Archives for category: High School Graduation
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Texas: Low Graduation Rates for Charter Schools, Far Lower than District Schools

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2017 //
49

Texas charter schools have a graduation rate overall of 62%, nearly 30 percentage points lower than the state’s public school. Results like this help to explain why public support for charters is dropping fast in opinion polls, like that of the pro-choice, pro-charter Education Next. EdNext reported an 11-point drop in public support for charters in just the last year, among members of both parties.

Texas Public Radio reported:

“When the exclusions and exceptions the state grants charter schools are stripped away, Texas charter schools have an average graduation rate almost 30 percentage points lower than the state’s traditional school districts.

“According to a 2017 report from the Texas Education Agency, just 62 percent of Texas charter school students graduated on time in 2016, compared to more than 90 percent of students from traditional school districts.

“The discrepancy doesn’t show up on campus or district level accountability reports, however, because most charter schools with low graduation rates are rated under alternative standards or have high numbers of students excluded from the graduation count.

“But it’s a statistic the Intercultural Development Research Association believes Texas should be paying attention to. The San Antonio-based research and advocacy group released a report last week highlighting the difference in graduation rates.

““A 90 percent versus a 62 percent graduation rate — it’s huge. That’s incredible because charter schools are seen as these kind of rescue schools,” said David Hinojosa, program director for IDRA. “Yet, then when you look at the outcomes for these charter schools and this diversion of resources towards charter schools they’re not paying off.”

“IDRA’s calculation includes the graduation rates of all charter schools, including those that have asked the state to be rated under alternative standards. Under Texas law, schools can ask to be measured under alternative standards if most of their students are classified as at risk of dropping out of school. About 22 percent of Texas charter schools are rated under alternative standards.

“Hinojosa said looking at the graduation rates of all charter schools “offers a fair comparison” because the statewide percentage of charter school students Texas considers at risk of dropping out is about the same as the rate of at-risk students in traditional school districts: a little more than 50 percent.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, High School Graduation, Privatization

New York: Parents Appaud Regents’ Decision to Create Multiple Pathways to Graduation

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2017 //
5

This comes from NYSAPE (New York State Allies for Public Education):

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 15, 2017

More information contact:

Lisa Rudley (917) 414-9190; nys.allies@gmail.com

Bonnie Buckley (631) 513-8976 bonnief.buckley@gmail.com

NYS Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE)

Multiple Pathways to a Diploma for All (MPDA)

Parents Around the State Applaud the Board of Regents’ Precedent-Setting Diploma Expansion

On Monday, the NYS Board of Regents voted to create an additional alternate pathway to graduation for students who receive special education services. In doing so, the Board of Regents broke through the decades-old policy that tied all New York State high school diplomas to high-stakes exit exams. If the measure is formally adopted, these students who struggle with academic exams will be able to earn a diploma as long as they have completed the required amount of Regents-level coursework and earned the Career Development and Occupational Studies (CDOS) Commencement credential. Furthermore, students who should have graduated in 2015, 2016, or 2017 and have already exited high school will now have the option to re-enroll to meet the new requirements and earn a local diploma.

“As a New York State resident and parent, I am confident that these students will now be recognized as having ‘earned’ their high school diploma and be viewed as the assets to our State that they are,” commented Betty Pilnik, Long Island public school parent and co-founder of Multiple Pathways to a Diploma for All. “These students have worked twice as hard as some of their peers and now will be able to join the workforce or the military or to further their education–options that were unavailable to them before the Board of Regents and NYSED acknowledged that these students deserve the opportunity to be contributing, productive members of society.”

Suzanne Coyle, Rockland County public school parent and an employment specialist concurred, “This is a significant and validating decision by the Board of Regents. Students who have exited high school with a CDOS, but no diploma, have faced a world of challenges and severe limitations with regard to their employment opportunities, higher education, entrance into any branch of the US military, and funding for further vocational training. They’ve been denied, but this will be transformative.”

