I’m not a parent, but would like your take on this if you’re a parent. Basically, I watched a news story on YouTube about a high school student in Baltimore that had a 0.13 GPA and is STILL ranked in the middle of the class.Not only that his mom was shocked when the school told her that he needs to redo high school. I’m not sure if I can share links but if you’re unfamiliar with the story you can always look it up on YouTube or on your news feed.
There is probably a back story about the characteristics of Baltimore and schools there. From what I have read (here and elsewhere):
- Private school is a big thing there, so that anyone with money sends their kids to private school.
- Anyone without money who cares about their kids’ education tries to get their kids into a magnet school.
- Baltimore is highly segregated by SES and race.
These characteristics suggest that there may be some local public schools that are very low performing.
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@NatInTheHatt
There are many factors that are behind that one story that may have been eye-opening to you. A good place to start would be Virginia Tech professor Dennis Patrick Halpin’s “A Brotherhood of Liberty: Black Reconstruction and Its Legacies In Baltimore, 1865-1920.”
In it, the author details how after African-Americans flocked to Baltimore and created an upwardly mobile populace, segregationists unleashed a torrent of racist policies to harass and opress the African-Americans in the city. Combine that with later efforts such as severe redlining policies and policies regarding transportation and land use in the 1960s and 1970s which continued to enhance racial segregation. This resulted in a very much two-tiered (or even three-tiered) city where the have-nots have a lot less than the have-nots in many other cities.
Once we view history more fully, it goes a long way to making us better understand more aspects of the present. For those truly interested in understanding the strings that tie the present to the past, there are many other skillfully and thoroughly researched books that would be helpful.
Similar results happened in some other cities that practiced extreme racial segregation and extreme race-based oppression, like Milwaukee, Chicago, and elsewhere.
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Thanks,
It’s just super heartbreaking!
When a problem is this dire it’s BEYOND blaming teachers and parents. It’s like we are all trying to ride out a storm at sea. Some students have kayaks, some have yachts. But the students in Baltimore don’t even have inflatable arm floaties🤷♀️
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Unfortunately, the results of today are exactly what was planned. The hard part is undoing the framework that has been built to support such inequality in Baltimore. Even in 2020, there is unbelievable resistance to the idea of correcting the harms.
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Yeah, this was reported on Fox News about two weeks ago. But if you read the story, the kid was mostly truant. And any parent knows about keeping on top of a child’s academic progress and school attendance. When interviewed, the mother was defensive, claiming that it’s all the school’s fault. By her own admission, she never ONCE went in to meet with the school, no parent-teacher meeting, nothing. Her claim is that the school only requested it once, and “it never happened”.
The real issue here is that supposedly the majority of the kids in this school are doing just as poorly. Fact is, schools can only do so much. A lot depends upon the kids who go there, and the families who back up those kids. Clearly, there is a large concentration of students and families who have given up on education in this school. Why? Probably because they don’t see it as being of any value to them. Why some teens and their families would think that there is no value in education, is another topic of discussion that is beyond the scope of CC.
Suffice it to say that as in many inner city areas, the families that care about education either move out of the city, or get their kids into magnet schools. That leaves behind families who don’t make an effort to get their kids into magnet schools, attending the generic inner city schools.
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Not everyone is interested in obtaining an education, for whatever reason. Schools are not magicians who can change that.
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Yep. Happens everywhere, for all races. I grew-up on the edge of Appalachia. I could count on both hands how many kids in my HS class were illiterate (and my class wasn’t large). It happens less-often in the well-off suburbs but it still happens. There’s a wide disparity in schools but it still falls on the parents and the kids to stress the importance of an education (but that’s another discussion).
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I believe it! I have watched a few documentaries on poverty and education issues in the Appalachia area.
For many years, the majority of students in Baltimore attended catholic schools. The public schools didn’t even have busing in Baltimore because there wasn’t a reason to bus students for diversity. There were 4 magnet high schools and most of the high school students who were interested in an education went to those schools. I didn’t know anyone who lived in Baltimore City (Baltimore County is a different from the City) who sent their kids to public school. I worked with people and they almost all went to catholic schools; one woman had attended one of the 4 magnet schools.
Nancy Pelosi grew up in Baltimore’s Little Italy neighborhood. Her father was the mayor. She attended catholic schools for her entire education, so even the mayor’s children didn’t go to public schools. There was no funding for the public schools because those in charge sent their kids to parochial or private schools.
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@EconPop gives us a history lesson about the history of segregation and racial injustice in Baltimore, and it seems to have not been taken into account.
One failing kid - it may be the parents’ or kid’s fault, If there are 40,000 failing kids, using these same explanations doesn’t work.
this kid is in the middle of their class, relative to the rest.
The majority of Black and Hispanic residents of Baltimore send their kids to the public school system, while the majority of the White parents send their kids to private schools.
The majority of the White people who used to live in Baltimore have left, while the majority of the Black people did not.
I will also point to the racial and income demographics of this school system
I again urge people to actually read what @EconPop wrote, and to check it out if they don’t actually believe it.
