Tag: Baltimore

Bad Math Baltimore

Baltimore, schools, education, school choice, mathematics

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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Accountability local leaders tax policy

Balking in Baltimore

So far, the besieged businessmen of the Fells Point area of Baltimore are only threatening to withhold payments of taxes and fees to the city.

If and when they follow through, the plan is to place the withheld funds in escrow. The money would then be turned over to the city government if and only if the city again meets minimal standards of performance.

Tax resistance? Sure. But not in the usual mode.

Fells Point shop owners are rebelling against a “culture of lawlessness” in their streets, streets managed or mismanaged by the city. They want police to do more — be free to do more — about crime.

In a letter to Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and other officials submitted not long after several shootings in the area, thirty-seven Fells Point businessmen demand that the city “Pick up the trash. . . . Enforce traffic and parking laws. . . . Stop illegal open-air alcohol and drug sales. . . . Empower police to responsibly do their job. . . . Please do your job so we can get back to doing ours.”

What will happen? I fear that, despite this worthy protest, city officials will continue to turn a blind eye. I fear that they will regard the protest as a PR problem, one that will go away and allow them to go on with the usual business of government — the way they see it. Their evasive initial responses to the letter are not encouraging.

Baltimore businesspeople are not trying to dodge city taxes here. They understand very well that one cannot expect to get something for nothing. They just want to get something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling

None of That Happened

A high school senior in Baltimore, Maryland, has only passed three courses in his last four years of “study.”

But here’s the kicker: his 0.1373 Grade Point Average is average at his school. Out of 120 students in his class, the young man ranks 62nd, with 58 others failing to reach his hardly stratospheric GPA.

“Tiffany France thought her son would receive his diploma this coming June,” explained Project Baltimore, the local Fox affiliate’s watchdog effort on education. “But after four years of high school, France just learned, her 17-year-old must start over.”

The television exposé found that in three years her son had “failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days.”

But for some inexplicable reason, though the unnamed lad was flunking roughly nine out of ten classes, Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts continued to pass him on to higher grades and more advanced classes than those he had just bombed on.

“I’ve seen many transcripts, many report cards, like this particular student,” informed an anonymous (for fear of reprisal) administrator with the City Schools.

“He’s a good kid,” his mother offered. “[H]e’s willing, he’s trying, but who would he turn to when the people that’s supposed to help him is not? Who do he turn to?”

Baltimore City Schools released a long statement detailing their bureaucratic procedures and protocols to prevent students from falling through the cracks. “France says none of that happened,” reported Project Baltimore.

I was privileged to have two parents who would never have allowed me to be so mis-educated. But when parents struggle, the theory is that public schools are there to help. In actual practice, though, this theory fails.

But gets passed along anyway.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Good Golly, Healthy Holly

One reason to talk about corruption a lot is that there is a lot of corruption to talk about.

The scheme was to get Kaiser Permanente to buy 20,000 copies of her children’s book, Healthy Holly, at a decidedly non-discounted price of $5 a pop, while the health provider was negotiating a contract with UMMS and while she was serving on the UMMS board deciding that contract.

It’s been several months since I’ve discussed Baltimore, Maryland, a hotbed of Big Government degeneracy. Now that former Mayor Catherine Pugh has been indicted — this Tuesday — on multiple federal charges, we should take a moment to appraise her own tricky larceny against the city’s taxpayers and the patients of University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS).

What a scam.

And not her only one. She leveraged this scam to fund her mayoral campaign, for example.

So, it is good that she is being prosecuted.

Odd, though, that it is the federal government doing the prosecuting. Baltimore is a corporate entity under the sovereignty of the State of Maryland, not the United States.

What have state and local investigators and prosecutors been doing?

While this might seem a picky point, the federalization of law and order is, as the college crowd says, ‘problematic.’ Tasking the Federal Government to the rescue is great, insofar as it actually rescues. Yet, it is also an unmistakable sign not only of the corruption of the criminal justice system, but also of a failure of representative democracy to hold government officials accountable in that state or locality.

This is certain: government, removed from citizens’ vigilance, almost necessarily breeds corruption … and not just in Baltimore.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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insider corruption term limits

House-Cleaning & Law-Following

Post author By Redactor
Post date June 10, 2019
No Comments on House-Cleaning & Law-Following

Larry Hogan, Maryland’s popular Republican governor, has vowed to “clean house” in the wake of the scandals rocking the “private” non-profit University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS), set up by the State of Maryland.

It isn’t just former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh, who resigned from the UMMS board after it was disclosed the board had purchased $500,000 worth of her self-published children’s book, “Healthy Holly.” Yep, it’s always for the children. (Pugh also resigned as mayor after the FBI raided her home and office.)

In fact, nine of the 23 UMMS board members had money-making contracts with the system they “manage.” Not to mention that a recent Post exposé detailed how former state legislator and long-time board member, Francis Kelly, whose legislation established the system, had multi-million-dollar insurance contracts with UMMS.

Yet, as The Washington Post reports, “state law long has called for housecleaning … specifying that board members can’t serve more than two consecutive five-year terms.”

Gov. Hogan and his predecessors — both Republican and Democrat — simply ignored the law, reappointing board members beyond the limits.

“If members were allowed to essentially stay on the board in perpetuity,” former state senator, now U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D‑Md.) argued, “it’s a direct threat to the independence and accountability of the board.”

Abandoning term limits, State Senator Jill Carter (D‑Baltimore City) told the Post, was “part of the problem,” resulting in self-dealing.

Hmmm, think they’ll ever apply this knowledge to establishing term limits on their own powerful legislative bodies?

So much corruption, too few limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense

Corruption Beyond Imagination

Post author By CS Admin
Post date February 15, 2018
1 Comment on Corruption Beyond Imagination

Baltimore, police, corruption, crime, Gun Trace Task Force

“Two Baltimore detectives were convicted Monday of robbery and racketeering,” the Washington Post reported, “in a trial that laid bare shocking crimes committed by an elite police unit and surfaced new allegations of widespread corruption in the city’s police department.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Leo Wise presented the jury with “things more horrible in some cases than you ever could have imagined.”

Test your imagination:

Four police officers, already convicted, testified to routinely violating the rights of citizens in order to steal cash and property worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Officers left the scene of an accident they caused without summoning assistance for those injured, and then covered up their involvement.
Detectives “doubled their salaries by lying to claim extravagant overtime when they were actually at bars or … out of the country on vacation.”
There was an allegation of murder against one policeman and a charge that another high police official covered it up.

A total of eight officers of the Gun Trace Task Force have now been convicted of or pleaded guilty to felonies.

Where was Internal Affairs? “The head of internal affairs has been transferred” the Post informed, after he was “implicated in misconduct during trial testimony.”

We could sic the feds on them! Oh, wait, “[m]ost of the behavior charged in the case took place even as the [Baltimore police] department was already under federal investigation by the Justice Department …”

Prospects for reform?

Last Wednesday, Mayor Catherine Pugh claimed to having been “too busy to follow the trial closely or read Baltimore Sun coverage…”

Baltimore, we’ve got a problem.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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