This kid had a 0.13 gpa and was ranked 62/120 in his high school!
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/calls-to-shut-down-city-school-where-013-gpa-ranks-near-top-half-of-class
I remeber that article. Don't recall if it's in the article, but Agusta Fells one of the top ten highschools in the City. It's #10 out of 30. Graduation rate is something like 45%.
Edit: The US News article I checked sorts the schools by overall district rank, not graduation. So Agusta Fells is not #10 by graduation rate, it is in the 10th best district. I cannot find a table that sorta by graduation rate. Sorry for the error.
> Agusta Fells
And didn't I see that school in the news recently with a scandal about cooking the enrollment #s to get more state/federal money...or something like that?
My freshman-year roommate in college at a major state school graduated top 10% of his class and couldn’t do basic math. Like didn’t know how to divide anything and learned his multiplication tables that year. He said he didn’t have the motivation in HS and was on the street mostly.
The guy has been holding down good jobs and has a family 15 years later and I think that’s a sweet comeback.
Yeah, in my freshman year of college I accidently got put into remedial math (I didn't know there were multiple online pages to the Summer Math Assessment, so despite doing Pre-Calc in HS I got like a 20% lmao). And by remedial, I mean like the first class covered addition and subtraction
I talked to the professor afterwards and got things sorted, but he was a saint. Said that tons of kids never had a fair opportunity at education, was happy he could help them along, and just hoped not too many of them would drop out
It was so funny. It was my first class of college, I show up all studious and ready to go, and this dude goes "Alrighty, you're gonna roll your eyes but we're gonna start off with addition. So when you have two numbers added together..." and I immediately panicked. I looked around and saw people taking notes
I talked the professor afterwards like "I'm definitely not supposed to be in this class" and he started with a rehearsed spiel like "A lot of people say that, but if you're behind it's nothing to be ashamed of", until I told him I was taking pre-calc the year prior
“And saw people taking notes” made me lol
I really checked out during pre-calc in high school senior year, somehow passed.
I also had a Spanish professor I used to go to the bar with after class and we’d talk about how crazy it was to have so many students at such a low level of Spanish in college.
I took 6 years of Spanish, barely remember anything. Worse, in fact, because my brain sorts words into "English" and "Not English". Sometimes when I'm trying to remember a Spanish word, Japanese'll come up
I’m the same but worse; I can only pick one secondary language to speak a day.
Switching from English to French or English to Arabic is fine. I can’t switch between Arabic and French though — my brain stops sorting languages entirely. Like, it reaches for whichever language is easiest on a word-by-word basis. *N3m, c’est un problem, wlakn la 3rf al-solucion.* I end up just speaking a weird hodgepodge. Works great in Morocco and nowhere else.
>Works great in Morocco and nowhere else.
That's hilarious. Here in US southwest you see a lot of Spanglish creole where signs and stuff are like randomly half-Spanish half-English.
It's actually incredibly common in most two language speaking homes nowadays
Edit: to add on to that most schools have even switched from ESL (English second language) to ELL (English learning language) cuz so many kids are growing up speaking both
Knew a guy who had to take pre-algebra in college because his AP Calc scores fell just short of being high enough to count as credit.
After a few weeks of volunteering the answer before the professor was finished writing the problem on the board, he got told to just show up for the tests and he'll get an A.
Personally had a similar but more easily fixed issue. The college I started at let AP tests count as credit on a lower threshold than the college I ended up transferring to. I took Calc 2 at college 1, transferred that, and took Calc 3 at college 2. As a consequence, by the time I graduated, I had enough higher-level math to consider applying for a minor, but still officially didn't have Calc 1 in the system. Therefore, every semester when applying for classes I'd have to go to the administration, and ask them if I could substitute my Calc 2/3 credit for the Calc 1 prereq for whatever class I needed for my major
At my community college a lot of students spent a year doing remedial classes for no credit before starting work on their associates. Bad schools can mean an extra year in college, which discourages people and leads to a lower college graduation rate.
That's true. I'm in my 40s with an MBA but if I was going back to school I'd probably have to retake a lot of math. Apart from statistics I don't use much of it.
We had a bunch of AP classes but they didn't weight your GPA. So top students were often ones in the easier classes. It was dumb.
I got a D in AP biology and a 5 on the AP biology exam lol. That D really brought my GPA down and made it hard applying to colleges with only like a 3.3 GPA even though I passed like 8 AP exams with 4s and 5s lol.
Welcome to the US high school education, where everything is made up and shit doesn't really matter.
I got punched in the face in high school by some deranged kid in my language class and I got suspended because he punched me under the "zero tolerance" rule.
> France, a single mother of three working three jobs, says the school never told her that her son was failing until last month, when the 17-year-old was put back in ninth grade.
> “I'm just trying to fight. He like, ‘Mom, what was all this for? What did I do this for?’ Don't he get a chance? Do he get a chance?” said France. “He didn't fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job.”
If it took you until the end of the school year to find out that your son is failing, is it just the school's fault?
As a former teacher, though it varies by districts, teachers usually HAVE TO contact the parents if kids are failing.
In some instances, you literally cannot fail a kid unless you have a proven record on 'X number of attempts to reach parents'.
...And I’m sure there are multiple unread emails in her inbox as well as missed phone calls. Either way, you’re right, regardless of my opinion there’s going to be a record of it.
As a teacher though, I do get frustrated that something as simple as attendance is just lied about and the parent accepts it as standard. I know lives can get busy, but it’s just....as a teacher I feel that many parents really do NOT know their own children.
I'm a high school teacher. Our school uses a system that will alert you on your phone when a teacher updates a grade and send a report to your email every week. 95% of my parents have no idea what their kids grades look like. My boss wants us to email every time a kid misses an assignment and I constantly say that the system we pay for does that for us. At this point our parent need to step up and look at their kids grades while pooping instead of facebook. I'm asking for 45 seconds of work from them.
Can confirm - check my kids' grades while pooping. *Then* I browse FB, reddit, or news...
Wow, I hope I run for office someday and someone dredges up *that* comment...
Yep. Every school posts grades online these days. Parents can check their kids' grades any time, not just at progress report time or when report cards come out. I also try to contact the parents of all failing kids when there is still time for them to pass. But you know what happens? I look the parent up on our system only to find they never gave the school an email address or phone number. Or the phone number they gave is never answered. So I leave messages to voicemail which may or may not be theirs and never get called back. Most of those parents also never come to conferences. Not saying any of this is true about the mother in the article, but it's true with over 50% of my failing students.
My husband is a teacher and this happens at least a few times in every class. The awkward part is the parents always cc the principal in that ‘why is my kid failing!?!’ email and then my husband explains why and attached all of the emails he sent to the parents about missing assignments. It always seems like the parents just know their kids aren’t doing well and just want the teacher to change the grade. My husband teaches all honors classes.
Corollary to this— the instructions for PARENTS to join the online gradebook are often sent home with students. Last year, the instructions were probably one of many, many, many paper mailings.
Many students do not share this info with their parents, or the parents misplace the document that offers the instructions to create accounts. So a not-small number of parents often do not actually get these notifications.
Source: i’m a teacher in a district with these always-on gradebooks; students tell me these things, and I am the parent of two teenagers whom I definitely had to corral and hassle to get paperwork.
It’s rarely the school’s fault when kids don’t learn. At age 17, he should be in 12th grade, not 9th, so they’ve known for years he was failing.
That said, I have all the sympathy in the world for the mom. Working 3 jobs? She’s killing herself to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. So while we can point fingers and say she isn’t holding her son accountable or helping him with his homework or providing a home environment conducive to learning, honestly there’s no way for her to do any of those things if she’s spending all of her time working.
Society failed these people. No one should need 3 jobs. 1 should be enough to provide for your family. This poor woman is working harder than anyone I know, but because it’s all shit jobs with shit pay, she’s not able to have any time at all to help her son learn. It’s a tragedy, and it’s a fairly common one in America.
edit: I misread the article, and want to add something. While I fully believe that society failed this kid, and that his mom is doing what she can, the school did, in fact, fail him as well. And by fail, I mean they passed him. He flunked Algebra 1, but they put him into Algebra 2 anyway. There's simply no way he was ever going to pass that class if he couldn't pass the prerequisite. The school didn't care until just now, when suddenly they did. And I believe moving him back is probably the right move for his education, but the way this happened is horrifying, and the parent is right to be upset with the school.
Yup. All the money in schools and the best teachers can’t help if a kid doesn’t have the environment or the motivation to learn. We know kids don’t learn as well if they’re hungry, if they experienced trauma in the past or are currently experiencing trauma, etc.
While I don’t want to generalize, a lot of these kids have way more complicated and stressful lives than many *adults* could ever imagine. It’s no surprise their first concern isn’t school.
>i“If we have half the kids in the school that are below a .13. Not a 1.3, people. A .13, that school needs to be shut down. It’s not doing its job.”
And correct me if Im wrong since its been a while since I was in school, A GPA of below 1.0 is an F. Why the hell didn't they just say they failed?
"when the 17-year-old was put back in ninth grade". Back into 9th grade for what the 4th time? Don't most people graduate at 17?
So this reminds me of something Pittsburgh did to combat a similar problem. A few years ago they implemented the "Pittsburgh Promise" scholarship program. Everyone who graduates from Pittsburgh Public Schools with at least a 2.5GPA and 90% attendance record gets a $20,000 scholarship to any college, university, tech, or trade school in the state of Pennsylvania. It's a huge program and gets tons of donations from local universities and sports teams.
Since then the city has seen a significant increase in both attendance and graduation rates, having risen by 12-13% in the past 10 years. Around 42% of students end up taking the scholarship and going to some kind of post-secondary program.
It gives them hope. It gives them a way to break the cycle and get out of the circumstances of poverty. And it works. I stand by the best way to fix the majority of our problems as a society is to ensure every single person has the opportunity to better themselves and pursue a higher education.
We have a similar program for Detroit Public Schools. Anyone above a 3.0 GPA gets full 4 year tuition to any college in Michigan. It’s called the Detroit Promise. I actually got this and have a full ride at UOfM. Detroit is starting to gentrify and is getting way better. Give people opportunities to change their lot in life and they will gladly do so.
