High School Student Graduates with Honors Says She’s Illiterate
A sad story of educational neglect where a student went through her K-12 education in Hartford, CT without learning how to read, but was still able to graduate with honors and is now in college, relying on text-to-speech technology. She moved to the United States from Puerto Rico when she was very young. There’s not enough detail in the story about the effort made by the school district or her family to get her the education and language assistance she needed. Still, it’s pretty clear that the school district failed her. She was likely one of only a few Spanish-speaking students and started her schooling in Connecticut after the kids in her class had well-surpassed her reading abilities. A decade ago, translation services were not as readily available as they are today and I doubt there’s a strong population of spanish-speaking teachers in, of all places, Connecticut.
Another obvious aspect to this story is that Ms. Aleysha Ortiz is a very resilient young lady.
She and her mother are now suing the Hartford School District and the City for negligence.
CNN
CNN
I’m sure illiterate students graduating with honors is not a common occurrence across the United States.
However, I will guesstimate, without even doing the research, that students are graduating high school with much lower reading, writing, and arithmetic skills than they have in the past.
The research:
Guessed right.
It’s no surprise that the United States education system continues to flounder amongst the industrialized countries of the world.
WE NEED TO DO BETTER!
THE QUESTION is “Why?”
Let’s list some basics here as to why this is happening and what we’re staring down the barrel of:
The dismantling of the American family
The public education system vs. charter schools
Cell phones
Value systems
Are these the four most important reasons why our kids aren’t reading, writing, and arithmetickin’ at the same level of the generations before them and at lower level than other countries? I’m no expert sociologist. Just reporting the obvious from West Philadelphia.
The dismantling of the American family
The American Dream — Mom & Dad, a couple of kids, a couple of pets, living happily behind a white picket fence in a middle-class home in a safe suburb. With the wealth gap expanding, the middle class shrinking, social security going to shit, and everything else going on, it feels harder and harder to visualize for many Americans.
But let’s focus on the family—whether they’re in a mansion, a middle-class townhouse, or Section 8 housing—the number of dual-parent households are shrinking. Not only that, but it’s more common than ever to have both parents working, whether they live together or not.
Now compare that to the households of our parents and grandparents where it was more common that both Mom & Dad were in the house and only Dad was working. There’s simply more time and opportunity for the kids to be taught, disciplined, and looked after.
Every parent wants their kids to succeed in life and school. If you have two parents in the home and one who is almost always at home, it’s easier to implement and outperform those educational standards that we’d all want for our children.
2. Public Education System vs. Charter Schools
The Department of Education is constantly under scrutiny, and for the first time in decades, it is truly being threatened by the United States government. Besides Trump’s vendetta on the Department of Education (which is now spearheaded by Linda McMahon of the WWE McMahon family… WHY), the public school system has been under attack for years, thanks to the outbreak of charter schools popping up across the country. In Philadelphia alone, there are now 87 charter schools, which is about 40% of the number of public schools.
With public and charter schools competing for students, naturally funding, programming, teachers, and every other resource will be diluted. Competition can certainly bring out the best in sports and business, but in education? Well, it doesn’t look that way at the moment.
3. CELL PHONES
The single most disruptive device to the classroom today.
Spin it, twist it, look at the issue from any vantage you want. There’s nothing that effects the classroom more on a daily basis than cell phone usage. We’re basically all addicted to them at this point.
The obvious solution is to put them in a box to start the class and they get them back halfway through for a tech break, and then they leave with them at the end of class. To do this, the administration needs to implement the policy and teachers need to do their best to enforce it.
Enforcing that will be incredibly difficult with some students and a breeze with others.
4. Value Systems
At one point in time, Ben Franklin was the most famous man on the planet. At another, it was Albert Einstein. Two of the most brilliant people to ever exist. Our brilliant famous person is Elon Musk. At no point during Einstein or Franklin’s day did a pornstar, OnlyFans model, or Kardashian break through the news to portray that kind of success to the younger generation. Today, OF models, Instagram influencers, and YouTubers make up some of the most prevalent and forward-facing public figures to young people across the globe.
I’d argue there is more negative media than positive projected to kids growing up today.
It’s really not fair.
Then tack on our hypersexualized, excessively violent media output (especially in America), and an unhealthy, addictive relationship with social media and you’ve got yourself an entire generation with a seriously fucked vantage of the world as they know it.
I’m not here to say I have a solution beyond a more controlled media environment for our young ones, but I do think we need to fight fire with fire when possible — can the Kardashians to teach Math in Skims bikinis?
Only slightly kidding about that last line.
