Maryland, My Maryland

Or Forget it Jake, It's Baltimore. John Sexton at Hat Hair, Maryland NAACP calls for conference to fix problems in public schools

Fox 45 News Baltimore published a story yesterday about plans by the NAACP to demand improvements in Maryland public schools.

The Maryland NAACP is preparing for what could be a historic moment in improving the public education of African American students. The civil rights group says it’s called a conference with public school leaders on June 15 and 16 to find solutions that will work immediately, not 10 years from now.

The Maryland NAACP released a public statement last week saying it’s attempted to work with state and local education agencies “to remedy the dreadful education circumstances” for African American children in public schools. The situation, according to the NAACP, is “intolerable” and getting worse.

The NAACP of Maryland is absolutely right about the conditions and the fact that they are both dreadful and intolerable. The group says it is focused on finding solutions for three issues: Lagging academic achievement, a breakdown in discipline and the treatment of special education students.

Fox 45 notes that it has reported on all of these issues as they affect Baltimore City Schools over the past six years. I’ve written about many of these reports. For instance, some Baltimore students are graduating high school without ever learning to read. At one especially bad high school, a student with a 0.13 GPA was found to be in the middle of his class. More recently, test scores showed there were 23 schools in Baltimore where not a single student was proficient at grade level math. The situation for reading wasn’t much better.

When it comes to discipline, there was a report last year where parents compared sending their kids to school to enrolling them in a fight club.

“I knew the transition from elementary to middle was going to be a difficult one, but I was vastly unprepared for what would soon become my son’s reality,” said Sarah Valentine, a parent of a sixth-grade student, “Daily assaults, arson, deadly weapons and even shooting quickly replaced recess and circle time. My once carefree son now consistently has to worry that he will fall victim to an act of violence,” Valentine said.

Christy Cachiaras said she has four children enrolled in Baltimore County schools and said two of her children were assaulted in the past week.

“It feels like sometimes we’re sending our kids to fight club. It’s really sad and scary. I would urge the board to think about some balances between protections for victims and protections for the offenders,” she said. “We do have a lot of mental health issues that are the result of quarantine and the pandemic.”

And when it comes to special education, the city’s schools are also dropping the ball.

The third point cited by the NAACP is “Inappropriate treatment of special education students”. In 2022, Project Baltimore told the story of four City Schools students with disabilities who could not attend school without a nurse…

All four students were not receiving the services that, by law, City Schools was required to provide. And when they filed complaints, the state found City schools violated their federal education rights.

I think the urgency the NAACP is showing is good but I do wonder what the group is willing to do in order to deal with these problems. The NAACP of Maryland lists “Eliminate zero tolerance; keep kids in schools” as one of its four “Educational Pillars.” That seems to be in line with concerns about the “school to prison pipeline.”

But this Fox 45 report connects a rise in discipline issues with a 98% drop in arrests at Baltimore City schools. That decline is almost certainly the result of activist concern about the “school to prison pipeline.” Two city schools police officers said that as a result of that, authorities were turning a blind eye to school violence. Logically, if students learn there are no real consequences to attacking teachers or other students they will less inclined to stop. In other words, I wonder if some of the very real problems the NAACP of Maryland wants to address aren’t the result of policies the NAACP of Maryland endorses.

Of course, the part of the story nobody wants to talk about is that this is largely a problem in the relatively poor, heavily urban, Democrat controlled, predominantly black and brown areas in the Baltimore and Baltimore County, Prince George and Charles County. The schools elsewhere, in more suburban, and rural areas, are often pretty good. While I'm not saying it isn't possible to make policies to improve the underperforming schools, I don't think conference among the worst offenders is likely to make a significant dent. A population transplant might.