So Nataly Buhr — a new high school graduate — has had lots of lessons about educational failures, even though she's the valedictorian in her high school class of about 500 students. And in that last, she's almost certainly distinct from those she criticized. I would take 20:1 odds that none of the professional staff at San Ysidro High School were, themselves, valedictorians of their own high school classes. How that qualifies them to evaluate the needs and concerns of a valedictorian (the principal criticizes her for not having raised them prior to the speech — which is, objectively and all other things being equal, the right thing to do, but even in corporate litigation there's more formal recognition of "demand futility" than in education) is beyond me. And, more to the point, beyond them.
Nonetheless, she got an excellent education… quite possibly in spite of her public school system. As did a contemporary in Florida. And that education comes down to this: Educators can't take either criticism or a joke. Or recognize irony. When education stopped being the thing that brainy women were consigned to some time in the 1960s (a result of men's need for easy draft deferments as much as anything else, at least as to this field in particular… because there wasn't a simultaneous rush of men into nursing!), the chances of an educator having been high-school valedictorian went through the floor. On the one hand, that was great for the women whose actual capabilities could be exploited by the economy and themselves. On the other hand, it was a bad thing for public education, especially since culturally in the US men are even more prone to bullying the nerds than women are.
Meanwhile, Betsy De Vos wants to make education even less of a priority in high schools, substituting job training (for "good manufacturing jobs," no doubt, that don't actually exist and would be technological dead ends in a decade if they did). <SARCASM> That just might keep a successor of Ms Buhr from speaking out a dozen years from now… because she'll have been even more ill-served than she was as San Ysidro High School near San Diego, which already appears on its way to meeting De Vos's view of the proper role of public schools. Sending the valedictorian to UC San Diego implies a lot — especially that valedictorians at public high schools should not expect to be welcomed at 1%er colleges. </SARCASM>
This is some of the bullshit that results from Balkanized "local control" of schools, seldom by those who were themselves successful in those schools or (academically anyway) afterward. <SARCASM> I'm so glad nothing has changed in the four decades since I lived through it, or in the decade since my kids did. </SARCASM> (Admittedly, I wasn't the class valedictorian; I got a couple of A-minuses in PE in the days before "class weighting" for AP and college-prep classes, so an A- in 9th grade PE counted as much as an A in AP Bio, AP Chemistry, or AP Calculus….)