justice lessons like the racism of math, instead of spending your time teaching the children to be terrified that they’re going to be shot in school, you could teach them the skills they should be learning. Our schools have become leftist indoctrination academies, where imparting social justice values and virtues is more important than teaching our kids. The result is that we have to dumb-down graduation requirements.

Government-run schools have a motivation to crank out stupid people. Why? The stupider you are, the more that you have to rely on government for everything in life. This is absolutely the government model for wanting schools that teach kids to be social justice warriors, but not to spell or do math. That’s where we are in Washington now.

They are failing at educating our kids. Kids are not achieving anything near what should be acceptable in a society like ours. Look at the education of European kids. Our neighbors had an exchange student from Europe living with them. She was the whip-smartest 14-year-old I’d ever met. She spoke multiple languages because its what her school demanded. When European students hit about 16, they’re either on the university track or the trade school path. If you’re not a great student, they still provide a pathway for you to earn a decent living.

But here in Washington, if kids don’t pass the mandated test, then rather than helping them to reach the goal of passing the test, we’ll just make the test not mandatory. Brilliant, isn’t it?

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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Dori: Changing graduation requirements the dumbing-down of our kids