Between 2015 and 2017, approximately 45,000 students with disabilities did not graduate despite multiple attempts to pass multiple Regents exams. The Board of Regents had implemented various waivers and safety nets, including 2016’s “Superintendent’s Determination,” to aid some of those students, but according to Christine Zirkelbach, Founder of NY Stop Grad High Stakes Testing, “Only 417 students of those 45,000 students were able to graduate with a Superintendent’s Determination as it was originally established. With this revision, NYSED has held to students taking and passing Regents-level curriculum, a full 22 credits, and has added the vigorous work required to earn a CDOS as a pathway to a meaningful diploma for students with an IEP. This is not lowering standards; this is substituting a hands-on practical assessment for a written exam.”

New York is one of only a few states that still requires high school exit exams, even when students have passed all their courses. While parents see the Board of Regents vote as a major step forward, we and our organizations will continue to advocate for the complete elimination of exit exams.

“It is a tragedy that so many students with disabilities have spent their entire high school career focused on passing these exams, many to no avail,” remarked Bianca Tanis, Ulster County public school parent, educator and founding member of NYSAPE. This change is an important first step in recognizing that high-stakes exit exams have never been shown to improve postsecondary outcomes for ANY students and that to the contrary, these costly exams exacerbate inequalities and diminish opportunity.”

“The opt out movement has never just been about grades 3-8 high-stakes testing. It is about empowering parents to advocate on behalf of their children. This change reflects that advocacy effort and a research-based, common sense response by our Board of Regents. Child-first policy shifts like these will continue to move New York in the right direction,” echoed Jeanette Deutermann, NYSAPE co-founder and Long Island Opt Out founder.

Lisa Rudley, Westchester County public school parent and another co-founder of NYSAPE, also applauded the vote, but added a note of caution, “We thank the Board of Regents for removing some of the barriers for students who deserve to have a meaningful diploma. This is an important step forward, however the fact that the granting of the diploma ultimately rests with the superintendent means that parents need to be diligent advocates for their children. District-level waivers tend to favor students in districts whose parents are most active; as such it’s important to keep in mind that they can be inequitably applied.”

The public will have 45 days (December 27 through February 12) to comment on the proposed regulations and the state education department can make revisions as necessary after the public comment period has ended.

Bonnie Buckley, Long Island public school parent and co-founder of Multiple Pathways to a Diploma for All, knows the value of that civic engagement. “Two and a half years ago this inequity came to my attention when I learned my daughter wouldn’t be able to graduate without Regents exams. With several other parents, we started a grassroots movement and the Facebook page, Multiple Pathways to a Diploma for All, to address this inequity. I am profoundly grateful to Chancellor Rosa, the Board of Regents and NYSED for making it possible for children all around the state to move on with their lives. This is a door opening, and we are pleased with this change and are hopeful it is an indication of other changes.”

We will continue to advocate for the removal of high-stakes standardized tests as requirements for earning a New York State high school diploma.

NYSAPE is a grassroots coalition of over 50 parent and educator groups across the state.

Multiple Pathways to a Diploma for All is a grassroots parent organization with nearly 6,000 members.

Link: http://www.nysape.org/nysape-mpda-pr-diploma-expansion.html

Categories High School Graduation, New York, Special Education

Gary Rubinstein: Will Reformer Michael Johnston Please Stop Boasting About His “Miracle ” School?

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2017 //
22

Gary Rubinstein knows Michael Johnston from his days in Teach for America. He wishes Mike would stop telling tall tales about the school he briefly ran.

Mike said that the school he ran had a 100% graduation rate and college acceptance rate. Gary points out that 44 seniors graduated and got accepted to college, but there were 73 students in tenth grade two years earlier. That’s a 60% graduation rate, not 100%.

Now Mike Johnston is running for Governor of Colorado. He has built a reputation in the state as an education “reformer.” After graduating from Yale, he taught in Mississippi as a member of Teach for America, earned a degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, then a law degree, then was principal of a small school in Colorado where he claimed the school had a graduation rate of 100% and all were accepted into college. Based on this record, he ran for and was elected to the State Senate at the age of 35.

