Principal specialization of dual characters of flagged Weyl modules

Schur polynomials are special cases of Schubert polynomials, which in turn are special cases of dual characters of flagged Weyl modules. The principal specialization of Schur and Schubert polynomials has a long history, with Macdonald famously expressing the principal specialization of any Schubert polynomial in terms of reduced words. We prove a lower bound on the principal specialization of dual characters of flagged Weyl modules. Our result yields an alternative proof of a conjecture of Stanley about the principal specialization of Schubert polynomials, originally proved by Weigandt.