I don't blame the teachers as much as I do the leaders of the schools. They are the ones who are told the students are not doing well but because that could mean their jobs, they pass them anyway. Let's not forget about the egg and sperm donors, not all of them are parents. The parents should be the backbone for the kids not an entry way into the world and free stuff. How do they not see they are reaping what they are sowing? Rhetorical, of course.

Need to go back to the beginning....the lack of a caring 2 parent family, probably.

Remove CRT along with everything "Gender" and focus on arithmetic, English as a first language, financial responsibility, history, and civics or American government.

Schools in Baltimore suck? That's not shocking to me. Let's look up some stats:

Average teacher salary in Maryland: $73,444. That's well about a number of states, and only beaten by a few of the usual suspects like California, New Yok, New Jersey, Washington, Rhode Island, and a few others. Maybe they just need to throw more money at the problem.

Maryland is number five in terms of best performing high schools. What's special about Baltimore? Hmmm.

Maryland is fourteenth overall.

quote:

Originally posted by Flash-LB:
AS a side note, the schools around here are doing better than Baltimore by a long shot, but in the grand scheme of things are failing miserably. The last time students were tested, only around 1/3 of them were at grade level in math and English.

Perhaps because of this the last 3 years the school bond initiatives and overrides have been shot down pretty hard on election day. They're having to learn to live within their budgets just like normal people.

Having a child in the school system you pay taxes into, I'm going to chime in. When we were weighing on the factors deciding to move here, we discovered to our dismay that Arizona public schools were ranked somewhere like a few spots from dead last, nationally. Washington schools were ranked in the top five, I believe. Our school district was ranked somewhere near the top of the state. Needless to say, we were very concerned that we would be making a major mistake in moving to Arizona, in terms of my son's education. We almost didn't move because of it. There was a lot of praying, sitting still and quiet to think, and in the end, I decided it would be the best overall thing for the family, and that we'd be in the vicinity of one of the best public school districts in the state, and if we couldn't find a good school for him there, we'd looking into charter schools. After most of third grade under his belt, it's clear that whatever metrics they're using to determine how good a school is, they're not an accurate or realistic determination of how the kids are actually doing, because while he was ahead in subjects in Washington, he's playing catch-up here in Arizona nearly across the board. Some of that is that he spent over a year and a half "learning from home" and the relaxed standards that came with it, but not all of it. There's a major gap between the schools here and the ones we just left, in all subjects. All that added time "learning from home" also really set him back in all kinds of ways I should probably just skip for the sake of brevity and conversation, and Washington was one of the last states to let kids back to school.

Anyways, come to find out that some of the metrics used in school rankings are things like parent participation, amount of extracurricular activities and how much they get for funding, and other things that don't actually have a direct effect on test scores. To that end, I went to schools that mostly only taught for the standardized test at the end of the year, and the teachers who really pushed that nonsense, I didn't learn much from. So while from personal experience, I don't think standardized tests are really the best indictor of how well schools are teaching, outright scoring a zero in any category on one is appalling.

Seems to me that there is a very definite lack of performance reviews for teachers. And not only in the Baltimore schools. But then I have to remember that vital lesson I learned while in training by our army to be a certified military instructor, the trainer has to actually know more than the trainee.

As I seem to recall, US schools placed somewhere around 50 in the ranking of international schools. That was some years ago and does not seem likely that it has gotten any better since then.

The big cities that for decades have controlled all aspects of civic life have failed. Underlying problem if their misguided beliefs that are the core of the hard left's agenda. In education it easy to view the chronic failure with the test results. Fact is the democrats have failed in all aspects of governance.

Here’s the mission statement from the US Department of Education:

”Our mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”

We have good men working on this issue - good men.

The naps should be videotaped. And the scores of each student overlayed.

And then played back when someone makes a claim on inequity. Zero effort is not inequity.

This has been going on for a long time in big city public school systems and is what happens when society tolerates such self destructive behavior. When parents do t give a shit, neither will their kids.

I used to read a book series years ago called The Destroyer series written in the 70’s on forward by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir. They openly mock inner city public school systems. What they describe (socializing, drinking, smoking weed, rampant pregnancy, assaulting teachers; basically everything that goes on now in big city public schools) is eerily the same as todays reality. When asked by Remo Williams what her answer to the problem was, a teacher replied to write off everyone above the 4th grade and start fresh with the little ones.