I met Mike Johnston in 2010, when I visited Denver to talk about my then-new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” I was scheduled to debate Johnston at a luncheon before about 100 of Denver’s civic leaders. At the very moment I was in Denver, the Legislature was debating Johnston’s legislation to evaluate teachers and principals by the test scores of their students. Johnston called his law, SB 10-191, the “Great Teachers, Great Principals Act.” It required that test scores would count for 50% of every teacher and principal’s evaluation.

On the day we were to debate, Johnston was late. I spoke. Minutes later, Johnston arrived, not having heard anything I said about choice and testing. He spoke with great excitement about how his new legislation would weed out all the bad and ineffective teachers in the state and would lead to a new era of great teachers, great principals, and great schools.

Johnston, as Gary Rubinstein points out, is very much an Obama Democrat. Arne Duncan, whose Race to the Top squandered $5 Billion, has endorsed Johnston’s candidacy for governor.

Seven years later, even Colorado reformers acknowledge that Mike Johnston’s grandiose promises fell flat. In an article in Education Week, Colorado reformer Van Schoales admitted that the punitive SB 10-191 didn’t have much, if any effect.

He wrote:

“Implementation did not live up to the promises.

“Colorado Department of Education data released in February show that the distribution of teacher effectiveness in the state looks much as it did before passage of the bill. Eighty-eight percent of Colorado teachers were rated effective or highly effective, 4 percent were partially effective, 7.8 percent of teachers were not rated, and less than 1 percent were deemed ineffective. In other words, we leveraged everything we could and not only didn’t advance teacher effectiveness, we created a massive bureaucracy and alienated many in the field.

“What happened?

“It was wrong to force everyone in a state to have one ‘best’ evaluation system.”

“First, the data. We built a policy on growth data that only partially existed. The majority of teachers teach in states’ untested subject areas. This meant processes for measuring student growth outside of literacy or math were often thoughtlessly slapped together to meet the new evaluation law. For example, some elementary school art-teacher evaluations were linked to student performance on multiple-choice district art tests, while Spanish-teacher evaluations were tied to how the school did on the state’s math and literacy tests. Even for those who teach the grades and subjects with state tests, some debate remains on how much growth should be weighted for high-stakes decisions on teacher ratings. And we knew that few teachers accepted having their evaluations heavily weighted on student growth.

“Second, there has been little embrace of the state’s new teacher-evaluation system even from administrators frustrated with the former system. There were exceptions, namely the districts of Denver and Harrison, which had far fewer highly effective teachers than elsewhere in the state. Both districts invested time and resources in the development of a system that more accurately reflects a teacher’s impact on student learning. Yet most Colorado districts were forced to create new evaluation systems in alignment with the new law or adopt the state system, and most did the latter. This meant that these districts focused on compliance (and checking off evaluation boxes), rather than using the law to support teacher improvement.

“Third, we continue to have a leadership problem. Research shows that teacher evaluators are still not likely to give direct and honest feedback to teachers. A Brown University study on teacher evaluators in these new systems shows that the evaluators are three times more likely to rate teachers higher than they should be rated. This is a problem of school and district culture, not a fault with the evaluation rubric.

“Fourth, all of Colorado’s 238 charter schools waived out of the system.

“We wanted a new system to help professionalize teaching and address the real disparities in teacher quality. Instead, we got an 18-page state rubric and 345-page user guide for teacher evaluation.

“We didn’t understand how most school systems would respond to these teacher-evaluation laws. We failed to track implementation and didn’t check our assumptions along the way.”

Unfortunately, when the time came to change the law, Sen. Mike Johnston joined with five Republicans on the State Senate Education Committee to defeat a proposal to fix his failed law.

The rejected proposal, “originally introduced with bipartisan sponsorship, would have allowed school districts to drop the use of student academic growth data in teacher evaluations. It also would have eliminated the annual evaluation requirement for effective and highly effective teachers.”

But Johnston preferred to keep his law in place, despite its failure. It remains today as the most regressive teacher evaluation law in the nation. And it has had seven years to demonstrate its ineffectiveness.