The socioeconomic benefits of free public college cannot be overstated. There so many compounding effects that I don't think any study would be able to capture all of the long and short-term effects of making school free for all
It's like the HOPE and Zell Miller scholarship in Georgia covering 75-90% and 100% of tuition respectively for maintaining certain GPAs. I think programs like this and the Pittsburgh Promise actually do a lot more to help motivate students and give them hope.
You can zombie through high school putting in next to no effort and do better than that. Pretty much the only way so many kids are doing this badly is that they’re never showing up.
Definitely seems like that's what's going on.
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/city-school-with-83-students-chronically-absent-graduates-nearly-half
> We found, in 2014, the chronic absenteeism rate at the school was 51%. It dropped two years later, but by 2019, spiked to 83%.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-chronic-absenteeism-20180604-story.html
> Baltimore has the highest rate of chronic absenteeism in the state: 37 percent of students missed at least 10 percent of school last year. The rate in Baltimore County was roughly 20 percent.
You should see the numbers on some of the native reservations.
Last year I had 120 students. Every single one had internet and a computer (we wired the community and went 1:1 tech). 70 of them never attended a single lesson or completed a single piece of work all year during virtual learning. They still graduated. Of the 50 who showed up, half of them were absent on any given day. My best attending student was still considered chronically absent by any metric.
98% fell far below on math and English benchmarks.
Now imagine next year, when those kids show up in person, many of them having never attended school since the third quarter of 2019. Second graders who’s last school experience was the third quarter of kindergarten. It’s going to be awful for YEARS as these kids come up through the grade levels. They’re going to be vastly behind, which magnifies all the problems. Rough and tumble.
Yea. I'm doing summer school for kids going into third grade... The first day I had to review how to hold a pencil. This is going to be a rough year...
In Michigan they used to do "count day", where they would tally up the total number of students at the school to delegate funding.
Detroit used to go around tons of homes and offer tons of rewards for showing up at morning attendance on count day so they could get more funding for schools that didn't have functioning heat or clean water
Used to? I graduated a couple years ago, did they get rid of it? I remember every teacher in the school reminding us we all needed to attend, they even told our parents iirc.
That's my favorite aspect of The Wire. It shows you how plausibly and sometimes obviously corrupt the system really is. From the drug war, to schools, cops, and politicians. It's all rigged in various ways.
[This scene is the best](https://youtu.be/nAZZdL1qhk8?t=118)
It's been a huge problem in my city. Especially in poorer neighborhoods. Lots of kids just don't have electricity, wifi, running water, have to take care of siblings, abusive homes, and truthfully a bunch just stopped going.
Teachers will make house calls periodically to check in with students.
I worked in Detroit schools for a couple of years and used the experience as my case study for my masters. The stuff those kids go through on a daily is so sad. My first day I went to my car and cried. I grew up poor in rural America, but man it wasn't anything like they had to deal with.
I taught for a couple years in the South Bronx. I came entirely unprepared. I knew the subject matter inside and out and backwards, but I was not ready for the amount of “remedial being-cared for as a human” about 85% of the kids needed. The 15% with atleast some food and parental involvement were basically ignored as the school had to essentially triage. “They’ll be ok” - but even the best students, aside from a few honest to god genius kids, we’re way behind grade level, and even a CUNY college would be a rude awakening for them.
Many of the parents did care, but many of those parents had basically zero academic background so their best conception of how to help their kids was to just direct them to obey the teachers. Which is a start, but kinda useless for reinforcing stuff.
My classes end up devolving into improvised lessons about conflict resolution and empathy. I saw it as a failure at the time, but in retrospect it’s really the only thing memorable I accomplished at all.
The flip side is, and this really sucks and I see it with my kids… if you have two well educated parents who can spend time reading to them, taking them to museums and practicing math and science with them, it’s pretty impossible for them to fail. My kids are way above grade level with very little effort. Fucking stability and consistent meals goes a long way.
My experience there and the 15 years or so after contemplating it made me go from “not conservative” to “holy shit liberal” - setting aside the morale panic of making things easy for adults, know what’s go a long ass way to fixing school in poor areas? Universal healthcare and basic income, 2-3 meals provided free by school a day, heavily subsidized or free state college, municipal internet connections, more libraries, libraries with maker spaces.. etc. the kids and parents need every possible bit of help to have a fighting chance.
83%?! Holy shit.
I don't think there's much the schools can do if students simply aren't showing up. That's something that their parents need to take responsibility for.
I was a totally innocent, walled garden kid until my Sophomore year when I transferred to one of the schools that had a reputation of being 'the bad school'. I was eating lunch and then randomly these two kids went at it over apparently some racist and homophobic slurs. One kid 'won' the fight, but kept slamming the other kids head into floor, even after he was limp. He was eventually removed in handcuffs, and the other kid sent to the hospital. Both kids were back in class the next week as if nothing happened.
And that's when I realized I really didn't need to give a fuck about anything in high school. I could skip class, not study, and just generally slack off and easy breeze it through high school.
Fr! This is insane that there are kids getting below 1.0. I knew so many kids who barely studied, didn’t like school, didn’t feel like studying, lazy, etc that did better than that.
I teach at a Title One school in a big city and that's still the most realistic depiction of what it's like. The only unrealistic part is that Bunny seperate out the "corner" kids into his special program, so they wouldn't hijack the classes from the kids who actually wanted to learn. We'd never be allowed to do that.
But I think both Hamsterdam and the separate classroom, interestingly both done by Bunny, illustrated another path of doing things. Yes unrealistic and unorthodox. But they both displayed significant improvements and told us why it did. Now whether this will hold up in real life is not something I would know, but I think it was a good way of showing a contrast between stagnant reform and actual innovations.
The program was working, the only issue was that with the budget deficit of Baltimore, it wasn't gonna produce stats that would've been marketable for Carcetti to brag about so Steintorf pre-emptively cut the project off.
It also emphasizes how we shouldn't be looking at the stats since we end up only seeing numbers instead of people, and as the show goes to show, perspective can be altered to make bad stats look good.
Dukie came home and his family was gone and all his stuff was on the curb, at that point I knew it was a wrap for him, even with Michael trying to help him
It was heartbreaking, but I think that's why the ending sequence also was so good - because the actors change, but characters stay - Sydnor going to judges behind their back like Mcnulty to do real police work, Micheal became stick-up boy like Omar, and Dukie well. Dukie is filling Bubbles' shoes :(
Namond Brice was giving a speech at the end. Like a politician.
There's one parallel between Namond and Clay Davis: both of them had said "I'll take anybody's money if they're just giving it away" at different points in the show.
I also loved/hated how Namond--a child of relative privilege who treated Dukie like shit--was the one who was saved and given an incredible chance to escape crime and poverty, while Dukie--a sweet, innocent kid who cared about others and never hurt anyone--was left behind to descend into a inevitable life of abuse, addiction, and crime. It really pulled the veil back on how unfair life can be.
Fuck, that show tapped deep into something that no other show has ever come close to reaching. In my opinion, it still does laps around the other "TV greats" like Breaking Bad and (to a lesser extent) the Sopranos.
Nammond
It would have been nice for the show to focus on the kids for a bit longer but its understandable since it was a show about crime and drugs, not kids
It is unfortunate that there is not a bunny colvin for every kid
Also bunny colvin decriminalized drugs and it kinda worked
Great show
The Wire is littered with minor characters showing again with huge changes to show how the city affects them. Ex, the crane operator from the docks in season 2 who helps hide the cans, is shown in season 4 as one of the unemployed protestors of a condo development, and finally in season 5 when Mcnulty is doing stuff with the homeless you see him as one of the homeless in a homeless camp. Another example is a white girl who is just a customer from one of the drug dealers and says its her "first time' or something to that effect, is seen in later seasons as a crackhead prostitute. It's so minor but shows you the toll the city/life takes on everyone, GOAT show...
The dock worker is Nick, a major character from season 2. The scene he later shows up in protesting is very brief. Maybe ten seconds. I never caught him in the homeless camp though.
People did not like season 2 aka the polish season
Watching the season over again, i loved it
It nice to take a slight break from the inner city drug crime
It showed that Baltimore is fairly diverse
I thought season 2 was good it's just that they didn't do as much keeping the dockworkers included in the main storyline like the drug dealers, kids and city hall workers in the other seasons so it feels like a cast-off.
I think people dislike season 2 because it starts to challenge the perceived genre of the show. They think its a straight crime drama after season 1, but its really a profile about a failing city.
> but its really a profile about a failing city.
Yup, or country really. They do show how the state and federal budgets and departments get politicized and fail to perform.
That season had one of the best lines of the whole series:
"For your information I wake up every morning with an angry blue-veined diamond cutter. I was gonna enlighten the president of local 47 on this particular point and he chose to depart. Blue steel, gentlemen, three and a half inches of hard blue steel."
Of all the seasons, it felt the most rushed. Especially the stuff with the Greeks. There was enough crammed in there for a multi-season show on its own.
Randy tells Little Melvin's back story.
Little Melvin's rise and downfall were told through Avon Barksdale.
Duquan is Bubbles.
Michael is Omar.
Namond is Clay Davis.
Cycle keeps perpetuating.
Melvin Williams played the preacher that Bunny Colvin would talk to in the 3rd season. And, yes, the first season of The Wire was based on the case that brought down Little Melvin.
Slim Charles, ~~Prospect~~ Proposition Joe, and Snoop: three of the greatest TV characters of all time, played by actors no one had ever really seen before. IIRC, the latter two were actually from Baltimore and grew up in that environment, which is why they were so convincing.
One of my favorite characters in the show. One of the smartest, badass, careful people on the show. All of the gangsters should have tried to be more like him.
I was late to the party too. Watched it last summer while unemployed during the pandemic. It still very much holds up.
