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Posted on 06/26/2025 8:35:21 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
What do you call a nation where a high school student can graduate with honors—yet cannot read or write?
You call it America in 2025.
This week, we learned about Aleysha Ortiz, a 19-year-old who graduated from Hartford Public High School in Connecticut with academic distinction—despite being illiterate. She is now suing the school district, alleging negligence, emotional distress, and a complete abdication of duty by the educators and administrators who were supposed to serve her. Her story, reported by CNN, is both infuriating and emblematic of a national crisis that’s been engineered from top down.
Aleysha’s early assessments showed severe learning challenges. Her reading level remained at kindergarten or first-grade level well into middle and high school. She was only diagnosed with dyslexia and other learning disabilities after graduation. Think about that: they handed her a diploma while she couldn’t read it. And the kicker? She graduated with honors—a participation trophy for surviving 13 years in an educational meat grinder that masquerades as a public service.
This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s the new normal. And while Connecticut is one of the wealthiest states in the nation—the seat of Ivy League royalty like Yale University—its inner-city public schools are failing catastrophically. If it’s happening in the land of bluebloods and billion-dollar endowments, what hope do kids in Mississippi or the South Side of Chicago have?
The state of Oregon just made matters worse by permanently removing requirements for high school students to demonstrate proficiency in reading, writing, or math in order to graduate (source). Yes, you read that right. The bar isn’t being lowered—it’s being buried. And it’s not about equity. It’s about ensuring a compliant, unskilled, unthinking generation that will never challenge authority, never run a business, never read the Constitution, and never threaten the ruling class.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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We spend a huge amount on public education.
We keep kids in school for 12 years.
And in the end, they cannot read, they cannot do simple math, and they can’t find North America on a world map.
Nobody sat and read a book with her in her whole life? Parent(s) failed her miserably.
What do kids do in school all day?
Teacher, teacher, can you teach me?
Can you tell me all I need to know?
Teacher, teacher, can you reach me?
Or will I fall when you let me go? Oh no
“Parent(s) failed her miserably.”
…correct. PS school system is nothing but a daycare and “free” meals. Parents or parent assume or don’t care. They just want the kid out of the house.
This is EXACTLY why standardized test need to be mandatory.
Nobody should graduate, even less so with HONORS and be illiterate.
What is the teachers’ union position on this?
Our future Chinese overloads are pleased.
Retired urban public school teacher here. At one time we were given great freedom to assign grades based on student achievement. A student could challenge a grade. But no problems if we could defend that grade.
That changed around the year 2000. A new generation of administrators came in. Their goal was not student achievement, but making themselves and the district look good. Pressure was placed on teachers to bump up grades. We older teachers resisted. By many younger ones did not.
Oh, and the school computers started automatically changing tests scores less than 50% to 50%. That was not a bug in the system. It was a feature.
So if a student scored 15 points on one of my 100 point tests, I’d put in 15. The computer would instantly change it to 50.
I told my kids from Day One, YOU are responsible for your education, not the schools nor the teachers.
Public schools are nothing more than social indoctrination centers and baby sitting services.
Perhaps those old coal mines weren’t such a bad idea after all.
https://ctmirror.org/2024/12/13/aleysha-ortiz-ct-grad-cant-read-lawsuit/
Wonder what is really behind the lawsuit? money or being ridiculed or understanding of what education should really be about.
Will this lead to more lawsuits?
Thank you for teaching as long as you did even as you saw the system changing . Each class you taught was better off.know you hate it
It’s just symptomatic of a culture in decline. If everyone gets a trophy, there’s no incentive to succeed. At the same time the Left is pushing the concept of moral relativity, that there is no right or wrong. Spiritual blindness ensues, and the natural direction society goes after that is down. This to me seems exactly what the Bible describes will happen in the last days.
I remember about 10 years ago a client being impressed because they were installing a coffee bar in his son’s public high school. He and his wife were running around taking the kids to various activities so their kids would be able to get into a good collage. Madness.
It has become much worse. Fifty percent of urban high school graduates are functionally illiterate. Only forty percent of students who begin kindergarden, remain in the domain actually graduate high school. Those sixty percent who drop out are also mostly illiterate. It suggests that 75% of urban youth at age 18 are functionally illiterate and are unable to participate fully in the modern work force. Poverty and crime are the consequences. Money is not the answer.
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