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Baltimore city schools rsnk #3 in the country when it comes to per pupil spending, #3. There is no “money issue”. There is a corruption and accountability issue. The administration has consistently wasted the funding while incpetemt workers collect big paychecks. The schools are horrendous and the only one to blame for that is the people running the show. There is zero accountability. There is hardly and competence within the administration. It’s a perfect scenario for a disaster.
The schools are ultimately run by Baltimore City government. There’s another corrupt entity. I doubt anyone working for the schools is there for much more than collecting a nice paycheck. If they are it doesn’t show. The school administration has resisted all efforts to monitor or audit their spending/performance. The teachers union is happy to keep inferior workers employed while collecting large sums of money through dues. It’s truly a giant mess.
Yes, the kids and parents hold some responsibility. The local culture in much of Baltimore City leads many kids to be associated with drugs and gangs. Unfortunately for.msny of them they have little choice if they want to survive in these neighborhoods. It’s either join or get beat every day until you succumb.
The fact that this child with a 0.13 GPA is in the top half of the class and has continued to be promoted and moved on to higher level courses even as he failed the previous ones should tell you the system is completely broken. These kids are just shuffled through. They are mearly dollar signs to the system, a means to more funding. The schools get more funding for each kid enrolled. They don’t care if the kids actually show up, get good grades, are taught anything. Sadly, all they care about is that enrollment number gives them money that they can continue to bleed out to pay high salaries and waste on God knows what because they have successfully resisted auditing.
The Baltimore City government and the Baltimore City school administration is mostly minority run so I’m not sure it’s accurate to blame the issue on racism. It’s more appropriate to hold these leaders accountable and force them to finally address these ongoing issues that have plagued this school system for generations. If the current group isn’t capable then they need to be replaced. It’s criminal how these schools are being run and what is happening with these kids. I’m not sure why it’s being allowed to continue.
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I am aware of history of racial injustice in Baltimore ( and many other cities, @Mwolf, some far worse than Baltimore). That is certainly part of the problem, but a large part as well is the utter lack of interest of this kid, and his mother, in obtaining an education. They were both aware he wasn’t attending class, and did not care if he was doing the requisite work to pass. They did have some agency in this mess.
Your extrapolation of this student’s case to the entire public student population of the city is unwarranted. This kid was in the middle of his school class-maybe population 1000 at most? I think it is likely that somewhere in the public system there are kids who are attending class, working hard, and learning. Some will even end up in the Ivy League. Agency matters.
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We get kids in our school district whose parents work in Baltimore. They move here because of the schools (coupled with less expensive housing and taxes). Most of the school districts around us get them too, esp south of us. We live 1 - 1.5 hours from Baltimore in light traffic, so these parents are making quite a commitment. There was a time I had to drive to Johns Hopkins daily for treatment. If it was near rush hour it was like being a link in an ongoing chain.
There are better (public) schools in Baltimore for sure - not all are bad. But if you aren’t lucky enough to get into them, it’s cwap. (Lottery system for at least some.) Then there’s definitely a culture among some/many of dissing education and it’s been built up for years. It’s extremely tough for kids to overcome that.
Solving poverty/education issues doesn’t have a simple answer. I wish it did. The actual kids involved are as intelligent (or not) as any others anywhere - the full bell curve. I feel for them.
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This isn’t my take as a parent, but more as a concerned citizen in general.
It’s a complex set of issues and puzzle pieces. Unfortunately, many people are more interested in deflection than fixing it. Some people blame the parents and lack of funding (as someone else pointed out Baltimore actually has a high per pupil spend) and some people blame the school and political systems, and we go round and round while kids continue falling through the holes.
If you haven’t watched it yet I recommend watching Waiting for Superman. It was actually inspired by a story from Baltimore. That was more than a decade ago now.
Also, if you go to ASCD.org and search on Grace Pilon, there is an article about the success of a The Workshop Way at the Daneel School in New Orleans. I offer it as an example because in that scenario it was the same set of students, parents, neighborhood, historical policies, school staff, school district, politicians, etc before and after. The only thing that changed was the approach used within the school. The author, in another book, also describes a scenario at another school where just one first grade teacher used it and the students in her first grade classroom had better outcomes overall than students from the other first grade classrooms. This suggests that holding all other pieces constant and just improving one piece has an impact.
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I have a cousin who used to be a middle school teacher in a poor area – but not anywhere even remotely close to Baltimore. She had some students who were absolutely determined to do well and who worked hard. Most of them ended up doing very well at a very good local public university. She had some students who never did any work at all. She had some students who showed up drunk first thing in the morning. She had one student who would regularly show up drunk and pregnant first thing in the morning. This was in middle school.
Her students who worked hard did well with their lives. She kept in touch with many of them.
There is some limit to what the schools can do.
This was not Baltimore, but to a large extent people are people wherever you go.
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Don’t put words in my mouth, MWolf. Those are YOUR assumptions, regarding race, not mine, and I said nothing of the sort.
