Education Quote by Ruben Hinojosa

A classic Washington two-step: praise first, pivot fast. Hinojosa’s line reads like a polite memo, but it’s really a power move in the long fight over what counts as success in public education. By “commend[ing] the Administration,” he signals party discipline and buys credibility with insiders who care about being seen as constructive. Then he draws a boundary: the real metric, he argues, shouldn’t be another round of “high school reform” initiatives so much as a single, legible outcome - graduation.

That choice of target is strategic. “Reform” is a roomy word that can mean new standards, new tests, new charters, new funding formulas - a policy buffet where progress is hard to measure and failure is easy to rebrand. Graduation, by contrast, is concrete. It forces systems to account for the students who vanish between ninth grade and a diploma, especially low-income students and students of color who have historically borne the costs of bureaucratic flexibility.

The subtext is also a warning about accountability theater. In the era when education policy was dominated by test-based measurement and federal pressure (think No Child Left Behind’s aftershocks), districts could raise scores while quietly shedding the hardest-to-serve kids. Making graduation “the key accountability measure” aims to close that escape hatch. It’s not naïve about the risks - graduation rates can be inflated - but it stakes out a moral and political claim: schools shouldn’t be judged mainly by performance snapshots; they should be judged by whether they finish the job.