Graduate Illiteracy?

How Can a Student Graduate and Be Accepted at a University, Yet Be Functionally Illiterate?

You would obviously assume that these two words cannot go together, but in the U.S. educational system, a student graduating with honours and receiving a scholarship to University, claims she cannot read or write. That’s correct, — she states she is functionally illiterate.

How can this happen?

After 12 years of attending public schools in Hartford, Connecticut, Aleysha Ortiz is suing the Hartford Board of Education and the City of Hartford for negligence.

A minority Spanish speaking student, Ortiz had learning disabilities throughout her entire tenure in the school system. She used technology to fill out her college application, including writing an essay.

She got through high school, and graduated, she says, “By relying on apps that translate text to speech and speech to text.” No one questioned her lack of literacy, although she needed to spend 4-5 hours a night to complete homework.

Because it was necessary to do three times the work in order to put her ideas on paper, listen to the assignment, then convert speech to text, text then would be cut and pasted into her homework, she was actually sleep deprived, not completing her homework until 1 am.

Not An Isolated Circumstance

For me, as a former college educator, this was also a real problem. I once had a student in a post-secondary program provide me with an essay that spanned seven pages, — as a single sentence.

I was shocked, and dumbfounded. The man in question had graduated from high school, yet was functionally illiterate. Not only was his grammar so poor that I could not glean what he was actually trying to communicate, but his vocabulary was confined to what I would say was less than a thousand words.

I recommended to the Dean of the Faculty in question that students be required to write an essay, in the presence of an educator to ensure that papers were either, not plagiarized or in fact, created by AI.

And while software was and is available to flag such submissions for educators, they don’t always catch all of those submissions, therefore people without the necessary skills actually slip through the cracks.

Since this experience, I have retired and no longer teach, but the student in question did not graduate from the program, and it was he who paid the ultimate price for a system that is more interested in an institutions financial success than it is in student learning.

Before retiring, I succeeded in having the institution test all applicants to the program and attend a remedial English grammar assessment class. If unsuccessful, students were then provided with the opportunity to take further remedial English language skills in order to achieve their goals.

The program was unique in that applicants came from Canada, the U.S., Australia and the U.K. predominantly. It was quite noticeable that the bulk of those students who were either barely literate or had poor language skills emanated from the United States.

Most of these students had come through the public school system, and many were minorities. What this says about the U.S. educational system leaves me worried that many American students are falling through the cracks.

Have you had any experience with this problem in your institutions? Please feel free to comment.