Educational Excellence: "Honors Student" Who Cannot Read or Write Sues Government School Which Allowed Her to Graduate as a Complete Illitarate

Incredible.

But it's not. We all know these failure factors are churning out one illiterate after another and scamming the taxpayer $30,000 per student per year for this "service."

A Connecticut college student is suing the Hartford Board of Education and the city of Hartford for negligence.

Nineteen-year-old Aleysha Ortiz says she graduated from high school with honors and earned a college scholarship, but she can't read or write.

In some ways, Ortiz is living an American dream.

The 19-year-old began her freshman year at the University of Connecticut in Hartford this past fall.

She's excited to study public policy; it's the culmination of hard work after moving north from Puerto Rico as a child.

By the way, the problem isn't that she speaks Spanish. She's spoken English since birth.

She cannot read or write in any language.

"I remember I was very nervous, but I know it was going to be better opportunities for me to learn," Ortiz remarked.

But Ortiz says those opportunities never came to fruition.

"All I see is words everywhere," Ortiz said.

Ortiz graduated from the Hartford Public Schools system last year, but she says she is now illiterate and still doesn't know how to read or write.

"They would just either tell me to stay in a corner and sleep or just draw pictures, flowers for them," Ortiz said about her earlier education.

When she was in high school, Ortiz relied on speech-to-text programs and other apps to read or write essays.

Ortiz said her mother, who does not speak English well, tried to get answers.

"She advocated so much," Ortiz said. "She went to the school. The principal promised her that it would be better. Sometimes it would be people from the district or the directors promising her they would do better."

Now, Ortiz is suing the Hartford Board of Education and the city for negligence.

...

Turner fears a crucial guardrail will be lost if President Donald Trump's administration follows through with abolishing the Department of Education.

"How do I protect the special education children?" Turner asked. "Who do I go to if I close it down?"

Oh yeah, we have to keep the Department of Education open. It's done such a bang-up job so far.

Now I know this girl seems to have cheated her way through school, and undoubtedly, she has the first responsibility for her own education. She and her mother.

But this school appears to have just passed this illiterate dum-dum through grade after grade without every verifying she could read simple sentences at a five-year-old level.

Hey I know how we can improve government teacher performance: Just pay them more.

That will attract new talent.

Oh, but also, you're not allowed to actually hire new talent. We have written the law to require that teachers have useless degrees in education, which is a huge entry barrier to people who studied more useful things in college, and who don't want to go back to school for three years to be a teacher.

So we'll just pay the existing, horrible teachers more. This will attract new talent... from within them!

Second headline:

Left-Wing Teachers Oppose Deporting Criminal Illegal Aliens Because They'll Get Less Money if Illegal Alien Children Leave the Country

Mark Krikorian
@MarkSKrikorian

"Public schools depend on the children of illegal aliens to keep up enrollment levels and extract more money from state taxpayers."

It's all about the kids with these teachers. All about the kids.

Nothing but the kids.

Powerline:

This, from the Minneapolis Star Tribune,

School leaders fear declining attendance during ICE surge will also lower state funding.

Public schools depend on the children of illegal aliens to keep up enrollment levels and extract more money from state taxpayers.

More students means more teachers, which means more public school teacher union members, which means more union dues, which means bigger donations to the Democratic party....

Democrats in Minnesota have gone all-in on an illegal-immigrant-based economy....

To that end, public schools in Minnesota have sued the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security in an effort to kick ICE out of the state (File No. 26-cv-1023). It's one of many such lawsuits filed by Democrats and Democrat-controlled institutions.

The Star Tribune reports,

Because the money to pay teachers, counselors, bus drivers and principals is tied to attendance, officials fear prolonged absences by students in hiding will lead to declining state funding for schools.

FischerKing
@FischerKing64

22h

This would be funny if it weren't so serious. Illegal alien children in American public schools degrade education for everyone across the board because of the lack of English proficiency, which slows everything down, prevents native students from getting the education their parents pay for through taxes. But the schools/teachers/unions actually want illegals because it drives up enrollment - which means more funding, more teachers etc. So those taxpayers wind up paying more but getting less. This is from the Minneapolis tribune, will link to full article in next post.

In better education news: Three red states, Alabama, Mississippi, and Lousiana, are seeing historic gains in student learning by using teaching techniques that actually work.

These aren't new techniques. They're very old techniques. They're techniques the left-wing, grifter educrat establishment chucked aside to pursue novel, failing techniques because educrats don't get paid if they just tell people to keep using the same techniques that worked in the past.

No, the EduGrifters only get paid if they propose something New! and Counter-Intuitive!

The educrats are constantly proposing new pedagogies for the exact same reason they put out a new Madden Football every single year: Churn. You have to keep churning out new product to keep your business going.

Soaking wet lefty Nicholas Kristof of the NYT is surprised to find out that it's conservative states, not his beloved edugrifter blue ones, who are actually teaching children how to read and do math.

A ray of hope is emerging in American education.

Not among Democrats or Republicans, each diverted by culture wars.

Actually, Nick, it is among Republicans.

Nice try though!

Not in the education reform movement, largely abandoned by the philanthropists who once propelled it.

The edugrifter's "reform" movement that has produced nothing but failure upon failure for 50 years? Yes, quite right, the hope isn't coming from them.

Rather, hope emerges in the most unlikely of places: three states here in the Deep South that long represented America's educational basement.

Why is that so unlikely? Oh, because leftwingers, who fail at everything, are so smart and talented, right?

These states -- Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi -- have histories of child poverty, racism and dismal educational outcomes, and they continue to spend less than most other states on public schools.

