The Morning Briefing: Parents Should Be Able to Sue Public Schools for Malpractice

Top O’ the Briefing

Happy Wednesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Bostwick knew that things with Sheila wouldn’t last when she kept complaining that there was no “ham and cheese” Oreos flavor.

It would be nice to not have to frequently write about the negative, sometimes heartbreaking, things going in our publicly funded schools. I’m not on any sort of crusade to harangue public schools or denigrate teachers, but a lot of bad news keeps coming out of the teachers’ unions-dominated schools.

The problems often have a 21st century flare to them. There are myriad problems brought about by radical transgender policies. The BLM crowd is influencing curricula. And, of course, Critical Race Theory is being taught even though school districts and the unions keep getting Pinocchio noses while swearing that it isn’t.

Some disturbing news having to do with public schools in Baltimore is a little more, well, old school.

Athena wrote about it for us:

Project Baltimore, an investigative reporting initiative, analyzed the recent release of Baltimore City Public Schools 2022 test scores and made a shocking discovery: 23 of the city’s schools failed to produce a single student who was proficient in math. An additional 20 Baltimore schools had just one or two students who could do math at their grade level. These appalling failures account for over a quarter of the city’s 155 schools (elementary through high school) where students take the MCAP (Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program) tests.

I had to read that twice to make sure that I hadn’t just skimmed it and gotten it wrong.

This news would be upsetting if it had only been one or two schools, but 23 is unconscionable. The unions and the district executives no doubt have a list of excuses citing external factors at the ready, but this is on the people running the schools and teaching in them.

The familiar refrain from the teachers’ unions is that everything can be fixed with more money, as if all districts were operating on shoestring budgets. As Athena notes in her post, Baltimore public schools aren’t exactly searching the couch cushions for loose change:

This, even though the Baltimore school district hovers around third place for per-capita educational spending. “Baltimore is often ranked in the top three per capita spending districts,” writes top attorney and academic Jonathan Turley. “The total budget for Baltimore public schools is roughly $1.2 billion. That is for a city with a total population of roughly 600,000 (The greater Baltimore metropolitan area is 2.8 million). In 2015, the school population was 84,000 kids.”

The conversation on the left is always about the never-ending need for more resources in public education. There is rarely any talk of how those resources will be allocated. In situations like this, one wonders if any of them are being used to teach the children.

The biggest problem with taxpayer-funded public enterprises (the military being a bit of an exception) is that there is precious little accountability. The teachers and administrators who presided over this debacle aren’t going to be fired. If any are, it will be one or two sacrificial lambs, then it will be back to business as usual.

When people like me advocate for abolishing the Dept. of Education, it’s not done with malice or a hard heart. It would be a kindness to revamp public education in America.

There are tragic versions of the Baltimore story going on in several big cities in America. They’ve all got common themes: the city has been run by Democrats for decades, union presence is overwhelming, and the school districts are fairly well funded, they’re just misspending the money.

My dream of nuking the Dept. of Education isn’t going to come true, obviously. The only way to slightly weaken the power of the teachers’ unions and provide some sort of hope for kids who are mired in the well-funded but failing school systems is to keep fighting for school choice. I’ve written for years that it’s an issue that should always be a top priority for Republicans given that it is both desperately needed and an organic way to make inroads into the minority communities whose kids’ lives are being ruined by the failing public schools.

Fortunately, as I wrote last month, school choice is becoming a priority again for some Republicans.

The teachers’ unions, and the school administrators who are in frequent contact with them, don’t give a damn about the children in their charge. In a just world, we’d be able to lock up people who are deliberately dooming young children to a miserable future just so they can line their own pockets.

In this world, we’ll just have to keep pointing out that they’re pure evil and doing everything we can to weaken their influence.

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Cats have a precise method of walking called ‘direct registering’.

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