If you happen to live in Baltimore and are looking for something else to be incensed about apart from the rampant crime and government corruption, look no further than the public schools. The kids are back in class for the semester, or at least some of them are, and a public activist group has conducted a review of the latest round of state standardized testing. Across the city, 13 schools (that’s 40% of the schools) failed to produce a single student who tested as “proficient” in math. And most of the others didn’t produce many. This has resulted in some understandable outrage, with one public education activist telling Fox Baltimore that the city is witnessing a case of “educational homicide.” And there are parents showing up at school board meetings and calling for heads to roll. (Daily Mail)

A slate of Baltimore schools have sparked outrage after zero students passed their state math exams – with almost 75 percent testing at the lowest possible score.

The poor performances came in the latest round of Maryland‘s state testing, where 13 high schools in the city – a staggering 40 percent – failed to produce a single student with a ‘proficient’ score in math.

‘This is educational homicide,’ said Jason Rodriguez, deputy director of Baltimore-based nonprofit People Empowered by the Struggle, to Fox Baltimore.

These shocking results were brought to light by a group called Project Baltimore. Their leader has called on Dr. Sonja Santelises, the CEO of Baltimore City Schools, to resign. They point out that this is not an issue of insufficient funding. Baltimore’s public schools have a huge budget. They’re simply not getting the job done.

That failure to deliver is evident in this round of test scores. The standardized tests are scored on a ranking system of one to four, with four being the highest possible score. In the 13 schools in question, fully three-quarters of the students were given a score of one, the lowest possible. A spokesperson for the school system tried to blame some of the shortcomings on the pandemic and the issues caused by the schools being closed. But Project Baltimore isn’t buying it. They point to another set of standardized tests from 2017 where the same number of schools also produced zero students who were proficient in math. And that was well before the pandemic began.

So if it’s not a lack of funding and it wasn’t caused by the pandemic, what is to blame for these abysmal results? One analyst pointed to the poor attendance record of many students. Baltimore has one of the highest truancy rates in the country, with significant numbers of students attending school on ten percent or fewer of the school calendar days over the course of the year. That’s certainly part of the problem and it speaks to shortcomings in the community. If a student doesn’t have parents at home that force them out the door and make sure they’re going to school, they have little chance to succeed.

But not all of the students are absent every day. There are obviously some who attend on a regular basis, so that can’t explain how not a single one of them wound up being proficient in math in more than a dozen schools. Perhaps Dr. Sonja Santelises does need to step down because a fish rots from the head down. But that clearly won’t be enough. They’re going to have to find new, better teachers and institute curricula that focus on the basics and provide extra help for students who are clearly struggling. Other school districts around the country have somehow managed to pull this off and there is no excuse for why Baltimore is failing so spectacularly.