Forget It Jake, It's Baltimore

John Sexton at Haut Hair has another article on the continuing failures of Maryland's biggest city, and political powerhouse. Failure factory: Majority of freshmen at Baltimore high school read at an elementary school level

This story is already more than 2 weeks old since I missed it when it was published prior to Christmas, but I think it still deserves attention. Last year you may recall there was a local news story about a high school in Baltimore where a student with a 0.13 GPA turned out to be roughly in the middle of his class. In other words, nearly half the students in his grade had a GPA that was lower than 0.13. How was that possible?

The local reporter followed up that initial story with a whole series of reports which suggested the answer to that question was organized fraud by teachers and administrators. In fact, the school was enrolling so-called “ghost students” in classes that they never attended, apparently as a way to claim more resources from the state.

Hey, that's my money! 

The reporter kept digging and kept making more shocking discoveries. For instance, it wasn’t just the one bad high school where students were outright failing. After gaining access to documents that showed the GPA of every high school student in Baltimore, he found that 41% of them had a GPA below 1.0.

Then in September a report issued by Baltimore City Schools (which for some reason took two years to complete) concluded that ghost students and ghost classes were common at the high school that initially prompted all of this. Last month reporter Chris Papst came back with another report based on new documents which showed a majority of freshmen entering that high school were reading at an elementary school level:

The data we received is from before the COVID shutdowns. During the 2018-2019 school year, 48 Augusta Fells juniors took the reading test, 11 tested at a third-grade reading level. In that same year, out of 54 tenth graders tested, 27 were reading at a third or fourth-grade level. We don’t know where the other half tested. City Schools won’t release the data. Fifty-five freshman took the reading test during the 2017-2018 school year, and well over half, at least 39, were reading at elementary school levels.

I'll bet if you looked carefully at any number blue cities, you would fine similar levels of achievement. The good news is this means more than half of Baltimore's high school students were literate, at least minimally.