Gary Rubinstein calls on Mike Johnston to stop making the false claim in his campaign literature that his high school’s graduation rate was 100%.

I call on him to renounce and denounce SB 10-191.

Make a clean break of it, Mike. Set things right. Show you are man enough to admit you were wrong.

Categories Accountability, Colorado, Corporate Reformers, High School Graduation, Teach for America, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM

John Merrow: When “Too Good to Be True” Is Not True

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2017 //
25

John Merrow reviews the miraculous but not true story of the high school in Washington, D.C., that increased its graduation rate from 57% to 100% in one year. And every one of these graduates were accepted into college! A touching story. But a false story. Made even worse by the fact that it was reported by NPR, which is a usually reliable and trustworthy source for news.

Merrow notes that in the original report, 26 of the graduating class of nearly 200 students had not yet earned enough credits to graduate. How, then, could the school have a graduation rate of 100% and a college acceptance rate of 100%?

A little digging, he said, would have revealed the fact that a local D.C. community college accepts all students who have a high school diploma, a GED, or the equivalent, so gaining college acceptance is not a high bar to cross.

He then recounts how NPR walked the story back and did some investigation, finding the original story to be wrong. There was no 100% graduation rate, and many students earned credits with “credit recovery,” sitting in front of a computer for a week to get a semester’s credits. How phony is that!

He writes:

Further evidence that the 100% college acceptance story is bogus comes from academic results. Only 9% of seniors were able to pass the city’s English test, and not a single student passed the math test. The average SAT score for Ballou test-takers was 782 out of a possible 1600. Moreover, teachers told NPR that some administrators actually filled out the college applications for those students who had no interest in attending college!

This disgraceful approach to schooling does widespread damage beyond what is obviously done to kids who receive phony diplomas but no real education. One teacher told NPR, “This is [the] biggest way to keep a community down. To graduate students who aren’t qualified, send them off to college unprepared, so they return to the community to continue the cycle.”

I am not writing this to criticize NPR for missing the story** the first time around. I did that myself more than once in my 41-year career, and I was late in recognizing the flaws in Michelle Rhee’s ‘test scores are everything’ approach in Washington. Her wrong-headed strategy is, arguably, responsible for the mind-set that exists at Ballou today.

Here’s what matters: the Ballou fiasco is the bitter fruit of the ‘School Reform’ movement that continues to dominate educational practice in most school districts today. These (faux) reformers continue to support policies and practices that basically reduce children to a single number, their scores on standardized, machine-scored tests. This approach has led to a diminished curriculum, drill-and-kill schooling, buckets of money leaving the schools and going instead to testing companies and outside consultants, the growth of charter schools (many run by profiteers), and a drumbeat of criticism from ideologues who seem determined to break apart and ruin public education, rather than attempt to reinvent it.

(This approach also once again proves the truth of Campbell’s Law, the more importance given to a single measure, the greater the probability that it will be corrupted. When test scores rule education, some people cheat. And when high school graduation rates rule, people also find ways to cheat.

In case you were not sure, Merrow makes clear that he was hoodwinked by Michelle Rhee, and he calls out the false premises and false promises of the “School Reform” movement, which has done so much to corrupt education by setting targets that can’t be reached without cheating.

Categories District of Columbia, Fraud, High School Graduation, Hoax, Media, Michelle Rhee

Michael Hynes: Time to Slay the College Board Dragon

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2017 //
15

Michael Hynes is Superintendent of the Patchogue-Medford School District on Long Island in New York State.

He writes about his contempt for the College Board.

He writes:

“Reader beware. Before you read my thoughts about the educational sacred cow and standardized testing machine known as the College Board, you should know up front that I am no fan of the College Board CEO/President David Coleman who years ago was the architect of Common Core.

“Most of us in the educational world know of the Common Core State Standards and the “test focused education reform movement” that accompanied it was a fiasco that still plagues American schools today.

“Mr. Coleman was on the English Language Arts writing team and his good friend and eventual partner at Student Achievement Partners (SAP) Jason Zimba was a leader on the Common Core Mathematics team. Student Achievement Partners is a non-profit organization that researches and develops achievement based assessment standards.

