President Donald Trump issued an executive order on August 27 to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America, several news agencies reported.
The executive order was issued amid a trade war with our good neighbor to the north and comes just a few months after an executive order from his office renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
Student newspapers across the nation are starting to file stories about the executive order.
“Are they going to start changing the name of food? Will French Fries become Freedom Fries, Canadian Bacon into American Bacon? What about English muffins? Will those become American Breakfast Rounds? Swiss cheese to Founding Father cheese?” writes Molly DeRosa in the student newspaper at Stroudsburg High School in Pennsylvania.
“We have already formed names for these things, and it’s mutually agreed upon,” reporter Gabrielle Spriggs quotes one senior as saying in the student newspaper at Palisade High School in Colorado. “There are more mature ways to handle problems and disagreements.”
And while students express their own opinions, there has been no shortage of hoaxes surrounding the executive order.
One AI-generated map has been circulating on social media, Snopes.com reported. The map, in French, replaces occurrences of “Lac Ontario” with “Lac America.” Several clues on the image itself, though, belie its AI origin.
Additional claims that Canada was blocking or planning to block the passage of ships in the Lake has also been debunked.
Downstream Impact — Editorial
Speaking as someone who helps design statewide standardized tests, I can assure you that all this renaming has a potentially detrimental effect.
Admittedly, maps are fluid things, especially the maps of war-torn regions or continents. But questions on standardized assessments take years to develop, field test, and place in slots on operational forms.
We are at risk of simply losing any of those questions that refer to “Lake Ontario” or the “Gulf of Mexico,” of which there are many on Maryland tests. And we’re not abandoning these questions because the map is inaccurate (it will be), but because simply putting the question on a standardized assessment may trigger unease on the part of some students who know what Mr Trump did.
I realize many people don’t like these standardized tests, but I also know that states spend millions — hundreds of millions, in fact — to develop and field test them. Any change to the content of an item — even a correction of Lake Ontario to Lake America — means the performance statistics for that item are in doubt. That means using it on an operational assessment will render the scores students get on that test less reliable.
How much less? It’s really hard to say. But states don’t take chances with this kind of thing. Millions of dollars in development cost are out the window.
Personally, I don’t care what we call places, but I’m sort of with the Palisade senior above: we all agreed on these names, and unless a war changes the boundaries, let’s leave it alone.