Earlier this month David wrote about a new report on Baltimore City schools. State testing revealed that there were 23 schools where not a single student was doing math at grade level. Only 7% of kids in Baltimore City schools from grades 3-8 were judged proficient in math.

Fox45, the local affiliate that aired that report, followed up with an interview with a mom whose son was attending one of those 23 schools. Nichelle Watkins knew her son Logan was in trouble because he was in 4th grade and still couldn’t read well or do basic math. She had written to the school asking for help or for the school to hold her son back so he’d have a chance to learn but the school had ignored her requests and kept passing her son into higher grades. “I feel like they don’t care. It’s not they’re children. They don’t care,” she told reporter Chris Papst. She was in tears as she worried that without an education her son was likely to wind up dead or in prison. She felt her son needed a tutor but as a single mother living in public housing she said she didn’t have $1,000 to hire one from Sylvan learning.

The good news is that a lot of people saw that report and some of them offered to help.

It’s now been two weeks since Watkins shared her story with Project Baltimore. And in those two weeks, her life has changed…

“I have so many people reaching out,” Watkins told Project Baltimore. “It’s been crazy.”

Watkins’s story triggered an outpouring of support. Numerous tutoring services, including Sylvan Learning, contacted Watkins offering free tutoring for Logan. Two viewers came forward, each one offering $1,000 to pay for tutoring services. A local private school has offered Logan free tuition. But the first to reach out was Blanca Tapahuasco.

“It is sad that he’s so far behind,” Tapahuasco told Project Baltimore.

Tapahuasco has been a tutor for 25 years, at one point for Baltimore City Schools. When she saw Logan’s story on Fox45 News, she immediately offered to help.

“After assessing Logan and listening to him read, I have him at a first grade,” Tapahuasco told Project Baltimore. “Definitely kindergarten for math.”

The story notes that Baltimore City schools has an annual budget of $1.6 billion, making it one of the best funded systems in the country. But since the original story aired, no one at BCS has attempted to contact Nichelle Watkins, not the principal of her son’s school, nor the superintendent. No one. They are treating this as a political problem to be managed away.

If other kids in Baltimore City schools were keeping up then it might be possible to see the story of this one student as an outlier. But as the statewide test scores show, Logan Watkins isn’t an outlier. In fact, 93% of all kids in these schools can’t do grade level math.

In some schools the situation is even worse. Back in 2021 Fox45 reported on a teen attending Augusta Fells High School. His mother thought he was a senior about to graduate until she got a letter saying he had only passed 3 classes in 4 years and was technically still a freshman. Even worse, that student’s GPA of 0.13 placed him in the top half of his class. A subsequent report found that 41% of Baltimore high schoolers had a GPA below 1.0. I’d be willing to bet most of those kids can’t read and were also passed along from grade to grade.

I’m not one who is quick to believe in claims of systemic racism but Baltimore public schools are the exception to the rule. As I said at the time, if you’re looking for systemic racism, Baltimore City schools should be exhibit A. There is clearly a systemic problem there and it’s hard to believe it would be ignored the way it has been if most of the people suffering as a result weren’t poor and black.

The problem of course is political. Everyone running these schools and the city of Baltimore is a progressive democrat. So you get year after year of this abysmal failure that harms tens of thousands of children and the people in charge are mostly downplaying it and telling the media to shut up about it.

I’ve been doing this job for more than a decade now and I firmly believe this story would be one of the biggest scandals in the country if not for the politics involved. I have the same feeling about this that I did about the Jeffrey Epstein story back when the media was mostly ignoring his crimes because he was friends with (and funded) so many Democrats. The Democrats in power in Baltimore can’t take on the unions running the schools and the media turns a blind eye to all of it. Instead of grabbing national headlines, this story has largely been left to one local Fox affiliate to uncover. They’ve been doing a pretty amazing job with it for two years now, but they’re not the New York Times. They don’t have the power to set an agenda for the rest of the media to follow. It’s a media scandal on top of a public school scandal.

Still, it’s good to see that there are still people out there like Blanca Tapahuasco willing to step up when the authorities have failed. But you have to wonder how many more kids just like Logan Watkins are out there, languishing in bad schools because it would be politically difficult to fix them.