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.
Illustration created with Krea and Fireflly
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