A former student, Aleysha Ortiz, is suing the city of Hartford and the local board of education. Ortiz alleges she graduated without learning how to read or write. She claims it was due to negligence and lack of proper support for her developmental disabilities.
The lawsuit claims Ortiz was denied necessary testing for dyslexia. It also claims she was removed from special education curriculum and only tested for developmental disabilities on her last day of school, revealing significant unmet educational needs.
The double bind of working in a “D” or “F” rated school were how many of the factors were completely outside of our power.
You can’t do much when 1/10+ of your student population is absent on a good day, when they hate their teachers getting their bags searched by them as soon as they walk in the door, when students just fucking vanish without anyone caring (deported/shot/dropped out). It really fucking stings to finally make some progress with a kid - like when you finally figure out that the reason they haven’t turned in an assignment the entire the semester is because they are completely and utterly illiterate, and despite being a fucking chemistry teacher you have to do something - and then they disappear without a trace the next week.
There are some names I’ve seen in the news that gut me.
The students you give your standardized test to aren’t even the same ones you began the school with. It’s not measuring anything you or the school did.
And these schools - which are the ones that need the fucking money instead got punished. Got funding cuts. It can’t be that the task was impossible, it’s that you didn’t spend enough money on educational consultants to make sure that all bellwork has an ACT question on it.