“Interesting enough, it was funded in part by Bill Gates. The final nail in the coffin for me was when I realized Mr. Coleman, his former assistant and Mr. Zimba were founding board members for Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, an organization that lobbies for standards driven educational reform.

“Do you see a pattern?

“Now Mr. Coleman leads the College Board money-making machine and this educational monolith is the church that most public schools worship several times a year.

“For the reader who doesn’t know what The College Board is: it is the ultimate gatekeeper and judge-jury-executioner for millions of students each year who dream to enter college and it literally is a hardship for many families due to the test taking expense.

“Schools and families have no other choice because there is no other game in town, aside from a student taking the ACT exam.

“The College Board claims to be a non-profit organization, but it’s hard to take that claim seriously when its exam fees for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), Advanced Placement test (AP), services for late registration, score verification services and a multitude of other related fees are costing families and schools millions of dollars each year.

“Eleven years ago this “non-profit” made a profit of $55 million and paid nineteen College Board Executives’ salaries that ranged from three hundred thousand dollars to over one million dollars a year.

“That trend continues today.

“Cost aside, it is hard to fathom and understand how the College Board has claimed a monopoly-like status over our public school system.

“Over the years it has literally convinced school administrators, school board trustees, teachers, parents and students they can’t live without what they sell. They sell classes and tests to schools like Big Pharma sells pills to consumers.”

Read on.

Categories Coleman, David, Common Core, Education Reform, High School Graduation, Standardized Testing

Laura Chapman Explains the Inappropriate Push for “AP for All”

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2017 //
23

We have noticed the pressure to put students in Advanced Placement classes, whether or not they are prepared or interested. My first thought was that the College Board was making big money and encouraging this unsound policy.

Laura Chapman sees other reasons:

Speaking of AP courses, I think part of the problem is not just the College Board but the stack ratings of high schools published every year by U.S. News and World Report.

Their metrics focus on students’ scores on standardized tests, graduation rates, but also the number of Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses taken, and passed.

The awards for gold, silver, and bronze status differ for public and charter schools. There is killer “tie breaker” for schools forwarded by the College Board and US News Rankings. The CRI value is a composite score conjured from scores on statewide tests, graduation rates and the like.

Begin quote: This year (2017) U.S. News and the College Board collaboratively developed a new tiebreaker to avoid ties in the numerical rankings when schools had the same unrounded CRI values, which was the case for the top 25 ranked schools in the 2017 Best High Schools rankings.

This new tiebreaker was the percentage of 12th-graders in the 2014-2015 academic year who took AP exams and the percentage who passed those exams in at least four of the seven AP content areas. The tiebreaker measures the breadth of students who took and passed AP exams across multiple disciplines.

The AP content areas measured were English, Math & Computer Science, Sciences, World Languages & Culture, History and Social Sciences, Arts and AP Capstone.

Students who took and passed exams in two or three areas were given partial credit – 50 percent and 75 percent, respectively.

Those who took and passed AP exams in four of the seven AP content areas earned full credit.

The percentage of students taking exams in multiple areas was weighted 25 percent and the percentage of students passing exams in multiple areas was weighted 75 percent to derive the final tiebreaker score.

High schools where the largest proportion of 12th-grade students in the 2014-2015 academic year took and passed AP tests in at least four AP content areas scored highest in the tiebreaker.

The new tiebreaker was used to break ties among 297 schools – 61 gold medal schools and 236 silver medal schools. The College Board computed the tiebreaker. End Quote.

Of course for a richer understanding about the history of the idea that high school must be college, you can read any number of books, or some legacy reports from the American Diploma Project from which the Common Core evolved, to the Gates Foundation Database with some key works, among them “college and career ready,” early college, and College Board,

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings

22 comments

Categories High School Graduation

NPR: The Hoax of the D.C. Public School Where 100% of Seniors Graduated and Were Accepted by Colleges

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2017 //
44

Last July, I wrote about a struggling high school in D.C. where 100% of the seniors graduated and were accepted by colleges. The story appeared on NPR, and I wrongly assumed that they had done fact checking. I am not a reporter, and I do not have a staff to check out claims. NPR does. But they took the claim by D.C. administrators at face value, without checking.