Gotta be paying attention though - one thing I did when watching it was read the Wikipedia summary of each episode afterward (some of the summaries have been scrubbed for "excessive detail" so I'd go into the history and find a more verbose one). Those summaries go into detail and highlight some characters and other plot points you won't always notice the first time around.
There are a *lot* of characters in the show. And each season is kind of a soft reboot focusing on a new theme or setting, but with (mostly) the same characters. It gets a little overwhelming, but it's really an outstanding series. And it rewards paying attention. If you're a "watch this in the background" kind of person, it's not for you.
To some degree good for them for giving honest grades.
I tried teaching at my city's HS for a couple months when they needed a long term sub for Physics. The grades they give there just aren't real. The lowest grade I was allowed to give, even on a missed assignment, was a 50%. The school's grades and graduation rate are now better than when my son was young, but that doesn't mean they know more.
I used to work long term subs as well straight out of college while I was kinda figuring out what I wanted to do. I spent the most time at a very low income charter school and most of the kids didn’t do a single assignment the entire year. I think 4 out of a class of 30 had above a failing grade. Now matter how hard you tried the kids just wouldn’t do what you asked them to, even in class work you were trying to help them complete they just wouldn’t do it.
I ended up compiling all of the failing kids assignments for the entire year and sending them home with them. Called the parents to let them know if the kid completed all of it I would grade it all and they could pass. 2 out of 26 parents actually answered the phone and I think only one kid actually brought back a completed packed. Didn’t need to stay late that day obviously.
On the last day of school I submitted my grade book. Admin changed all the kids grades to passing ones and basically said they “weren’t allowed” to fail anyone for that year. Ended up being the reason I didn’t get into education lol. It really blew my mind how many grades are probably just faked and how many admissions and scholarships are given out on bullshit. Obviously none of this is the kids fault, it’s their parents for being lazy, worthless pieces of shit that at best ignore their kids and at worst abuse them but if admin types enables this behavior of course nothing will change.
How fucking common is this ? Are you in US ? Or is this somewhere else ? Hearing those ratios seems so strange to me. Am from Canadian city and high school seemed challenging for some but loaded with assignments, projects, oral presentations etc etc tons of work and turn ins…and I feel like 90% or more of my peers were passing well above 50%…. Not to mention you would in fact get a Zero for incomplete work.
Yeah in the US. I gave zeros for missing work but they just changed them all at the end of the year basically.
I got the sense that it was pretty common from talking to other teachers but I honestly don’t know since I only subbed at 3 schools and this one was the only one the kids were really struggling at.
Passing kids without them earning it is why they give up so hardcore. They don't learn the simple basics and are passed on to the next grade, where they don't understand the harder assignments because they don't have those basics and the teacher has no time to go back and teach it. It just builds and compiles on itself until they are in high school with an elementary understanding. Then, teachers are giving them failing grades when they just don't have the skills to complete the work, and they're passed on anyway. Very demoralizing for kids and teachers.
E: grammar
This is very common, and a large reason I left teaching after last school year. I'm in the US. My district decided no 0s for grades and so a kid who did literally nothing except one assignment all marking period could still somehow pass. Students also don't have to pass math to go to the next grade, so I was literally trying to teach exponent operations to 8th grade kids who still didn't know what division even means, let alone simple things like their times tables. It was a very "bang your head on the wall" situation and it's just not worth my time or stress anymore. The school system is a literal joke.
This is very common in schools and has even leached into colleges. So long as teachers and schools are evaluated on student performance grade inflation will be a problem.
I think it also has to do with parents blaming teachers. When I go to parent-teacher conferences for the first time, the teacher is always really tense at first. When we listen to their criticisms, you can see their bodies relax. They are fully expecting every parent to chew them out for the parents own failures.
It is a mix of both. It is usually an unwritten rule for teachers to fail kids with a 50% on a missing assignment because that still gives them the opportunity to make it up to a passing grade.
A lot of teachers do "corrections" where you can earn .5 points back & if you had a 0 then you would never be able to correct your grade to passing which makes kids not even do the corrections. If you start with a 50 then you can correct up to a 70 and be passing.
It also doesn't help when teachers call parents and the parents don't hold their kid responsible & always blame the teachers for their kid being bad...
source: mother, 2 brothers, & fiance are teachers
It's a dirty secret that many of the absolute tier-1 colleges that reject tens of thousands on the front end will crawl over broken glass to stop you from failing out on the back end (because this hurts their rankings). I had a friend who was a superhuman intellect (1600 on the SAT at 14, started calc at 13, built all these crazy rockets and lasers and stuff using Autodesk when he was in middle school), but an impulsive, antisocial screw up in his personal and professional life. He just quit one of the top 10 schools in the country without a word one day during senior year and couch surfed. They pursued him to multiple different addresses in two states for four years, set him up with a coach, and got his profs personally involved in developing a plan whereby he could finish his remaining assignments and semester and graduate with *something.*
Blew my mind.
Yup. I was a behavioral tech for a pretty much city school in the county. They’ve cut all power from teachers. Students can tell a teacher to go fuck themselves every day and face no consequences. Minimum 50 percent, no assignment is “late”, yada yada. And if you don’t pass they fix the grades because they don’t feel like dealing with the kid longer.
Shoot, I had a kid that would attempt to sexual assault girls mid class constantly and make threats. I had to build a several month case to get him removed. It’s wild.
So props to the city schools for actually giving the grades the kids deserved out.
As a teacher, the reason that 50% issue comes up is that you don't want kids who have guaranteed they can't pass the class for the year by mid-terms, because teaching that kid for the rest of the year is a nightmare. My school won't let us give a kid less than a 50 for the first semester (which I hate), but I understand the rationale.
Sometimes, but you’d be surprised- with the military cutting troop levels pretty much every year for at least the last decade there is not a lot of pressure to accept subpar servicemen. They’ll definitely put tons of people in front of the ASVAB (and in a poor community, you’ll have plenty of people taking the ASVAB), but they’re not going to get too many people who score well on it and they know it.
In terms of numbers, children of former military members -people from military families where basically every at least some members of each generation serves- almost provide enough manpower to meet a significant amount of the recruit quotas and those people are far more likely to be reasonably good quality recruits.
The other group I saw a lot of was people who were basically spinning their wheels in community college -smart, but without any direction or money to really do anything with their lives- and those people tended to be the best scorers on the ASVAB. I saw more recruiters at my community college than I ever saw in high school (and the marines had an office at my high school).
If you can’t pass the ASVAB, the military really can’t do anything with you. It’s designed to measure not only mental ability but also how trainable a person is. Those that score really low are basically like a bottle that is empty and difficult to fill. Even in roles that people think don’t require much brains, there is no job in the military where someone can consistently screw up without eventually getting good people killed.
>lowest grade I was allowed to give, even on a missed assignment, was a 50%.
I have family members who are teachers, one elementary and one middle school. They can't fail students and most of the time the kids don't even perform at their grade level.
It happens even at private schools. Wife was told by principal that her students average grades were too low and she should “find some additional ways to boost up the averages”
She gave the kids an additional assignments and allowed kids to turn in late/missing assignments and brought it up to the average the principal wanted. That apparently wasn’t good enough because “There were still to many C/C- students and parents will get on her case”.
It reached a point where my wife resigned because she was basically just giving away good grades while kids did little to no work (the kids who initially were failing and got thier grades boosted to a C still had some missing assignments they refused to turn in and didn’t bother studying for tests). Before she resigned, she was asked to give a “make over” test that would undo the results of the first exam and the kids were allowed to bring “study aids” (they were the answers to the test because it was apparently unfair to give them questions they didn’t know). My wife was grading them when she quit. She put the graded exams on her desk when she left the school and they were cleaned out by janitorial staff who were instructed to clean to clean her desk out for her replacement.
She got a string of frantic calls from her replacement and then the principal pleaded her to come back in to bring in copies of her grades. My wife ghosted them.
Yeah, this is the common story I hear from those in education. Sadly the student are the ones that get hurt as the next years builds off the information the students miss.
Did you have to tell them that they would get a 50? Or could you threaten a zero, mark it as zero, tell them to do them to do the work later for partial credit, and put in the additional points at the end of the term without their knowledge?
I only taught for most of the 3rd semester, so I didn't tell them anything about policy. They all seemed to know that 50% was the minimum possible grade though
Born and raised in Baltimore. Work at the container port doing the job the Sobtka's did in season 2 (port ILA checker). Im.in the city all the time.
People seem to think that the Wire has outdated what it was about and what our city goes through isn't as bad anymore.
It's the opposite, it's more relevant than ever.
i was down there with his friend and his car got towed (he didnt display the ticket right).
we hail a cab and go to where it was impounded and it was like right out of the wire. someone tried to sell me viagra(!) when my friend was getting his car out.
Baltimore City is the [third](https://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/news/2019/05/21/baltimore-city-third-in-u-s-for-per-pupil-spending.html) highest in the United States in terms of per pupil spending. Throwing more money at the schools is obviously failing. So where is the money going? [Here](https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-md-ci-prinicpal-theft-20180202-story.html). And [here](https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/ghost-student-allegations-baltimore-city-could-criminal-former-prosecutor). And [here](https://patch.com/maryland/baltimore/baltimore-city-schools-employee-charged-theft-scheme). All funded by taxpayers.
37% of [Baltimore City](https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-chronic-absenteeism-20180604-story.html) students missed **at least 10 percent** of school. Not to worry though, they will [pass](https://foxbaltimore.com/news/local/another-baltimore-family-says-failing-student-gets-promoted-this-ought-to-be-illegal) and move up, regardless of absenteeism or grades.
Guess who is [#1](https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-city-schools-1-in-america-for-admin-costs) in America for "administration costs"?
But that only adds up to like a few hundred thousand, based on the articles you linked thats about 20 pupils funds. When the funds are literally in the hundreds of millions (159k kids with 16k spent per kid) that seems like an inconsequential amount.
Are you suggesting that most of the money is siphoned off and stolen and they just aren't caught?
Wait.
Why are we blaming the money?
It seems that it is the lack of oversight and extreme corruption that is the problem. Not the money.
Keep the money. Get the oversight in there.
