Forget It Jake, It's Baltimore

John Sexton at Hot Hair, 41% of Baltimore high schoolers have a GPA below 1.0. At least they don't grade on the curve, right?

This story comes from the same reporter at Fox 45 in Baltimore who published multiple stories earlier this year about the failures at Augusta Fells high school. Monday he published a story based on new documents that provide the GPA of every one of Baltimore’s 20,000 high school students. Incredibly, 41% of all students now have a GPA average below 1.0.

Project Baltimore obtained a chart assembled by Baltimore City Schools. The chart shows the average GPA for every high school grade in the city – freshman through senior. In the first three quarters of this past school year, according to the chart, 41% of all Baltimore City high school students, earned below a 1.0 grade point average. In other words, nearly half of the 20,500 public high school students in Baltimore earned less than a D average.

Baltimore schools were never doing that well but appear to have been hit hard by COVID lockdowns and the remote learning that followed.

During the second quarter of the 2019/2020 school year, just before COVID hit, 24% of high school students had a GPA below 1.0. Now, it’s 41 percent.

City Schools declined an interview but told us in a statement,” Consistent with the experience of many school districts across the country, the COVID-19 pandemic created significant disruptions to student learning. As early as the summer of 2020, City Schools identified large numbers of students with decreases in their grade point averages and classroom performance when compared to past performances.

The full spreadsheet is visible for a moment in the video report below. It shows that seniors were doing the best among all high schoolers and freshmen were doing the worst. Looking just at freshmen, who would have started school last fall, more than 51% are below the 1.0 threshold. . . .

How is this possible? Perhaps it’s because Baltimore is a relatively impoverished area and it’s schools aren’t receiving the resources necessary to make better outcomes possible. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. In fact, Baltimore has the 3rd highest spending per pupil in the nation among major school districts.

But it's Baltimore, so the chances of the money actually being spent on education and not being siphoned off into graft and corruption is fairly small.