Seaside High School graduates received their diplomas at the Turnaround.

The Oregon Legislature has suspended through 2024 the requirement that students show proficiency in reading, writing and math — the aptly named “essential skills” — as a requirement for getting a high school diploma.

Is the ability to apply those skills no longer necessary in everyday life? If so, we didn’t get the memo.

Essential skills proficiency was added as a requirement for graduation a decade ago.

Teaching kids to read and write and do basic math was the whole point of public education when it came into existence. The public school curriculum has become more complicated over the years, but has always been filled with courses where students presumably learned and used those skills.

But a lot of students were graduating without the ability to apply them in real-life situations. Employers weren’t the only ones to take notice, and the decision was made to mandate proficiency as a requirement for a diploma.

It does not seem too high of an expectation after 12 years of schooling.

School districts had various options to test that proficiency. But critics of the requirement have called those tests into question, alleging that they are unfair to nonnative English speakers and racial minorities.

Senate Bill 744 calls a halt to the testing and the proficiency requirement and orders the Oregon Department of Education to evaluate graduation standards.

“The testing that we’ve been doing in the past doesn’t tell us what we want to know,” state Sen. Lew Frederick, D-Portland, told KATU. “We have been relying on tests that have been, frankly, very flawed and relying too much on them so that we aren’t really helping the students or the teachers or the community.”

We see nothing wrong with evaluating and upgrading graduation requirements. We are less enthusiastic about, but not completely against, alternative evaluation methods for determining proficiency.

But we agree with Republicans in the Legislature who say the state should not suspend the current standard while this evaluation takes place.

“The approach for Senate Bill 744 is to, in fact, lower our expectations for our kids,” said House Minority Leader Christine Drazan, R-Canby. “This is the wrong time to do that, when we have had this year of social isolation and lost learning. It’s the wrong thing to do in this moment.”

Our biggest fear is that the real goal of SB 744 is to find more ways to declare students proficient without actually teaching more students to be proficient.

Putting your boots in the oven won’t make them biscuits, and declaring a student proficient through some convoluted evaluation won’t make that so either.

The goal should be for every student, regardless of race or ethnicity, to be proficient in the essential skills, not to artificially increase the graduation rates.

To demand less turns an Oregon high school diploma into a participation trophy. That would truly be a disservice to the students and to the community.