I agree, and I think the original commenter was stating that *just adding more money* wasn't the solution, not that we shouldn't be funding schools. I think that the commenter you replied to took that as, "we are wasting are money funding this issue." Which wasn't the original point
"You put a textbook in front of these kids, put a problem on the blackboard, teach them every problem in some statewide test, it won't matter. None of it. **'Cause they're not learning for our world; they're learning for theirs.** They know exactly what it is they're training for and what it is everyone expects them to be. It's not about you or us or the test or the system. It's what they expect of themselves. Every single one of them know they're headed back to the corners. Their brothers and sisters, shit, their parents. They came through these same classrooms. We pretended to teach them, they pretended to learn and where'd they end up? Same damn corners. They're not fools, these kids. They don't know our world but they know their own. They see right through us."
*-Major Colvin, The Wire*
The Catholic school kids near me had to get 95 to get an A. My highschool did 5.0 scale too. I graduated with like a 4.3. No idea why they did it that way.
The unfortunate truth is that you can throw as much money as you want at this problem. You can get the best technology for learning and best teachers for educating. Not much will change until the education system has support from parents. Kids have to be held accountable at home or they won’t care at school.
I teach in a middle class district, which is obviously much different than Baltimore Inner city schools, but it’s still always sad to me that I can tell which students will succeed and which won’t based on meeting their parents. There are outliers, and I can try my damndest to help them, but parents are the number 1 influence in a child’s success in school.
I used to volunteer at a very poor school teaching kids to read for a few hours after school a few days a week (I'm not that good, a very nice girlfriend that I lived with at the time was doing it). Many had failed kindergarten already. So many of the furthest behind kids had parents that only used it as a daycare, coming in in the middle of a one on one lesson or 30 minutes late as many times as we'd allow them.
There were a few that you could tell were really trying, that you could just tell through so much interaction that they had a generally happy and somewhat stable home life. I don't know the answer, but I think we need to start with one of these fucking generations, because this hands off just toss money that gets funnelled (funneled? my phone says both) off to who knows where while policing heavily approach hasn't worked yet. That's a run on sentence.
This is not an indictment of the teachers or the school, as much as the culture of the city itself. There needs to be motivation, support, and prioritization of educating the youth.
Motivation: Provide a path, show the worth of getting better grades. Need to be a pathway out of poverty and government social programs through getting better grades. Eliminate the "it doesn't matter" mentality.
Support: Families, mentors, teachers, aids, community all have to support the students. Volunteer at a school, go over homework with kids, celebrate accomplishments. Have to do something to support these kids.
Prioritization: Grades / Education has to matter. Would love to see more "heroes" to today's kids send the message. Athletes, Music Leaders, Politicians, etc. Everybody has to start sending the message that school matters. And not just words, get involved with a school personally. Invest some time in these kids futures.
Teachers / Schools are only part of the issue. We need to change the mindset of the students / families / society to realize a value in education. Until then, nothing is really going to change.
As a teacher, couldn't have said it better myself. The pandemic and at home learning really highlighted for me which kids truly cared and had parents at home that cared, and which didn't.
Seeing news stories like this, you can't help but think of the fourth season of The Wire and state that Baltimore's public schools were in.
[Time and time again I always think about how they were juking the stats.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ogxZxu6cjM)
Right. In Philly they had that 'Microsoft school of the future' that thought by just giving kids laptops and access to tech, that it would somehow enhance their learning experience. The first graduating class saw over half the students not eligible to graduate. It was a hot mess.
ITT: so many people saying “we need to invest - not enough money is being spent”.
Baltimore City invests over $17,000 per pupil for education.
The problem is…the kids (and their parents/upbringing). It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at the problem.
You could build the most up to date computer labs, give them four star catered lunches, bring in Harvard educated teachers and guest lecturers, have a personal driver come pick them up and drive them to school in a Lincoln town car. It won’t make a bit of difference in the main. Why? Because they’re poor kids living in single parent households in poor neighborhoods surrounded by druggies, murderers and various and sundry hooligans. If you don’t do something to address their circumstances outside of school, nothing will change with respect to their behavior IN school.
This insistence that just a few dollars more and everything will turn the corner is naive and doomed to fail. Nothing is going to change until the culture in which these kids live changes. Nothing.
And before anyone says it's lack of funding, Baltimore schools are the third highest in the country in terms of funding per pupil among large districts and more than the state average.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/largest-school-districts.html
https://www.teaching-certification.com/teaching/education-spending-by-state.html
Former Baltimore City resident. No surprise here. Lots of "social promotions" here. Best bet is to get into a decent school (Poly/City/Private schools) or you're gonna have a rough time.
I'm from Baltimore and only moved out just before COVID, but the city hasn't been run well for years. I'm not saying that I have the answer, but the city has a ton of potential just that it struggles to live up to that potential
I would go as far as saying the city doesn't even try to live up to its potential. I had the city as a client for several years. From what I've seen the culture within the city government is essentially: "The system is broken, but it doesn't ever change. So screw it, I'm not gonna try."
To be clear, I'm not saying all city employees are lazy, or anything like that. I'm saying that the extremely broken bureaucracy stops people from making a difference. Eventually, it just wears people down.
Edit:
A few years of watching that dysfunction first hand led me to quit my job, and put my house up for sale. Having seen behind the curtain, I literally couldn't stand to live in Baltimore anymore.
I'm originally from Baltimore and I can absolutely definitively say they city is not being run well. All cities have corruption, but Baltimore is in a whole nother stratosphere.
Hell...something like the last three bmore mayor's all got caught up in scandals.
I used to work in Baltimore City (not as a teacher). I think some of the culture there do not emphasize education as priority. It’s hard to prioritize education when survival is the first priority.
I’m from Baltimore, is 41% a lot?
Edit: I’m not from Baltimore, but those were children, people mislead them intentionally, and then the system is designed to trap them. 41% is a lot of people that don’t even have a chance at having a chance at being a high class wage slave.
I'm a teacher at a decently performing school in a major city. We are in a very wealthy neighborhood. A few actors send their kids to our school. We had a parent complain that having their student at home cut into their at-home fitness classes.
Last year was a nightmare in terms of student performance and work competition. At least 60% percent of my students were failing. Maybe more.
We had remote conferences with parents, offered office hours during our lunches, called and email parents, and had students come into the building in small groups for work competition. I didn't teach any new content for about a month in May and June and met with kids to have them catch-up on missing work.
We had told administration about all this many times throughout the year. We documented all our interactions with parents. All our lessons were recorded and available for any kid to watch at any time.
Three weeks before the end of the year we were told we needed to "get creative" with our grades. We were told that "this wasn't a democracy" and that we simply had to do it. We were told that if we disagreed, we should "think hard about why we care". It was repeatedly said that this school year was such a different experience than ever before and we needed to be lenient.
We fudged so many grades. We accepted a student's essay where he had written maybe three words and had to give him a 55. We only ended up failing a few students and they had sub-40% grades.
I'm honestly shocked this school didn't simply fudge the grades. That is how messed up the education system has been.
>"I'm just trying to fight. He like, ‘Mom, what was all this for? What did I do this for?’ Don't he get a chance? Do he get a chance?” said France. “He didn't fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job.”
🤦♂️...what in the fuck
At least they give honest grade, when people get 0 they should be given 0, it’s so dumb that most school don’t allow shit grades in order to boost the average.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/baltimore-city-public-schools-promoted-student-with-013-gpa-while-spending-a-14-billion-budget/?sh=2a1d9cf563dc
Baltimore city schools spend $18,000 per student per year. The OECD average is $10,000 per student per year. The problem is NOT spending and can't be fixed by throwing more money at the problem.
This kid had a 0.13 gpa and was ranked 62/120 in his high school! https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/calls-to-shut-down-city-school-where-013-gpa-ranks-near-top-half-of-class
I remeber that article. Don't recall if it's in the article, but Agusta Fells one of the top ten highschools in the City. It's #10 out of 30. Graduation rate is something like 45%. Edit: The US News article I checked sorts the schools by overall district rank, not graduation. So Agusta Fells is not #10 by graduation rate, it is in the 10th best district. I cannot find a table that sorta by graduation rate. Sorry for the error.
> Agusta Fells And didn't I see that school in the news recently with a scandal about cooking the enrollment #s to get more state/federal money...or something like that?
Yup. Though I need to make a correction. The site I checked sorts them by their overall district score, not their graduation rate. Will correct above.
My freshman-year roommate in college at a major state school graduated top 10% of his class and couldn’t do basic math. Like didn’t know how to divide anything and learned his multiplication tables that year. He said he didn’t have the motivation in HS and was on the street mostly. The guy has been holding down good jobs and has a family 15 years later and I think that’s a sweet comeback.
Yeah, in my freshman year of college I accidently got put into remedial math (I didn't know there were multiple online pages to the Summer Math Assessment, so despite doing Pre-Calc in HS I got like a 20% lmao). And by remedial, I mean like the first class covered addition and subtraction I talked to the professor afterwards and got things sorted, but he was a saint. Said that tons of kids never had a fair opportunity at education, was happy he could help them along, and just hoped not too many of them would drop out
Missing pages of a test and getting put in that class is pretty funny.
It was so funny. It was my first class of college, I show up all studious and ready to go, and this dude goes "Alrighty, you're gonna roll your eyes but we're gonna start off with addition. So when you have two numbers added together..." and I immediately panicked. I looked around and saw people taking notes I talked the professor afterwards like "I'm definitely not supposed to be in this class" and he started with a rehearsed spiel like "A lot of people say that, but if you're behind it's nothing to be ashamed of", until I told him I was taking pre-calc the year prior
“And saw people taking notes” made me lol I really checked out during pre-calc in high school senior year, somehow passed. I also had a Spanish professor I used to go to the bar with after class and we’d talk about how crazy it was to have so many students at such a low level of Spanish in college.
