Graduated with honors—and can’t read a word
By Maureen Steele
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 the 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.
This is intentional dumbing down—a slow-motion demolition of intellectual capacity engineered through failing public schools, poisoned food, broken homes, and endless digital distraction. Everyone’s got ADHD. Everyone’s on pills. Everyone’s “neurodivergent.” But nobody’s asking why.
It’s the food. It’s the water. It’s the screens. It’s the collapse of family. It’s the teachers too afraid—or too lazy—to resist the orders handed down from the bloated bureaucracies that run education like a Soviet-style factory line.
And yes, the teachers are complicit. If you’re a teacher and you know your student can’t read or write and you promote them anyway because “that’s what the district told me to do,” you are the problem. You’ve betrayed your profession. If your moral compass is still functioning, you should be blowing the whistle—not just collecting a check and saying “I was just following orders.”
Let’s call it what it is: educational malpractice. And it’s not just the teachers. The principals. The vice principals. The school board members. The psychologists and case managers. Every adult in the chain who saw Aleysha struggling and did nothing should be fired and barred from education. Instead, they’ll probably get promoted. Or get a pension. Or tenure.
Ah, yes—tenure. The sacred cow of the failed public school system. Tenure exists to protect bad teachers, reward mediocrity, and make it nearly impossible to fire someone even when they’re harming children. Let’s be real: no one should have a guaranteed job in a field this important. You either do your job, or you lose it—like the rest of us.
But the root rot goes deeper than individual failures. This is the Department of Education’s handiwork. They’ve had a monopoly on curriculum and compliance since 1979, and the result is clear: declining test scores, record illiteracy, politicized classrooms, and entire generations who can’t write a sentence without AI. The federal government touches something, it dies. Put the government in charge of anything, and they will bungle the job—education included.
We need school choice. We need privatization. We need to abolish tenure, fire bad teachers, teachers’ unions, and shut down the Department of Education once and for all. Parents should be free to choose where and how their children are educated. Kids should be taught to think, not indoctrinated. And literacy—basic, human literacy—should not be a radical political demand in 2025.
Aleysha Ortiz deserved better. So do the millions of kids just like her, stuck in failing systems, passed along like defective products on an assembly line of despair. If we don’t change course now, we’ll have no future left to read about—because no one will be able to read.