Now NPR reports that the original story was fishy. Better late than never.

“An investigation by WAMU and NPR has found that Ballou High School’s administration graduated dozens of students despite high rates of unexcused absences. WAMU and NPR reviewed hundreds of pages of Ballou’s attendance records, class rosters and emails after a DCPS employee shared the private documents. The documents showed that half of the graduates missed more than three months of school last year, unexcused. One in five students was absent more than present — missing more than 90 days of school.”

“According to DCPS policy, if a student misses a class 30 times, he should fail that course. Research shows that missing 10 percent of school, about two days per month, can negatively affect test scores, reduce academic growth and increase the chances a student will drop out.”

The majority of the graduating class missed more than six weeks of school.

So now we understand how the reformers in charge of the DC school system got the graduation rate up. By lowering standards. By lying.

Remember Campbell’s Law.

“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

When you reward schools for higher scores, they will get higher scores, by hook or by crook. When you reward them for higher graduation rates, they will do what it takes—including lowering standards—to reach the goal.

Categories Campbell's Law, District of Columbia, High School Graduation, Hoax

Nevada: Legislature Changes Rules for High School Graduation, Offers Chance to Those Without a Diploma

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2017 //
5

In too many states, legislators meddle in schools nonstop, mandating tests that most of the legislators couldn’t pass, changing the high-school graduation requirements without thinking of the consequences.

Nevada is a case in point.

But at least the legislators will give those who didn’t meet the last graduation requirement a new chance to earn a diploma.

Without a diploma, a young adult can’t get a decent job.

“Former Nevada students who failed to earn a high school diploma because they couldn’t pass the state’s proficiency exam now have a shot at redemption.

“In 2013, the state Legislature approved phasing out the proficiency exam graduation requirement in favor of four end-of-course tests. But before the end-of-course exam requirement went into effect, legislation removed that requirement in 2017.

“That created a situation where students who didn’t pass the proficiency exam were being held to a different standard than more recent students.

“That will change as the result of a guidance memo sent to district superintendents by the state on Oct. 13, as long as the student meets all other graduation requirements.

“The change levels the playing field for adult education learners who are still trying to earn a diploma, according to the state.

“If it wasn’t retroactive we’d have a situation where we’d say if you’re 22, here’s your diploma, if you’re 23, take the test,” said Henry King, an educational program professional in the state Department of Education. “It would have created an artificial age line in adult ed by which there would have been different graduation requirements based on how old they were.”

Categories High School Graduation

Gary Rubinstein: Does KIPP Deserve to Expand in Philadelphia?

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2017 //
26

Gary Rubinstein learned that KIPP plans to add more schools in Philadelphia and nearly triple its enrollment.

So Gary did what he always did: he checked the public data for KIPP in Philadelphia.

He found that KIPP has one high school in the city.

“That school got the lowest possible rating, essentially an F. Not only were their test scores low, but they also got the lowest possible rating in ‘growth’ in math and reading, in other words the value-added for the school which reformers claim to take very seriously.”

But, says KIPP spokesmen, an amazing proportion of our students graduate from college.

Gary checked the data. KIPP was resorting to its usual legerdemain and ignoring the high attrition from fifth grade to high school graduation. They compare all low-income kids only to their high school graduates, which makes KIPP look far better than the reality.

Given KIPP’s unimpressive academic record–one might say “failing” record–in Philadelphia, why would the School Reform Commission allow them to expand?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, High School Graduation, Privatization

Graduation Speech: “You Said We Couldn’t Succeed, But You Were Wrong”

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2017 //
18

Jo Lieb, who blogs as “Poetic Justice,” posted the powerful graduation speech written and delivered by Coral Ortiz, with Coral’s permission. Coral just graduated from a public high school in New Haven, Connecticut.


