Aleysha Ortiz wants to be a writer. There’s a hitch: she says she’s illiterate.
Ya gotta have goals, as teachers used to say in the Seventies.
When goals were still in vogue.
Her near-term goal, however, is suing the school she graduated from, in Hartford, Connecticut, for … graduating her with honors!
She has a case. While graduating illiterates has almost become a tradition in America — teachers’ unions are on board — you would think that even a woke administrator might judge graduating an illiterate with honors a step too far.
Now, in truth, the 19-year-old can read and write, a bit. But she’s always had trouble, she says.
“Ortiz is suing the Hartford Board of Education, the City of Hartford and her special education case manager, Tilda Santiago,” explains The New York Post, “for negligence.”
The negligence being that the school was too slow in testing for and following up on her dyslexia. “Just one month before graduation, she began receiving the testing, which was not completed until the last day of high school,” the Post clarifies. “The testing concluded that Ortiz was in fact dyslexic and ‘required explicitly taught phonics, fluency and reading comprehension.’”
There is more to the story, of course. She was born in Puerto Rico, came to the U.S. at five, and didn’t speak English at all well when she started school.
A lot of folks raise skepticism about the now-college-freshman (!), more than implying she was just an unmotivated student. And that a multi-million-dollar lawsuit seems a bit much.
But ya gotta have goals.
Pity that our government schools’ goals have so little to do with education.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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5 replies on “Goals, Goals, Goals”
Had she not been allowed to advance each year and ultimately graduate, the same people would likely be sued for holding her back.
My first thought was: Where were the parents?
I have often heard a cry of “I sent him to school!” or of “I sent her to school!” as if a parent exhausts all responsibility for the education of his or her child by merely ensuring that the child heads to a bus stop each morning.
Bizarre enough that many people believe that they may be able writers simply because they do what they regard as a lot of reading. This young e=woman hopes that she has a talent for producing that which she cannot consume and evaluate.
I don’t think government schools can be salvaged. The government is incompetent in just about everything it does, and in education it’s worse than incompetent: it pushes a particular political agenda, half-disguised as unslanted reality. And there’s no REASON for the gov to take on the task of education, any more than for the government to be in the grocery store business.