“It’s true that 23 Baltimore schools had no students proficient in math, but there’s more to the story,” reads the headline — so you know that what’s coming is a diversionary word-salad effort to blame failing public school systems on anything other than something wrong the students, teachers, and/or administration.
Via The Baltimore Sun:
Imagine the flip of a coin. On one side you end up as a student attending Walt Whitman High in Bethesda, one of the best schools in the state. The other you become a student at Reach! Partnership School, where a recent report from Fox45′s Project Baltimore found there were no students proficient in math. This claim was presented, without examination or context, side by side with the community outrage that it has rightfully sparked. Our schools are failing — however, the why of this story is as important as the what.
We know that many factors affect student performance, including class size, funding and even the backgrounds of students.
Via WBAL:
According to test results, only 20% of Maryland students are proficient in math, and that number is much lower in Baltimore City. City Schools CEO Sonja Santelises explained why.
Santelises spoke with members of the Baltimore City Council Thursday night. She said chronic absenteeism is one part of the problem, but also said teachers need more support…
The city council’s Education, Workforce and Youth Committee held a hearing specifically about math scores in city schools after recent state test results showed 23 schools had zero students proficient in math.
Santelises said the pandemic is largely to blame.
She showed math scores are down across the state. Overall math proficiency is at 20% in Maryland schools compared to 7% in Baltimore City. Santelises said she has visited many of those schools and talked to educators about the problem.
Having attended public school in Atlanta myself, I can testify that these statistical findings comport with my “lived experience,” as the leftists say.
There are many reasons that public schools fail so spectacularly, and much of the blame lies with the administration that either hires teachers who don’t care from the start or recruits bright-eyed, earnest idealists who end up jaded because of the soul-crushing bureaucracy and poor pay.
But, truth be told, in all fairness, there are many sincere teachers who, in the process of becoming cynics, genuinely try to instill the curricula into their students’ brains. They’re as varied in their personal industriousness and fidelity to duty as the general population, even if the public school teachers’ unions pamper them.
The greatest impediment to academic achievement in public school by certain segments of the population is, at the bottom of the analysis, the culture of the students themselves — passed down to them by their parents — that is largely indifferent toward, if not outright hostile to, academic achievement as a concept of White Supremacy™.
There is no world in which a massive, sprawling bureaucracy such as the public school system, active in various levels of government, starting with the feds at the Department of Education, functions optimally without heavy parental involvement.
Parts of Asia are far more impoverished, from a purely material perspective, than any American inner city. Yet the people retain respect for the immense cultural value of prioritizing education. Parents and teachers collude to enforce these cultural values using the carrot or the stick, as it were. And so their future generations excel in the global economy.
Parents need to be active as hell in the school systems for any of it to work. They need to force their kids to learn what they need to learn and not blame “racism” or whatever when they don’t. They need to keep tabs on them via their teachers, whom they need to know at least as well as their next-door neighbors. They need to keep the administration in check when they try to force-feed their kids transgender propaganda or whatever fashionable Social Justice™ filth du jour.
