Yet another illiterate graduate sues their high school. What is happening?

A high school graduate in Washington state has filed a lawsuit against her former school district, claiming they never should have let her graduate. Her lawsuit is just the latest in a series alleging school districts are graduating students unprepared for life after high school.

Makena Simonsen graduated from Lynwood High School with a 3.87 GPA, a plan to enroll in a vocational program and a large smile on her face.

“I was happy. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I finally made it!’” Simonsen told 12News.

However, there was one big problem. Simonsen still read at an elementary school level.

Illiterate graduates

According to the suit, Simonsen said, “Although she can physically read, she very rarely understands what she is reading.”

The recent grad was a special needs student. The suit also claims Simonsen’s parents helped her with much of her schoolwork.

“[Simonsen’s] mother testified that when she would help [Simonsen] complete assignments, [Simonsen] would often have no idea how to do an assignment, and that her mother would have to walk her through every step, practically completing the assignment for her,” the suit reads.

Following her graduation, she planned to enroll in a vocational program that helps special-needs students transition into independent life. It’s free of charge, but because Simonsen got her high school diploma, she was no longer eligible.

Instead, she enrolled in a similar program at a nearby college, costing the family more than $60,000.

Simonsen and her attorneys are requesting reimbursement for the college program, attorney fees, costs and any other equitable relief the court deems appropriate.

Simonsen’s story is one of many, including a Tennessee man who successfully sued his former school district and a Connecticut teen who has filed a similar suit.

Education in America

How does this happen?

“I interviewed my school superintendent back in the 1970s, saying ‘Look, we have kids graduating who don’t know anything,’” Robert Maranto, 21st century chair in leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, told Straight Arrow News. “Why don’t we do some proficiency testing? And his answer was, the purpose of public education is not to educate students. It’s to provide an education for those few who want it and the rest, it’s custodial care.”

Data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows 25% of Americans aged 16-24 are functionally illiterate, meaning they can understand the basic meaning of short texts but can’t analyze longer reading materials.

“The problem is systemic,” David Steiner, executive director at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and former commissioner of education for New York state, told SAN.

In 1918, the National Education Association published a report called “The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education.” Essentially, that report shifted the focus of American public high schools from college preparation to a more comprehensive education.

“The view back then, and still to a good degree today, is that most kids aren’t really capable of learning that much,” Maranto said. “So, if you try to get them to learn a lot, it’s just elitist, and you’re just going to make them feel bad.”

Maranto said another part of this is who’s educating American students and how that’s changed from the early twentieth century.

“Women and African Americans with college degrees weren’t allowed to pursue other professions for the most part,” he said. “So, we would get amazing people going into teaching, they would hold the line to some degree on academic rigor. Those folks are still on the planet, but they’re not becoming teachers very much anymore, much less administrators. So, the tendencies have been to dumb down things.”

Steiner echoed that sentiment.

“The SAT has apparently gotten easier, though, of course, it’s graded on a curve, so you’re still in the same percentile, but it’s actually a shorter test,” he said. “The writing sample is shorter. The reading is shorter.”

The best way to track education in the U.S. is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. It measures student achievement in reading, math, science and more.

“The NAEP has been dead flat since 1992,” Steiner said. “We’re within a point of where we were in 1992, both in reading and in math.”

Despite numbers showing education levels have remained flat, the average GPA rose 16% between 1990 and 2020. That is because of grade inflation, which is essentially a decline in grading rigor.

“A number of states make scholarships for university entrance dependent on GPAs, and some tie entrance into state universities to GPAs,” Steiner said. “So, there’s every incentive for the nice teacher, the nice school to want to get their kids into state universities by inflating the GPA.”

Along with getting students into university, grade inflation improves school reputation, boosts parental satisfaction and more.

“One of them is sheer competitiveness, starting with upper-middle-class, middle-class professional parents putting pressure on private schools to get their kids’ GPAs up,” Steiner said.

Maranto echoed that sentiment and believes it’s partially a cultural issue.

“We used to be a dignity culture, which is, you sort of get respect based partly just on being a human being, but partly also based on what you achieve and whether you’re independent, whether you’re self-reliant,” he said. “We’ve gone down to more of a victim culture, where you get respect based on whether you can sell yourself as a victim.”

Maranto pointed to the Harvard admissions process, where some prospective students could write an essay about being a victim.

“Harvard’s actually changing. They’ve made a lot of improvements in the last two years on their admissions,” he said. “But, for a while, it’s that way. If you’re a victim culture, it’s very hard to make the case to kids that they have the agency to do well, and it’s very hard to convince teachers that you can hold kids to a standard.”