Many inner city school systems have magnet schools, or programs where families can ask that their children attend suburban schools, or charter schools - all sorts of options for kids whose parents care enough about their children’s educations to apply for a program, ANY program, just to get their children a chance at a better education. Just the fact that the parent had to make the effort to fill out an application selects for children coming from households where the parent cares about education. For this very reason, in my integrated town, EVERY child in town is automatically entered into a lottery for an extra, smaller school that was built - then it is the family’s choice, if they got a high enough number, to attend. If they don’t respond, the school district reaches out to them, with an interpreter, if necessary. That way they avoid excluding children whose parents don’t put in an application - there isn’t any application!
When the kids who come from households that care about education are all diverted into magnet schools, suburban schools, and charter schools, what’s left in the neighborhood public schools are kids whose parent couldn’t be bothered to put in an application. Clearly, if you read the news article, this parent did not follow her child’s progress in school, and never went to a parent-teacher conference, even though she admits to having been invited in. And if all the kids (of ANY race) whose parents value education choose private school, or move out of the city, or apply for all the other options (magnet, charter, suburban schools), then you wind up with neighborhood public schools having a student population whose parents do not place a high value on education - and hence a student with a 0.13 GPA ranked in the middle of his class (although I really find that hard to believe).
There was an excellent article in the Boston Globe a couple of years ago, about what had happened to the valedictorians of Boston’s neighborhood, non-magnet public high schools. Many of the valedictorians were Black or Hispanic, or they came from recent immigrant families, who had no idea about applying for seats in suburban schools, or magnet schools, or such. Unfortunately, fewer than one would expect of these valedictorians had managed to be graduated from college. Most of them seemed to have fallen off track somehow. It’s sad, but it reveals a lot about the challenges faced by these students. Meanwhile, the valedictorians from Boston’s exam schools, along with much of the student body from the exam schools, went on to do very well. What became of Boston’s brightest? - The Boston Globe
It’s a really tough problem, what’s going on in inner-city, racially and socioeconomically isolated schools. I don’t know how much money per child is being spent in Baltimore, but I can tell you that in much of the Northeast, the per-child funding is usually the highest in the inner city schools, when compared with similarly-sized neighboring districts, because of additional state funding directed towards these districts. So the issue is not necessarily money. Personally, I think that the issue can only be solved by scattered-housing integration. Build scattered public housing in the following manner: Buy up scattered vacant lots in inner-ring and outer-ring suburbs, and put up as public housing two and three family buildings built to blend into the neighborhoods. Pass a law making such public housing buildings exempt from single-family-home zoning. Scatter these multifamily, public-housing buildings throughout the suburbs. Then the children of these families will attend the good, neighborhood public schools because they LIVE in these good neighborhoods, without creating a concentrated area of poverty, with all the woes that come along with poverty.
But there will always be families who would be uncomfortable moving out of the inner city neighborhoods into suburban neighborhoods. There will always be families who will not value education, who will not seek education for their children, and who will not choose to move out of their “comfort” zone, into the suburban town with good schools, even if they are offered a good public housing option in one of those neighborhoods. And I suspect that no matter how many of these “scatter-site” public housing small multi-families are built, there will always be a far longer waiting list for them than units available.
It’s clear that building palatial, special-interest magnet schools in the inner city just doesn’t attract enough suburban kids to adequately integrate the inner city public schools. Some inner city public school students benefit by attending these schools, but there is always an application and never enough seats, so the kids without a parent who advocates for them to get into these schools is left behind, in the failing neighborhood schools, with a cohort of kids whose parents do not value education, worse for them that if no special options had siphoned off the kids who had a parent who cared enough to get them out.
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Something like that is already being tried, by having new housing developments reserve some (not necessarily specific) units for lower income people. However, there is commonly massive NIMBY resistance against such things.
Section 8 housing vouchers are based on a similar idea of integrating lower income people into existing housing in non-lower-income areas, rather than having them live in areas of concentrated poverty.
Of course, if some of the more motivated people move out of the lower income areas, then the lower income areas become even more concentrated poverty. Basically the same thing as what you are saying with low performing school districts where the more motivated parents sent their kids to private or magnet schools, except now it is with where people live.
Note that not all “suburbs” are non-poor areas, nor are all “inner city” areas poor areas.
There are also people in non-poor areas who are uncomfortable with even small numbers of poor people moving into their areas (using the housing programs described above). Similar can also be said when substituting “poor” for some race/ethnicity (even if not poor).
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Segregation and racial injustice in 1865-1920 was hardly unique to Baltimore. Other cities are not the disaster that Baltimore is today.
Pointing to history of >100 years ago in no way excuses the failures of city leaders of the last 30 years.
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I said it was “a start”. Also, I mentioned events that happened 40 and 50 years after 1920. Further, for those disinclined to accept these truths, it doesn’t really matter whether the seeds for the current troubles in Baltimore occurred 100 years ago or 10 years ago.
I did not mention more because I knew that anyone who was truly interested would use my recommendation as a starting point. I also knew that anyone who falsely believes other reasons will not pay attention whether I list one reference or one hundred. As someone posted before retracting what was obviously a dog-whistle comment: You can lead a horse to water …
I can present the evidence. I can’t force anyone to actually read it. It’s really mostly self-explanatory for anyone who actually reads (or skims) it.
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