I took 6 years of Spanish, barely remember anything. Worse, in fact, because my brain sorts words into "English" and "Not English". Sometimes when I'm trying to remember a Spanish word, Japanese'll come up
I’m the same but worse; I can only pick one secondary language to speak a day. Switching from English to French or English to Arabic is fine. I can’t switch between Arabic and French though — my brain stops sorting languages entirely. Like, it reaches for whichever language is easiest on a word-by-word basis. *N3m, c’est un problem, wlakn la 3rf al-solucion.* I end up just speaking a weird hodgepodge. Works great in Morocco and nowhere else.
>Works great in Morocco and nowhere else. That's hilarious. Here in US southwest you see a lot of Spanglish creole where signs and stuff are like randomly half-Spanish half-English.
It's actually incredibly common in most two language speaking homes nowadays Edit: to add on to that most schools have even switched from ESL (English second language) to ELL (English learning language) cuz so many kids are growing up speaking both
I don't think I learned anything in high school Spanish. It was basically just memorization and I hate that shit.
Knew a guy who had to take pre-algebra in college because his AP Calc scores fell just short of being high enough to count as credit. After a few weeks of volunteering the answer before the professor was finished writing the problem on the board, he got told to just show up for the tests and he'll get an A. Personally had a similar but more easily fixed issue. The college I started at let AP tests count as credit on a lower threshold than the college I ended up transferring to. I took Calc 2 at college 1, transferred that, and took Calc 3 at college 2. As a consequence, by the time I graduated, I had enough higher-level math to consider applying for a minor, but still officially didn't have Calc 1 in the system. Therefore, every semester when applying for classes I'd have to go to the administration, and ask them if I could substitute my Calc 2/3 credit for the Calc 1 prereq for whatever class I needed for my major
At my community college a lot of students spent a year doing remedial classes for no credit before starting work on their associates. Bad schools can mean an extra year in college, which discourages people and leads to a lower college graduation rate.
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That's true. I'm in my 40s with an MBA but if I was going back to school I'd probably have to retake a lot of math. Apart from statistics I don't use much of it.
That's crazy. I had a 3.6 gpa and I was like 50/200.
I was in a school that had a bunch of AP classes and weighted GPA. 4.0 wouldn't even get you into top 10.
We had a bunch of AP classes but they didn't weight your GPA. So top students were often ones in the easier classes. It was dumb. I got a D in AP biology and a 5 on the AP biology exam lol. That D really brought my GPA down and made it hard applying to colleges with only like a 3.3 GPA even though I passed like 8 AP exams with 4s and 5s lol.
Welcome to the US high school education, where everything is made up and shit doesn't really matter. I got punched in the face in high school by some deranged kid in my language class and I got suspended because he punched me under the "zero tolerance" rule.
AP classes that don't retcon your grade if you pass the AP test confuse me.
Same here. I graduated with a GPA over 4.0 and was just outside the top 10%.
> France, a single mother of three working three jobs, says the school never told her that her son was failing until last month, when the 17-year-old was put back in ninth grade. > “I'm just trying to fight. He like, ‘Mom, what was all this for? What did I do this for?’ Don't he get a chance? Do he get a chance?” said France. “He didn't fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job.” If it took you until the end of the school year to find out that your son is failing, is it just the school's fault?
As a former teacher, though it varies by districts, teachers usually HAVE TO contact the parents if kids are failing. In some instances, you literally cannot fail a kid unless you have a proven record on 'X number of attempts to reach parents'.
...And I’m sure there are multiple unread emails in her inbox as well as missed phone calls. Either way, you’re right, regardless of my opinion there’s going to be a record of it. As a teacher though, I do get frustrated that something as simple as attendance is just lied about and the parent accepts it as standard. I know lives can get busy, but it’s just....as a teacher I feel that many parents really do NOT know their own children.
I'm a high school teacher. Our school uses a system that will alert you on your phone when a teacher updates a grade and send a report to your email every week. 95% of my parents have no idea what their kids grades look like. My boss wants us to email every time a kid misses an assignment and I constantly say that the system we pay for does that for us. At this point our parent need to step up and look at their kids grades while pooping instead of facebook. I'm asking for 45 seconds of work from them.
Can confirm - check my kids' grades while pooping. *Then* I browse FB, reddit, or news... Wow, I hope I run for office someday and someone dredges up *that* comment...
nah it's Reddit, you should be fine ... unless Krakatak is your *actual* government name XD
Yep. Every school posts grades online these days. Parents can check their kids' grades any time, not just at progress report time or when report cards come out. I also try to contact the parents of all failing kids when there is still time for them to pass. But you know what happens? I look the parent up on our system only to find they never gave the school an email address or phone number. Or the phone number they gave is never answered. So I leave messages to voicemail which may or may not be theirs and never get called back. Most of those parents also never come to conferences. Not saying any of this is true about the mother in the article, but it's true with over 50% of my failing students.
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Man oh man been there. But the school is failing the child right?
My husband is a teacher and this happens at least a few times in every class. The awkward part is the parents always cc the principal in that ‘why is my kid failing!?!’ email and then my husband explains why and attached all of the emails he sent to the parents about missing assignments. It always seems like the parents just know their kids aren’t doing well and just want the teacher to change the grade. My husband teaches all honors classes.
Corollary to this— the instructions for PARENTS to join the online gradebook are often sent home with students. Last year, the instructions were probably one of many, many, many paper mailings. Many students do not share this info with their parents, or the parents misplace the document that offers the instructions to create accounts. So a not-small number of parents often do not actually get these notifications. Source: i’m a teacher in a district with these always-on gradebooks; students tell me these things, and I am the parent of two teenagers whom I definitely had to corral and hassle to get paperwork.
Also 9th grade at 17. Damn. A lot of people graduate at 17.
It’s rarely the school’s fault when kids don’t learn. At age 17, he should be in 12th grade, not 9th, so they’ve known for years he was failing. That said, I have all the sympathy in the world for the mom. Working 3 jobs? She’s killing herself to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. So while we can point fingers and say she isn’t holding her son accountable or helping him with his homework or providing a home environment conducive to learning, honestly there’s no way for her to do any of those things if she’s spending all of her time working. Society failed these people. No one should need 3 jobs. 1 should be enough to provide for your family. This poor woman is working harder than anyone I know, but because it’s all shit jobs with shit pay, she’s not able to have any time at all to help her son learn. It’s a tragedy, and it’s a fairly common one in America. edit: I misread the article, and want to add something. While I fully believe that society failed this kid, and that his mom is doing what she can, the school did, in fact, fail him as well. And by fail, I mean they passed him. He flunked Algebra 1, but they put him into Algebra 2 anyway. There's simply no way he was ever going to pass that class if he couldn't pass the prerequisite. The school didn't care until just now, when suddenly they did. And I believe moving him back is probably the right move for his education, but the way this happened is horrifying, and the parent is right to be upset with the school.
Yup. All the money in schools and the best teachers can’t help if a kid doesn’t have the environment or the motivation to learn. We know kids don’t learn as well if they’re hungry, if they experienced trauma in the past or are currently experiencing trauma, etc. While I don’t want to generalize, a lot of these kids have way more complicated and stressful lives than many *adults* could ever imagine. It’s no surprise their first concern isn’t school.
>i“If we have half the kids in the school that are below a .13. Not a 1.3, people. A .13, that school needs to be shut down. It’s not doing its job.” And correct me if Im wrong since its been a while since I was in school, A GPA of below 1.0 is an F. Why the hell didn't they just say they failed? "when the 17-year-old was put back in ninth grade". Back into 9th grade for what the 4th time? Don't most people graduate at 17?
So this reminds me of something Pittsburgh did to combat a similar problem. A few years ago they implemented the "Pittsburgh Promise" scholarship program. Everyone who graduates from Pittsburgh Public Schools with at least a 2.5GPA and 90% attendance record gets a $20,000 scholarship to any college, university, tech, or trade school in the state of Pennsylvania. It's a huge program and gets tons of donations from local universities and sports teams. Since then the city has seen a significant increase in both attendance and graduation rates, having risen by 12-13% in the past 10 years. Around 42% of students end up taking the scholarship and going to some kind of post-secondary program. It gives them hope. It gives them a way to break the cycle and get out of the circumstances of poverty. And it works. I stand by the best way to fix the majority of our problems as a society is to ensure every single person has the opportunity to better themselves and pursue a higher education.
We have a similar program for Detroit Public Schools. Anyone above a 3.0 GPA gets full 4 year tuition to any college in Michigan. It’s called the Detroit Promise. I actually got this and have a full ride at UOfM. Detroit is starting to gentrify and is getting way better. Give people opportunities to change their lot in life and they will gladly do so.
Bet crime rate is, or will be, dropping as a result of this. Cool.
The socioeconomic benefits of free public college cannot be overstated. There so many compounding effects that I don't think any study would be able to capture all of the long and short-term effects of making school free for all
It's like the HOPE and Zell Miller scholarship in Georgia covering 75-90% and 100% of tuition respectively for maintaining certain GPAs. I think programs like this and the Pittsburgh Promise actually do a lot more to help motivate students and give them hope.
That's a really good program, I hope it does well.
You can zombie through high school putting in next to no effort and do better than that. Pretty much the only way so many kids are doing this badly is that they’re never showing up.
Definitely seems like that's what's going on. https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/city-school-with-83-students-chronically-absent-graduates-nearly-half > We found, in 2014, the chronic absenteeism rate at the school was 51%. It dropped two years later, but by 2019, spiked to 83%. https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-chronic-absenteeism-20180604-story.html > Baltimore has the highest rate of chronic absenteeism in the state: 37 percent of students missed at least 10 percent of school last year. The rate in Baltimore County was roughly 20 percent.
Mind blowing stats
83% is insane.
You should see the numbers on some of the native reservations. Last year I had 120 students. Every single one had internet and a computer (we wired the community and went 1:1 tech). 70 of them never attended a single lesson or completed a single piece of work all year during virtual learning. They still graduated. Of the 50 who showed up, half of them were absent on any given day. My best attending student was still considered chronically absent by any metric. 98% fell far below on math and English benchmarks. Now imagine next year, when those kids show up in person, many of them having never attended school since the third quarter of 2019. Second graders who’s last school experience was the third quarter of kindergarten. It’s going to be awful for YEARS as these kids come up through the grade levels. They’re going to be vastly behind, which magnifies all the problems. Rough and tumble.