When we were young, we were taught that we were “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Our country taught us that no matter our income or race, we would all have the same chance to achieve our dreams. We were taught that there would never be a bias against a certain group of people, and that society believes in each and every one of us. These lessons of equality were taught as self-evident. These lessons of equality have and continue to be a lie.

The reality is that despite the fact that we recite the words “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” it has been 50 years since the civil rights movement that our country has never been equal. We—a class mostly made up of minority, low income, and first generation students—have had the odds stacked against us, but here we are standing at this graduation with 3 state championships, college acceptances, and one of largest increases in graduation rates in the State, because we didn’t let the inherent inequality stop us from achieving our goals.

I would be lying if I said today is like any other day, because today is not like any other day. Most importantly, Today is not your typical high school graduation; it is more than that. Today is the day when we walk across a stage and take our diplomas, as an act of defiance to those who said we could not. We have had many students, administrators, and teachers come and go. We have had heart break; we have had our nation turn its backs on us, through supporting those who support hate. So, to those that believed my classmates and I were incapable, I have decided to leave a message for you:

To the teacher who said my classmates and I would fail and that the taxpayers wasted resources on our education -– Today, we teach you that you were wrong.

To the counselor who told me students at this school never get into prestigious colleges – we didn’t let your perception of us define who we are.

To the people who assume we are robbing their stores because of the color of our skin – don’t judge a book by its cover.

To the people who told us that only boys were good at math – Girls are more than just pretty faces.

To the people who violated our bodies – no means no.

To the people who questioned our dedication to the things we were involved in – you didn’t see our sleepless nights and three championship trophies.

To the person who believed that our socio-economic status would define us – you do not need to be a millionaire to succeed.

To the lady on the bus who told me my peers and I would go to jail because of the high school we attended – we are still free.

To the politicians and corporations that refuse to address gun violence because it might cost them money- life has no price.

To the people who assume that our names are too ghetto to be qualified – our names have taken us farther than you could have imagined.

To the leaders who thought it was okay to make decisions that forced us to go to classes without textbooks – it is far from okay.

To the person who told us we only got into college because we were minorities – the color of one’s skin does not determine intelligence.

To the people that talked poorly about us in the newspaper – you taught us how to be fearless.

To the people who thought it was okay to experiment with our education – the math of 5 principals in 4 years just doesn’t add up.

To the people who want to privatize education – public education is the reason we succeeded.

To the politicians who choose unqualified people to affect our lives because you feel loyal to your party – you did not take a vow to serve a party. You
took a vow to serve the people.

To the person who believes my classmates and I are dangerous – we are human.

To the people who told me my friends and I are not beautiful – black is beautiful.

To those who believed that my peers and I would drop out – looks like you were wrong.

To everyone who voted for hate – love wins.

I could go on for hours talking about the people who defined us as something other than successful. But today is not solely about the obstacles that were placed in front of us. Today is about the truth. The fact that there were several times people underestimated us and we were able to prove them wrong. We stand here and take our diplomas not only as an act of defiance, but also as an act of gratitude. Thankful for the adults that cared, thankful for the teacher that spent hours educating us, thankful for the parents, family members, counselors, friends, politicians, and mentors that believed we could make it to this moment.

We could not have done this without you because it takes a village to raise a child. Despite the fact that our education was treated like an experiment, lacked in resources, and was marked by the presence of people who stopped believing we were capable, we did it. In 6 years we were capable of going from a 51 percent graduation rate to a 91 percent graduation rate. Today we acknowledge the fact that our country is not equal and that we have it harder than many other people. We acknowledge that, despite this inequality, we beat the odds. We did it, and now we have the chance to not only reach our own dreams, but also to help others reach theirs.

If we were able to overcome all of these obstacles, then there is nothing that can stop us. No one that can stop us, no dream that we can’t reach, and no adversity that we cannot overcome, because in the end, they said we couldn’t, so we did, and when they say we won’t, we will. Thank you and congratulations to the class of 2017.P

Categories Courage, Education Reform, High School Graduation
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