Oh they spend less? Well everyone knows that when you give every kid a $700 laptop and pay their teachers on the level of lawyers, educational achievement goes up.

Oh wait it doesn't. Never did.

Yet, consider:

Louisiana ranks No. 1 in the country in recovery from pandemic losses in reading, while Alabama ranks No. 1 in math recovery.

The state with the lowest chronic absenteeism in schools is Alabama, according to a tracker with data from 40 states.

Once an educational laughingstock, Mississippi now ranks ninth in the country in fourth-grade reading levels -- and after adjusting for demographics such as poverty and race, Mississippi ranks No. 1, while Louisiana ranks No. 2, according to calculations by the Urban Institute. Using the same demographic adjustment, Mississippi also ranks No. 1 in America in both fourth-grade and eighth-grade math.

Black fourth graders in Mississippi are on average better readers than those in Massachusetts, which is often thought to have the best public school system in the country (and one that spends twice as much per pupil).

I wrote about Mississippi's educational successes in 2023, but many of my fellow liberals then scoffed at the notion of learning from a state so tainted.

Oh an admission that lefties really think the sun shines out of their assholes and have contempt for anyone not like them. (You know, like true tolerant, welcoming cosmopolitans.)

Skeptics, mostly on the left, have made many critiques of the gains, including that they fade in upper grades, that the states are cheating, that this is all a temporary blip and that any progress is simply a result of holding back weak readers.

The critiques have been effectively rebutted -- for starters, they can't explain the continuing gains in Mississippi or the magnitude of the gains. Just as striking, the Mississippi gains increasingly are being replicated in Alabama and Louisiana, as they follow similar approaches. That's enormously encouraging, for it suggests that other states can also lift student trajectories if they are willing to learn from Southern red states they may be more accustomed to looking down on.

So I traveled through Mississippi and Alabama with the photographer Lynsey Addario to understand the lessons to be learned. Perhaps the most important is an insistence on metrics, accountability and mastery of reading by the end of third grade. And while reading gets the attention, just as important is getting kids to attend school regularly.

By "metrics," he means testing kids to make sure they are learning.

And as you know, our failing teacher-grifters are adamantly opposed to testing -- which they deride as merely "teaching to the test" (as has historically been done) -- because testing kids reveals their own failure to teach them and undermines their case for the next big raise during their next teachers strike.

..

In classrooms and offices, teachers and administrators frequently mentioned the motivating power of report cards -- not the letter grades given out by schools, but those they (the schools themselves) receive.

Well what do you know, testing and measuring actually improves performance.

Literally everyone who is not an ideologically-captured denialist knows this. It is true in every field. "What gets measured, gets improved," the saying goes.

And what doesn't get measured is allowed to slide and slide until it becomes a disaster. Ask your friends in Minnesota about how their practice of not checking up on social welfare businesses turned out.

..

What I see is schools fighting for their students. These states have created a structure that closely monitors each school's performance and incentivizes principals and teachers alike to do everything they can to get kids back in class and learning.

Teachers union teachers are adamant that they not be measured for actual job performance, so good luck with that in the blue states.

For many years, skeptics have offered dispiriting arguments about the prospects for educational gains: The way to improve literacy is to fix the family, fix addiction, fix the parents, for as long as the child's environment is broken, there's not much else that can be done.

The gains in these states suggest that that critique is wrong. Mississippi and Alabama haven't fixed child poverty, trauma and deeply troubled communities -- but they have figured out how to get kids to read by the end of third grade.

This matters in myriad ways: One recent study found that states with large increases in school test scores enjoyed rising incomes and drops in teen motherhood, incarceration and arrest rates compared with states that didn't enjoy such gains.

What's particularly impressive is that the Southern surge states lifted student achievement with only modest budgets. Spending per pupil in Alabama and Mississippi was below $12,000 in 2024, while in New York it was almost $30,000.

That's worth celebrating and emulating. Yet, unfortunately, there's not much sign of that.

No. I wonder why.

By the way, Kristof focused on these schools' fight to reduce truancy and make sure students actually show up for class.

He completely refused to mention which pedagogy they employ. Are they using time-tested phonics, thrown on the scrapheap by edugrifter "reformers' in the seventies, or the "whole word" reading, where supposedly you just look at a word and its meaning magically appears in a student's mind, which the edugrifters used as an improvement over phonics and then saw students become illiterate?

Well Nick and the New York Times won't tell you so I will, with an assist from Google AI:

Alabama public schools use the Science of Reading, focusing on systematic phonics, phonemic awareness, and explicit instruction through programs like the Alabama Reading Initiative (ARI), mandated by the Alabama Literacy Act (2019), which requires K-3 reading proficiency, teacher training, and bans the ineffective three-cueing system to build strong decoding and comprehension skills for all students.

A "phoneme" is just a part of a word, like "sh" or "nt," or just any single letter, that makes a specific sound. In other words, just phonics.

Why did Nick Kristof hide this information from readers?

Even when he's telling liberals "you should emulate the Alabama system," he can't be honest about it.

Why? Because leftists and their "experts" are facing the worst legitimacy and credibility crisis in Western history and they can't afford admitting another huge "L."

So they'll just pretend, publicly, that the Alabama plan is just about New! and Exciting! education reforms made to reduce truancy.

But they're the honest, good, caring, kind people only motivated by concerns for the public good and entirely untainted by grubby tribal concerns like always making sure your tribe comes out on top. Just ask them!

Or just read the signs on their lawns! "In this house, We Believe..."

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:20 PM

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