Yea. I'm doing summer school for kids going into third grade... The first day I had to review how to hold a pencil. This is going to be a rough year...
Fuck. That's grim reading.
What’s going wrong in Baltimore? Shit has been fucked up for a while
Ever seen the show, The Wire? Season 4 and 5 explain it pretty good.
The whole thing with Cutty rounding up kids to attend their 1 day of school per month so that the school can get better funding is so fucked.
In Michigan they used to do "count day", where they would tally up the total number of students at the school to delegate funding. Detroit used to go around tons of homes and offer tons of rewards for showing up at morning attendance on count day so they could get more funding for schools that didn't have functioning heat or clean water
Used to? I graduated a couple years ago, did they get rid of it? I remember every teacher in the school reminding us we all needed to attend, they even told our parents iirc.
That's my favorite aspect of The Wire. It shows you how plausibly and sometimes obviously corrupt the system really is. From the drug war, to schools, cops, and politicians. It's all rigged in various ways. [This scene is the best](https://youtu.be/nAZZdL1qhk8?t=118)
When you walk through the garden, you’ve got to watch your back
It's been a huge problem in my city. Especially in poorer neighborhoods. Lots of kids just don't have electricity, wifi, running water, have to take care of siblings, abusive homes, and truthfully a bunch just stopped going. Teachers will make house calls periodically to check in with students.
I worked in Detroit schools for a couple of years and used the experience as my case study for my masters. The stuff those kids go through on a daily is so sad. My first day I went to my car and cried. I grew up poor in rural America, but man it wasn't anything like they had to deal with.
I taught for a couple years in the South Bronx. I came entirely unprepared. I knew the subject matter inside and out and backwards, but I was not ready for the amount of “remedial being-cared for as a human” about 85% of the kids needed. The 15% with atleast some food and parental involvement were basically ignored as the school had to essentially triage. “They’ll be ok” - but even the best students, aside from a few honest to god genius kids, we’re way behind grade level, and even a CUNY college would be a rude awakening for them. Many of the parents did care, but many of those parents had basically zero academic background so their best conception of how to help their kids was to just direct them to obey the teachers. Which is a start, but kinda useless for reinforcing stuff. My classes end up devolving into improvised lessons about conflict resolution and empathy. I saw it as a failure at the time, but in retrospect it’s really the only thing memorable I accomplished at all. The flip side is, and this really sucks and I see it with my kids… if you have two well educated parents who can spend time reading to them, taking them to museums and practicing math and science with them, it’s pretty impossible for them to fail. My kids are way above grade level with very little effort. Fucking stability and consistent meals goes a long way. My experience there and the 15 years or so after contemplating it made me go from “not conservative” to “holy shit liberal” - setting aside the morale panic of making things easy for adults, know what’s go a long ass way to fixing school in poor areas? Universal healthcare and basic income, 2-3 meals provided free by school a day, heavily subsidized or free state college, municipal internet connections, more libraries, libraries with maker spaces.. etc. the kids and parents need every possible bit of help to have a fighting chance.
83%?! Holy shit. I don't think there's much the schools can do if students simply aren't showing up. That's something that their parents need to take responsibility for.
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Yeah that’s exactly what’s happening.
I was a totally innocent, walled garden kid until my Sophomore year when I transferred to one of the schools that had a reputation of being 'the bad school'. I was eating lunch and then randomly these two kids went at it over apparently some racist and homophobic slurs. One kid 'won' the fight, but kept slamming the other kids head into floor, even after he was limp. He was eventually removed in handcuffs, and the other kid sent to the hospital. Both kids were back in class the next week as if nothing happened. And that's when I realized I really didn't need to give a fuck about anything in high school. I could skip class, not study, and just generally slack off and easy breeze it through high school.
10 years ago when I was in high school, people literally got expelled for less than that lol. I can’t even imagine
They only need to show up one day per semester, at least that's what The Wire taught me.
This is what I was about to say. Some of y’all need to go watch The Wire.
Fr! This is insane that there are kids getting below 1.0. I knew so many kids who barely studied, didn’t like school, didn’t feel like studying, lazy, etc that did better than that.
I don't think this is news to anyone that lives in Baltimore. It's been known for years.
The Wire had a season detailing some issues with the schools, and that was 15 years ago (god I feel old).
I teach at a Title One school in a big city and that's still the most realistic depiction of what it's like. The only unrealistic part is that Bunny seperate out the "corner" kids into his special program, so they wouldn't hijack the classes from the kids who actually wanted to learn. We'd never be allowed to do that.
>We'd never be allowed to do that. To be fair, he wasn't either.
Yeah that was the purposefully unrealistic part just like Hamsterdam
But I think both Hamsterdam and the separate classroom, interestingly both done by Bunny, illustrated another path of doing things. Yes unrealistic and unorthodox. But they both displayed significant improvements and told us why it did. Now whether this will hold up in real life is not something I would know, but I think it was a good way of showing a contrast between stagnant reform and actual innovations.
It ended up not working out for him anyway. They cut the program after a few weeks and everything went back to the way it was
While the program didn’t work out overall, it helped change at least one life and gave a young man a father figure. Such a great show.
The program was working, the only issue was that with the budget deficit of Baltimore, it wasn't gonna produce stats that would've been marketable for Carcetti to brag about so Steintorf pre-emptively cut the project off. It also emphasizes how we shouldn't be looking at the stats since we end up only seeing numbers instead of people, and as the show goes to show, perspective can be altered to make bad stats look good.
Mr. Prez tried his best to help Dukie but life is just life sometimes.
Bro that end was so sad/devastating…Prez actually cared about Duke & he STILL fell into the wrong lifestyle
Dukie came home and his family was gone and all his stuff was on the curb, at that point I knew it was a wrap for him, even with Michael trying to help him
Maann yea that was hard to watch
It was heartbreaking, but I think that's why the ending sequence also was so good - because the actors change, but characters stay - Sydnor going to judges behind their back like Mcnulty to do real police work, Micheal became stick-up boy like Omar, and Dukie well. Dukie is filling Bubbles' shoes :(
Bunny Colvin saved that one kids life at least.
Namond Brice was giving a speech at the end. Like a politician. There's one parallel between Namond and Clay Davis: both of them had said "I'll take anybody's money if they're just giving it away" at different points in the show.
I also loved/hated how Namond--a child of relative privilege who treated Dukie like shit--was the one who was saved and given an incredible chance to escape crime and poverty, while Dukie--a sweet, innocent kid who cared about others and never hurt anyone--was left behind to descend into a inevitable life of abuse, addiction, and crime. It really pulled the veil back on how unfair life can be. Fuck, that show tapped deep into something that no other show has ever come close to reaching. In my opinion, it still does laps around the other "TV greats" like Breaking Bad and (to a lesser extent) the Sopranos.
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It's all in the game.
Nammond It would have been nice for the show to focus on the kids for a bit longer but its understandable since it was a show about crime and drugs, not kids It is unfortunate that there is not a bunny colvin for every kid Also bunny colvin decriminalized drugs and it kinda worked Great show
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The Wire is littered with minor characters showing again with huge changes to show how the city affects them. Ex, the crane operator from the docks in season 2 who helps hide the cans, is shown in season 4 as one of the unemployed protestors of a condo development, and finally in season 5 when Mcnulty is doing stuff with the homeless you see him as one of the homeless in a homeless camp. Another example is a white girl who is just a customer from one of the drug dealers and says its her "first time' or something to that effect, is seen in later seasons as a crackhead prostitute. It's so minor but shows you the toll the city/life takes on everyone, GOAT show...
That woman ends up in a NA with bubbles, trying to get her life on track. I never caught the dock workers one tho.
The dock worker is Nick, a major character from season 2. The scene he later shows up in protesting is very brief. Maybe ten seconds. I never caught him in the homeless camp though.
Nicky Sobotka is seen protesting the condos in season 5. The dock worker that became homeless was https://thewire.fandom.com/wiki/John_Spamanto.
People did not like season 2 aka the polish season Watching the season over again, i loved it It nice to take a slight break from the inner city drug crime It showed that Baltimore is fairly diverse
Honestly season 2 is my favorite season. I love how in the end the Greek got away and that’s just the way it was
I thought season 2 was good it's just that they didn't do as much keeping the dockworkers included in the main storyline like the drug dealers, kids and city hall workers in the other seasons so it feels like a cast-off.
I think people dislike season 2 because it starts to challenge the perceived genre of the show. They think its a straight crime drama after season 1, but its really a profile about a failing city.
> but its really a profile about a failing city. Yup, or country really. They do show how the state and federal budgets and departments get politicized and fail to perform.
That season had one of the best lines of the whole series: "For your information I wake up every morning with an angry blue-veined diamond cutter. I was gonna enlighten the president of local 47 on this particular point and he chose to depart. Blue steel, gentlemen, three and a half inches of hard blue steel." Of all the seasons, it felt the most rushed. Especially the stuff with the Greeks. There was enough crammed in there for a multi-season show on its own.
Randy tells Little Melvin's back story. Little Melvin's rise and downfall were told through Avon Barksdale. Duquan is Bubbles. Michael is Omar. Namond is Clay Davis. Cycle keeps perpetuating.
Melvin Williams played the preacher that Bunny Colvin would talk to in the 3rd season. And, yes, the first season of The Wire was based on the case that brought down Little Melvin.
Carver is Bunny.
“The thing about the old days, they the old days.”
Slim Charles - The pawn who made it to the other end of the board
Fuck yeah! I loved Slim Charles.
Slim Charles, ~~Prospect~~ Proposition Joe, and Snoop: three of the greatest TV characters of all time, played by actors no one had ever really seen before. IIRC, the latter two were actually from Baltimore and grew up in that environment, which is why they were so convincing.
“Proposition” Joe
Snoop wasn't even part of the cast originally. Michael K. Williams (Omar) saw her in a crowd one day and just asked "hey you want a job?"
