Dozens of Baltimore and Chicago schools fail to produce even one student proficient in math.

Don't blame covid or funding, blame the liberal education establishment and the culture.

According to this report by Fox’s Baltimore outlet, there are 23 schools in Baltimore where no student performs at grade level in math, as adjudged by the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program. Not one.

Two thousand students attend these 23 schools, which include ten high schools, eight elementary schools, three Middle/High schools, and two Elementary/Middle schools. Another 20 Baltimore City Schools had just one or two students who tested proficient in math. Overall, only 7 percent of third-through-eighth-graders in the Baltimore system accomplished this.

Is Baltimore an outlier among big city school systems? If so, then Chicago is also an outlier.

In that city, there are 35 schools where not a single student can do math at grade level. In addition, there are 22 schools where no student can read at grade level. These figures come from data supplied by the Illinois State Board of Education.

Statewide, there are 53 schools where no student is grade-level proficient in math and 30 (all in the Chicago area) where no student meets that standard in reading. Moreover, at 930 Illinois schools (one quarter of the state’s total) only 1 out of 10 students can do math at grade level.

Does the pandemic explain these awful rates? Not really. In 2019, the reading and math numbers in Illinois were only slightly better than they are now.

Is lack of funding the problem? No. At Spry Community Links High School, for example, per student spending exceeds $35,000 per year. Yet, not one of its 88 students can read or perform math at grade level.

Compare these dismals figures to student performance at the local public high school where I live in Maryland. There, dozens of students every year receive a “4” or better on one or more AP exam.

The implications of these disparities should alarm us all. The left, with its obsession on income inequality, should be at least as appalled as conservatives are. What kind of incomes can people who are proficient in neither math nor reading expect to earn?

Yet, the Illinois education bureaucracy says it’s satisfied with the education Chicago students are receiving:

Many of these schools [the ones where no one is proficient in math and/or reading] are rated “commendable” by the Illinois State Board of Education. That’s the 2nd-highest of four “accountability” ratings a school can receive.

Not a single one of the 113 students at Sandoval Sr High School can read or do math at grade level. And yet the school is “commendable.”

Same with Ralph Ellison Chicago International Charter School. Labeled “commendable”. . .none of the [172] students are proficient in either reading or math.

George W. Bush used to talk about “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” The Illinois Board’s bigotry doesn’t seem all that soft.

The same is true, I think, of Illinois governor J.B. Prtizker. His Illinois State Superintendent, appointed this year, presided over a school district in which just 1 in every 10 minority students, and 2 in 10 students overall, can read at grade level. The appointee had been the superintendent of that district (Elgin, Illinois) since 2014. 

What is to be done? I’ll leave that question to people who know more about these issues than I do.

I will take a stab at this related question: Who needs to do it?

The answer, I believe, is the residents of cities like Baltimore and Chicago. They need to stop electing the liberal officials who run their cities, including the schools. And they need to curtail their dysfunctional behavior.

The awful outcomes described in this post aren’t just an educational failure. They are a cultural failure, as well.