This story could bring tears to your eyes. In Baltimore, Maryland, there are 23 schools in which not one single student tested “proficient in math.”
Can we all agree these are schools that aren’t proficient in teaching math — or just about any course, for that matter?
A Fox News investigation calculated that Baltimore spends an average of $21,000 per student. How could the teachers unions possibly spend that much money and accomplish almost no learning?
With a dreadful record like this, it would be natural to think Baltimore must have the worst schools in the nation. Maybe not.
It turns out things may be worse in Illinois.
According to data from the Illinois State Board of Education reviewed by Wirepoints, an investigative journalism center, there were 30 schools last year, 22 of which are in the Chicago area, that failed to lift even one student to grade-level reading.
Wait, it gets worse. The state has more than 50 schools in which not a single student had achieved grade-level math.
Wouldn’t the proper response be to shut down these schools that are robbing children of an education?
Not in Illinois. In fact, the state educators rated the performance of several of these abysmal schools — are you ready for this? — “commendable.” This takes grade inflation to a whole new level of absurdity.
Of course, the decision by teachers unions and education administrators to shut down the schools for a year or more didn’t help. But the test results in many of these schools weren’t much better before the pandemic. And don’t blame a shortage of money. Many of these Chicago schools are spending up to $30,000 per child.
What we have here is a case of widespread educational child abuse.
All over the country, our public schools are delivering failing results. Last year, test scores nationally reached a several-decade low. The schools that had by far superior test scores to the public schools in almost every state were Catholic schools.
Now, think about this for a moment. If we really cared about the future of our children, wouldn’t we just contract out the nation’s thousands of rotten school systems to the Catholic dioceses around the country? Or throw in Jewish schools, charter schools, Montessori schools, home schools — or whatever works?
In most highly populated inner-cities where public schools are especially deficient, the mostly minority children can receive a better education in Catholic schools — at roughly half the cost of the public schools.
If there is a silver lining here, it is that there are some states that have rapidly expanded their school choice programs, allowing the education dollars to follow the students wherever their families choose to send them. Arizona, Florida, Iowa and West Virginia have already done so, with Texas, Tennessee and Utah considering bold moves toward universal school choice for families that can’t afford private alternatives.
Some 40 years ago, a famous national study on the condition of America’s schools warned of a “crisis of mediocrity” in education. Today, things have deteriorated so much that mediocrity would be an improvement and is considered “commendable.”
University of Chicago economists have estimated that the loss of education just from the COVID-19 shutdowns will cost the nation trillions of dollars of lost income and productivity from the diminished earning potential of our children throughout their whole lives.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste. And our public schools are wasting millions of minds week after week while they spend billions upon billions of dollars on Lord knows what. It’s time for bold new approaches. There are thousands of private and religious schools that have proven they know how to teach children, and instead of achieving 0% reading and math proficiency, they reach nearly 100%. Education reform is simple: Put our children, our nation’s greatest assets, in these schools.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economist with FreedomWorks. His latest book is “Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government is Devouring our Economy.”
This should come as no surprise since we are already aware of the national teachers’ unions position on education as evidenced by their concerns during the pandemic. Their handiwork became evident when parenst were able to monitor what their children were being taught and what they were not. What appeared was a black hole in the government/teacher union run education system, nearly two years, in some places, of retrograde performance which may never be made up and the accusation of parents as terrorist for questioning what their children were being exposed to in class and remotely! With all the equity being bandied about teachers are more proficient in indoctrination than ‘teachin readin, ritin and rithmatic let alone thinkin’! The Department of Education has been a failure, the unions are more interested in their political agendas and the students suffer. The sooner school boards understand they serve the public, students and parents, and not the woke mob the better.These administrators brought the ‘terrorism’ of an indignant public upon themselves.
100% right on Joe. The teacher unions are a waste and nothing but blood sucking.
Hence why for YEARS I have been saying EVERY DAMN ONE OF Those unions, needs to get gutted to the core.
AND EVERY MATH TEACHER In these schools needs to get a lobotomy!
I read a study last year where 628 students at a large, well know Baltimore high school were tested for reading. The results: 71 high school students were reading at a kindergarten level, 88 students reading at a first-grade level, and 45 are reading at a second-grade level. That’s about 1/3 were tested at 2nd grade or lower. Only 1.9% read at grade level. In another occurrence in Baltimore, a “student” passed just three courses in four years and had a 0.13 GPA. His mother was astonished that her son would not graduate. Where was she when this report cards were sent home? Our tax dollars hard at work. And we wonder why cities like Baltimore, Chicago, NYC, DC, LA, Seattle, Portland are in decline. These numbers don’t lie.
YET you can bet those kids, KEPT BEING graduated to the next grade, like lemmings on an assembly line.
So sad these students can’t function at anything close to grade levels. But we can take comfort that they are functioning at university-level in every Leftist, Woke, Gender, Social Justice, etc category you can imagine. The students won’t be able to function in any normal, living-life career but that’s not important. All they will need to do is collect government assistance checks, vote Democrat, jump to obey orders of their Democrat Masters, and loot/riot when necessary to disrupt Society. Who needs a good, high-functioning education for that? Such an education may even, GASP!, have students think for themselves.
Which is why i honestly think all this is NOT AN ACCIDENT.. ITS being done on purpose..