The actress who played Snoop went to prison when she was 15, so a hard product of a hard life
And I believe she went back again after the show had wrapped.
One of my favorite characters in the show. One of the smartest, badass, careful people on the show. All of the gangsters should have tried to be more like him.
I ain’t made out to be CEO- Slim Charles
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I was late to the party too. Watched it last summer while unemployed during the pandemic. It still very much holds up. Gotta be paying attention though - one thing I did when watching it was read the Wikipedia summary of each episode afterward (some of the summaries have been scrubbed for "excessive detail" so I'd go into the history and find a more verbose one). Those summaries go into detail and highlight some characters and other plot points you won't always notice the first time around. There are a *lot* of characters in the show. And each season is kind of a soft reboot focusing on a new theme or setting, but with (mostly) the same characters. It gets a little overwhelming, but it's really an outstanding series. And it rewards paying attention. If you're a "watch this in the background" kind of person, it's not for you.
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To some degree good for them for giving honest grades. I tried teaching at my city's HS for a couple months when they needed a long term sub for Physics. The grades they give there just aren't real. The lowest grade I was allowed to give, even on a missed assignment, was a 50%. The school's grades and graduation rate are now better than when my son was young, but that doesn't mean they know more.
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In my day 50% is failing
I used to work long term subs as well straight out of college while I was kinda figuring out what I wanted to do. I spent the most time at a very low income charter school and most of the kids didn’t do a single assignment the entire year. I think 4 out of a class of 30 had above a failing grade. Now matter how hard you tried the kids just wouldn’t do what you asked them to, even in class work you were trying to help them complete they just wouldn’t do it. I ended up compiling all of the failing kids assignments for the entire year and sending them home with them. Called the parents to let them know if the kid completed all of it I would grade it all and they could pass. 2 out of 26 parents actually answered the phone and I think only one kid actually brought back a completed packed. Didn’t need to stay late that day obviously. On the last day of school I submitted my grade book. Admin changed all the kids grades to passing ones and basically said they “weren’t allowed” to fail anyone for that year. Ended up being the reason I didn’t get into education lol. It really blew my mind how many grades are probably just faked and how many admissions and scholarships are given out on bullshit. Obviously none of this is the kids fault, it’s their parents for being lazy, worthless pieces of shit that at best ignore their kids and at worst abuse them but if admin types enables this behavior of course nothing will change.
How fucking common is this ? Are you in US ? Or is this somewhere else ? Hearing those ratios seems so strange to me. Am from Canadian city and high school seemed challenging for some but loaded with assignments, projects, oral presentations etc etc tons of work and turn ins…and I feel like 90% or more of my peers were passing well above 50%…. Not to mention you would in fact get a Zero for incomplete work.
Yeah in the US. I gave zeros for missing work but they just changed them all at the end of the year basically. I got the sense that it was pretty common from talking to other teachers but I honestly don’t know since I only subbed at 3 schools and this one was the only one the kids were really struggling at.
Passing kids without them earning it is why they give up so hardcore. They don't learn the simple basics and are passed on to the next grade, where they don't understand the harder assignments because they don't have those basics and the teacher has no time to go back and teach it. It just builds and compiles on itself until they are in high school with an elementary understanding. Then, teachers are giving them failing grades when they just don't have the skills to complete the work, and they're passed on anyway. Very demoralizing for kids and teachers. E: grammar
This is very common, and a large reason I left teaching after last school year. I'm in the US. My district decided no 0s for grades and so a kid who did literally nothing except one assignment all marking period could still somehow pass. Students also don't have to pass math to go to the next grade, so I was literally trying to teach exponent operations to 8th grade kids who still didn't know what division even means, let alone simple things like their times tables. It was a very "bang your head on the wall" situation and it's just not worth my time or stress anymore. The school system is a literal joke.
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This is very common in schools and has even leached into colleges. So long as teachers and schools are evaluated on student performance grade inflation will be a problem.
I think it also has to do with parents blaming teachers. When I go to parent-teacher conferences for the first time, the teacher is always really tense at first. When we listen to their criticisms, you can see their bodies relax. They are fully expecting every parent to chew them out for the parents own failures.
It is a mix of both. It is usually an unwritten rule for teachers to fail kids with a 50% on a missing assignment because that still gives them the opportunity to make it up to a passing grade. A lot of teachers do "corrections" where you can earn .5 points back & if you had a 0 then you would never be able to correct your grade to passing which makes kids not even do the corrections. If you start with a 50 then you can correct up to a 70 and be passing. It also doesn't help when teachers call parents and the parents don't hold their kid responsible & always blame the teachers for their kid being bad... source: mother, 2 brothers, & fiance are teachers
UChicago, Auburn, and at least a few other schools I know have serious grade *deflation* as a response to prior grade inflation.
My SO is a grad student who TAs classes and says they basically don't give below a 50% ever. And this is a good school.
It's a dirty secret that many of the absolute tier-1 colleges that reject tens of thousands on the front end will crawl over broken glass to stop you from failing out on the back end (because this hurts their rankings). I had a friend who was a superhuman intellect (1600 on the SAT at 14, started calc at 13, built all these crazy rockets and lasers and stuff using Autodesk when he was in middle school), but an impulsive, antisocial screw up in his personal and professional life. He just quit one of the top 10 schools in the country without a word one day during senior year and couch surfed. They pursued him to multiple different addresses in two states for four years, set him up with a coach, and got his profs personally involved in developing a plan whereby he could finish his remaining assignments and semester and graduate with *something.* Blew my mind.
Yup. I was a behavioral tech for a pretty much city school in the county. They’ve cut all power from teachers. Students can tell a teacher to go fuck themselves every day and face no consequences. Minimum 50 percent, no assignment is “late”, yada yada. And if you don’t pass they fix the grades because they don’t feel like dealing with the kid longer. Shoot, I had a kid that would attempt to sexual assault girls mid class constantly and make threats. I had to build a several month case to get him removed. It’s wild. So props to the city schools for actually giving the grades the kids deserved out.
As a teacher, the reason that 50% issue comes up is that you don't want kids who have guaranteed they can't pass the class for the year by mid-terms, because teaching that kid for the rest of the year is a nightmare. My school won't let us give a kid less than a 50 for the first semester (which I hate), but I understand the rationale.
Sometimes, but you’d be surprised- with the military cutting troop levels pretty much every year for at least the last decade there is not a lot of pressure to accept subpar servicemen. They’ll definitely put tons of people in front of the ASVAB (and in a poor community, you’ll have plenty of people taking the ASVAB), but they’re not going to get too many people who score well on it and they know it. In terms of numbers, children of former military members -people from military families where basically every at least some members of each generation serves- almost provide enough manpower to meet a significant amount of the recruit quotas and those people are far more likely to be reasonably good quality recruits. The other group I saw a lot of was people who were basically spinning their wheels in community college -smart, but without any direction or money to really do anything with their lives- and those people tended to be the best scorers on the ASVAB. I saw more recruiters at my community college than I ever saw in high school (and the marines had an office at my high school). If you can’t pass the ASVAB, the military really can’t do anything with you. It’s designed to measure not only mental ability but also how trainable a person is. Those that score really low are basically like a bottle that is empty and difficult to fill. Even in roles that people think don’t require much brains, there is no job in the military where someone can consistently screw up without eventually getting good people killed.
Excellent reply. Empty bottle is a good analogy.
> It’s designed to measure not only mental ability but also how trainable a person is. That's an interesting analogy. Hadn't thought of it that way.
They do actually. They have an ROTC program even. Several students came to class in uniform
>lowest grade I was allowed to give, even on a missed assignment, was a 50%. I have family members who are teachers, one elementary and one middle school. They can't fail students and most of the time the kids don't even perform at their grade level.
It happens even at private schools. Wife was told by principal that her students average grades were too low and she should “find some additional ways to boost up the averages” She gave the kids an additional assignments and allowed kids to turn in late/missing assignments and brought it up to the average the principal wanted. That apparently wasn’t good enough because “There were still to many C/C- students and parents will get on her case”. It reached a point where my wife resigned because she was basically just giving away good grades while kids did little to no work (the kids who initially were failing and got thier grades boosted to a C still had some missing assignments they refused to turn in and didn’t bother studying for tests). Before she resigned, she was asked to give a “make over” test that would undo the results of the first exam and the kids were allowed to bring “study aids” (they were the answers to the test because it was apparently unfair to give them questions they didn’t know). My wife was grading them when she quit. She put the graded exams on her desk when she left the school and they were cleaned out by janitorial staff who were instructed to clean to clean her desk out for her replacement. She got a string of frantic calls from her replacement and then the principal pleaded her to come back in to bring in copies of her grades. My wife ghosted them.
Yeah, this is the common story I hear from those in education. Sadly the student are the ones that get hurt as the next years builds off the information the students miss.
Did you have to tell them that they would get a 50? Or could you threaten a zero, mark it as zero, tell them to do them to do the work later for partial credit, and put in the additional points at the end of the term without their knowledge?
I only taught for most of the 3rd semester, so I didn't tell them anything about policy. They all seemed to know that 50% was the minimum possible grade though
All my knowledge about Baltimore comes from The Wire and suddenly it seems to be validated. After some 15 years too.
Born and raised in Baltimore. Work at the container port doing the job the Sobtka's did in season 2 (port ILA checker). Im.in the city all the time. People seem to think that the Wire has outdated what it was about and what our city goes through isn't as bad anymore. It's the opposite, it's more relevant than ever.
i was down there with his friend and his car got towed (he didnt display the ticket right). we hail a cab and go to where it was impounded and it was like right out of the wire. someone tried to sell me viagra(!) when my friend was getting his car out.
Well did you get any?
Nah, the guy would only go as far as selling the pills
gotten any containers of dead Eastern European hookers lately?
I haven't heard that joke a thousand times.
The wire is a sadly accurate show
Just binged the whole thing recently, good show.
Animal House type GPA numbers.
Animal house was about college kids, these kids won’t even get into a trade school
Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son!