While the effects of lowered standards are broad, the biggest victim is America’s youth. Just ask Simonsen, who’s now going to be on the hook for roughly $60,000 in student debt.

“We now know from recent research that when you’re lied to, essentially, about your academic qualifications and how much you’ve learned, you suffer later,” Steiner said. “The lie runs out at some point, and you, in fact, do less well later on in life. That can be measured financially, and has been measured financially. So, this is not a victimless crime.”

Impact on America

“[Education] is the very foundation of good citizenship,” Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren famously wrote in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which integrated American schools.

Among the other issues a lack of good education causes, a less-informed electorate makes less-informed decisions.

“The problem is that an uninformed citizen undermines one of the basic tenets of democracy, which is that you are a co-owner of your country, right?” Steiner said. “It’s for the people and by the people, right? Well, if it’s by people who know nothing or can’t be informed about public affairs, then obviously you risk a country in which an electorate, which is grossly undereducated, makes undereducated judgments.”

While education is important, it certainly doesn’t guarantee good decisions. In the 1930s, Germany was considered one of the most highly educated countries in the world.

“A very educated population also could make very serious mistakes, right?” Steiner said. “So, education itself is not a guarantee that you’re going to produce brilliantly enlightened citizens. Highly educated people can be just as dumb as poorly educated people, and elites can be the dumbest of all.”

During his second term, President Donald Trump has also routinely attacked some of America’s most prestigious universities and begun the process of dismantling the Department of Education.

Vice President JD Vance gave a keynote address at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference where he invoked former President Richard Nixon, who once said, “The universities are the enemy.”

“Regular people have contempt for education because they feel like, on the K-12 level, it doesn’t require any effort, unlike most blue-collar jobs, right?” Maranto said. “And then they have contempt, sometimes earned, and sometimes not earned, for college education because they think all we do is crazy political correct stuff. I think it’s unfair, but it’s not totally wrong.”

There are also other factors at play, according to Steiner.

“We had some of the world’s smartest graduate students in the sciences come here from all over the world and do their PhDs and stay in many top programs, PhD programs in this country,” he said. “It was three-quarters foreign students in the top schools, and now they’re going back home. So that’s a real problem.”

What can be done?

In short, a lot.

“We need to make academics more like athletics, right?” Maranto said. “Athletics, you’ve got the same coach for several years. Usually, you don’t have a different coach every year, so they have time to build a relationship. Athletics, it’s just assumed the coach is going to know and believe in and love that sport, and, hopefully, some of that will rub off on you. The coach has respect. A coach can yell at a kid. A teacher could get fired for yelling at a kid. Not that I’m advocating yelling, right? But you, you need to give the grown-ups certain respect in the relationship.”

Athletics is a major part of American schooling, with more than 50% of high schoolers in America participating in sports.

“Athletics, it’s a coalition of the willing, right?” Maranto said. “We accept that not everybody is going to try out for the football team or the baseball team or the basketball team, right? And I think we need to be more honest about that within academia. That there are paths that kids can choose that are more challenging, and maybe not every kid will choose that path, and that’s okay.”

Administrators have floated other solutions, including cell phone bans that some school districts have implemented to keep students focused. Meanwhile, some experts have pointed to school choice as an important option to fix American education.

“With more school choice, people honestly are going to be able to choose, do I want a school that’s fairly rigorous for my kid, or do I want to a school where, if he or you just shows up, they get a diploma, which it sounds like is what happened in Washington state,” Maranto said.

And as with most things in America, politics are also involved.

“Many states have essentially given up on trying to exercise judgment, because their governors and their commissioners tend to be able to crow about rising high school graduation percentages,” Steiner said. “It’s a familiar political argument, right? Re-elect me because my high school graduation rates are going up. Well, they’re going up, but the learning isn’t. Learning isn’t going up.”

Steiner added there’s a deeper issue at play.

“Animals can reproduce, collect nuts, build nests, homes,” he said. “Human beings have this unique gift that we’re able to think. And for many of us, that’s what makes life worth living. That there is, in our minds, our heads, our memories, things that are worth keeping company with, right? After all, we spend more time alone than we ever do with anyone else. So, the furnishings of your mind is the company you keep. And when you fail to educate a human being, you fail to provide that furnishing, you just leave it empty. And that’s actually, in my view, a real sin against the human nature and the human being, herself or himself.”

Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief