You may have thought it couldn’t get this bad.
“Not one student at 13 high schools in Baltimore City, Maryland, achieved proficiency in math,” informs the city’s Fox 45 News, “as indicated by state math exams.”
That’s 40 percent of the city’s high schools and we’re talking not a single soul managed to come in at “proficiency.” Not mastery, mind you.
“Among those 13 high schools,” the report continued, “a total of 1,736 students participated in the test with 74.5% of them achieving the lowest possible score of one out of four.”
Okay, okay, but what about the city’s best schools?
Well, a Fox 45 News follow-up found that only “11.4% of students” even at “Baltimore’s five top-performing high schools” are “proficient in math.”
Adding, “In fact, not one high school student in the entire city, last school year, achieved a top level of math proficiency.”
Jason Rodriguez, with People Empowered by the Struggle, an edgily named Baltimore nonprofit, calls it “educational homicide.”
“It’s not a funding issue,” says Rodriguez. “We’re getting plenty of funding.” He thinks “accountability is the issue” and has “been calling for the resignation of the school CEO.”
Young people in Baltimore can learn mathematics just as well as young people anywhere. That we know. But they also need functional families as well as functional schools. The government, plausibly the chief cause of the dysfunction of both, has only official responsibility for the latter.
Sure, it sounds like time to lop off the top brass. But also past time to give every parent of a school-age child in Baltimore (and everywhere) a choice about where to go to school — purchased with the tax dollars that taxpayers are already providing.
Currently, to no avail.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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6 replies on “Bad Math Baltimore”
The state-run schools are the Cloward-Piven strategy writ very large. Children of the poor and of the less affluent are raised to become ignorant adults with lessened productivity who will be dependents of the state, voters for the statists, and an informal army on the side of a socialist cause.
Decades have passed since opponents of school choice meant well, and we now see the desperate evil of present-day opponents, in the wilful sloppiness and outright fabrications of the efforts by Nancy K. McLean and by her coïdeologists to depict voucher proposals by Milton Friedman and others as expressions of a sinister conspiracy to reëstablish racial segregation of schools in the wake of Brown v the Board of Education.
Of course, McLean &alii are useful idiots for a ruling class whose own socialistic notion of the relevant community is really an aristocracy within the wider community, and who are not egalitarian about distributions even within that narrower community. Like so many on the left, McLean &alii chase a Marxist mirage, and play into the hands of neo-feudalists.
School of choice, aka vouchers, and the competition they will create are the only practical answer.
I would be most interested in the scores of the non-public schools in the area so there might be a valid comparison and rating.
Not just the schools an issue. Arguably, the unconstitutional and inaccurately named Department of Education is not earning its keep. More than a billion a year for the past 40 years, it has become a jobs program for teachers that can’t teach and administrators that can’t administrate but do anyway.
These big education bureaucracies scare me. When the school boards and the districts are politically armed to the teeth against a Siege by homeschoolers and Charter schoolers to steal their money, they make mistakes. I’m sure that in the early days, Baltimore had a public school. I’m sure it was not a massive bureaucracy. If Republicans would stop trying to destroy the public schools maybe we could disarm them, accidental double entender, and get back to the business of parents and teachers running neighborhood schools. That’s not a proposition of a solution but I think it is an observation of a problem. Big city school districts have become massive political bureaucracies. And we could talk to some people in the teachers unions about what that has done to teachers.
Which Republicans are trying to destroy the public schools? Democrats have run most of the big cities for decades. They destroyed the schools all by themselves.
They need functional teachers. The government schools have always been a scam