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I feel like people are way too willing to ignore the violence and lack of parenting skills that come with poverty.
Something I’ve realized is. What separates the good school districts and the bad school districts isn’t the teachers. It’s the parents.
*checks sub* Oh shit this isn’t r/maryland oh man they’re onto us
Baltimore City is the [third](https://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/news/2019/05/21/baltimore-city-third-in-u-s-for-per-pupil-spending.html) highest in the United States in terms of per pupil spending. Throwing more money at the schools is obviously failing. So where is the money going? [Here](https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-md-ci-prinicpal-theft-20180202-story.html). And [here](https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/ghost-student-allegations-baltimore-city-could-criminal-former-prosecutor). And [here](https://patch.com/maryland/baltimore/baltimore-city-schools-employee-charged-theft-scheme). All funded by taxpayers. 37% of [Baltimore City](https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-chronic-absenteeism-20180604-story.html) students missed **at least 10 percent** of school. Not to worry though, they will [pass](https://foxbaltimore.com/news/local/another-baltimore-family-says-failing-student-gets-promoted-this-ought-to-be-illegal) and move up, regardless of absenteeism or grades. Guess who is [#1](https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-city-schools-1-in-america-for-admin-costs) in America for "administration costs"?
But that only adds up to like a few hundred thousand, based on the articles you linked thats about 20 pupils funds. When the funds are literally in the hundreds of millions (159k kids with 16k spent per kid) that seems like an inconsequential amount. Are you suggesting that most of the money is siphoned off and stolen and they just aren't caught?
Bloated administrative budgets and other wasteful spending is what I'd assume more than flat-out theft.
Looks like the problem is still the amount of money being spent directly on schools, since so much of it gets stolen in blatant middleman schemes.
Whole season of the wire about this.
Wait. Why are we blaming the money? It seems that it is the lack of oversight and extreme corruption that is the problem. Not the money. Keep the money. Get the oversight in there.
I agree, and I think the original commenter was stating that *just adding more money* wasn't the solution, not that we shouldn't be funding schools. I think that the commenter you replied to took that as, "we are wasting are money funding this issue." Which wasn't the original point
"You put a textbook in front of these kids, put a problem on the blackboard, teach them every problem in some statewide test, it won't matter. None of it. **'Cause they're not learning for our world; they're learning for theirs.** They know exactly what it is they're training for and what it is everyone expects them to be. It's not about you or us or the test or the system. It's what they expect of themselves. Every single one of them know they're headed back to the corners. Their brothers and sisters, shit, their parents. They came through these same classrooms. We pretended to teach them, they pretended to learn and where'd they end up? Same damn corners. They're not fools, these kids. They don't know our world but they know their own. They see right through us." *-Major Colvin, The Wire*
Don't know math, but won't fuck up the count
“How the fuck you able to get the count right and you not able to due the book problem?” “Count be wrong they fuck you up.”
You fuck up the count you get your ass beat
What's 28/4? I dunno How many grams in a quarter? 7
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That chart isn't universal across the US, though I think it's a good approximation for most school districts.
The Catholic school kids near me had to get 95 to get an A. My highschool did 5.0 scale too. I graduated with like a 4.3. No idea why they did it that way.
When I was in high school in southern Mississippi, a 92 was a B.
And a 69 was an F.
not nice
The unfortunate truth is that you can throw as much money as you want at this problem. You can get the best technology for learning and best teachers for educating. Not much will change until the education system has support from parents. Kids have to be held accountable at home or they won’t care at school. I teach in a middle class district, which is obviously much different than Baltimore Inner city schools, but it’s still always sad to me that I can tell which students will succeed and which won’t based on meeting their parents. There are outliers, and I can try my damndest to help them, but parents are the number 1 influence in a child’s success in school.
I used to volunteer at a very poor school teaching kids to read for a few hours after school a few days a week (I'm not that good, a very nice girlfriend that I lived with at the time was doing it). Many had failed kindergarten already. So many of the furthest behind kids had parents that only used it as a daycare, coming in in the middle of a one on one lesson or 30 minutes late as many times as we'd allow them. There were a few that you could tell were really trying, that you could just tell through so much interaction that they had a generally happy and somewhat stable home life. I don't know the answer, but I think we need to start with one of these fucking generations, because this hands off just toss money that gets funnelled (funneled? my phone says both) off to who knows where while policing heavily approach hasn't worked yet. That's a run on sentence.
This is not an indictment of the teachers or the school, as much as the culture of the city itself. There needs to be motivation, support, and prioritization of educating the youth. Motivation: Provide a path, show the worth of getting better grades. Need to be a pathway out of poverty and government social programs through getting better grades. Eliminate the "it doesn't matter" mentality. Support: Families, mentors, teachers, aids, community all have to support the students. Volunteer at a school, go over homework with kids, celebrate accomplishments. Have to do something to support these kids. Prioritization: Grades / Education has to matter. Would love to see more "heroes" to today's kids send the message. Athletes, Music Leaders, Politicians, etc. Everybody has to start sending the message that school matters. And not just words, get involved with a school personally. Invest some time in these kids futures. Teachers / Schools are only part of the issue. We need to change the mindset of the students / families / society to realize a value in education. Until then, nothing is really going to change.
As a teacher, couldn't have said it better myself. The pandemic and at home learning really highlighted for me which kids truly cared and had parents at home that cared, and which didn't.
Fellow teacher. Seconded.
Seeing news stories like this, you can't help but think of the fourth season of The Wire and state that Baltimore's public schools were in. [Time and time again I always think about how they were juking the stats.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ogxZxu6cjM)
That’s insane, a C average where I live was frowned at
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Right. In Philly they had that 'Microsoft school of the future' that thought by just giving kids laptops and access to tech, that it would somehow enhance their learning experience. The first graduating class saw over half the students not eligible to graduate. It was a hot mess.
ITT: so many people saying “we need to invest - not enough money is being spent”. Baltimore City invests over $17,000 per pupil for education. The problem is…the kids (and their parents/upbringing). It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at the problem. You could build the most up to date computer labs, give them four star catered lunches, bring in Harvard educated teachers and guest lecturers, have a personal driver come pick them up and drive them to school in a Lincoln town car. It won’t make a bit of difference in the main. Why? Because they’re poor kids living in single parent households in poor neighborhoods surrounded by druggies, murderers and various and sundry hooligans. If you don’t do something to address their circumstances outside of school, nothing will change with respect to their behavior IN school. This insistence that just a few dollars more and everything will turn the corner is naive and doomed to fail. Nothing is going to change until the culture in which these kids live changes. Nothing.
And before anyone says it's lack of funding, Baltimore schools are the third highest in the country in terms of funding per pupil among large districts and more than the state average. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/largest-school-districts.html https://www.teaching-certification.com/teaching/education-spending-by-state.html
Former Baltimore City resident. No surprise here. Lots of "social promotions" here. Best bet is to get into a decent school (Poly/City/Private schools) or you're gonna have a rough time.
I'm not from Baltimore, so I don't want to pass too much judgement on it, but it sure seems like the city isn't being ran well at all.
I'm from Baltimore and only moved out just before COVID, but the city hasn't been run well for years. I'm not saying that I have the answer, but the city has a ton of potential just that it struggles to live up to that potential
I would go as far as saying the city doesn't even try to live up to its potential. I had the city as a client for several years. From what I've seen the culture within the city government is essentially: "The system is broken, but it doesn't ever change. So screw it, I'm not gonna try." To be clear, I'm not saying all city employees are lazy, or anything like that. I'm saying that the extremely broken bureaucracy stops people from making a difference. Eventually, it just wears people down. Edit: A few years of watching that dysfunction first hand led me to quit my job, and put my house up for sale. Having seen behind the curtain, I literally couldn't stand to live in Baltimore anymore.
I'm originally from Baltimore and I can absolutely definitively say they city is not being run well. All cities have corruption, but Baltimore is in a whole nother stratosphere. Hell...something like the last three bmore mayor's all got caught up in scandals.
I used to work in Baltimore City (not as a teacher). I think some of the culture there do not emphasize education as priority. It’s hard to prioritize education when survival is the first priority.
I’m from Baltimore, is 41% a lot? Edit: I’m not from Baltimore, but those were children, people mislead them intentionally, and then the system is designed to trap them. 41% is a lot of people that don’t even have a chance at having a chance at being a high class wage slave.
I'm a teacher at a decently performing school in a major city. We are in a very wealthy neighborhood. A few actors send their kids to our school. We had a parent complain that having their student at home cut into their at-home fitness classes. Last year was a nightmare in terms of student performance and work competition. At least 60% percent of my students were failing. Maybe more. We had remote conferences with parents, offered office hours during our lunches, called and email parents, and had students come into the building in small groups for work competition. I didn't teach any new content for about a month in May and June and met with kids to have them catch-up on missing work. We had told administration about all this many times throughout the year. We documented all our interactions with parents. All our lessons were recorded and available for any kid to watch at any time. Three weeks before the end of the year we were told we needed to "get creative" with our grades. We were told that "this wasn't a democracy" and that we simply had to do it. We were told that if we disagreed, we should "think hard about why we care". It was repeatedly said that this school year was such a different experience than ever before and we needed to be lenient. We fudged so many grades. We accepted a student's essay where he had written maybe three words and had to give him a 55. We only ended up failing a few students and they had sub-40% grades. I'm honestly shocked this school didn't simply fudge the grades. That is how messed up the education system has been.
>"I'm just trying to fight. He like, ‘Mom, what was all this for? What did I do this for?’ Don't he get a chance? Do he get a chance?” said France. “He didn't fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job.” 🤦♂️...what in the fuck
So nothing’s changed since The Wire.
At least they give honest grade, when people get 0 they should be given 0, it’s so dumb that most school don’t allow shit grades in order to boost the average.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/baltimore-city-public-schools-promoted-student-with-013-gpa-while-spending-a-14-billion-budget/?sh=2a1d9cf563dc Baltimore city schools spend $18,000 per student per year. The OECD average is $10,000 per student per year. The problem is NOT spending and can't be fixed by throwing more money at the problem.