Despite spending more per pupil than all but two large school districts in America, at least half a dozen government schools in Baltimore were unable to produce one single student who was proficient in either English or math last year.
The shocking results, uncovered by Project Baltimore, show a monumental tragedy unfolding in the city that represents a microcosm of the damage being inflicted on children across America. The proficiency tests put students in five categories, with four and five considered proficient, and one through three considered not proficient.
The schools include Booker T. Washington Middle School, Frederick Douglass High School, Achievement Academy at Harbor City, New Era Academy, Excel Academy at Francis M. Wood High, and New Hope Academy. At Frederick Douglass High School, some 90 percent of students received the lowest possible score, with just one student coming anywhere near proficient.
Incredibly, some students are on track to graduate despite not scoring even proficient on radically dumbed-down exams linked to Common Core.
School officials say they are not to blame. “I wouldn’t say the school district is at fault,” Baltimore City Schools Executive Director of Teaching and Learning Janise Lane was quoted as saying in local media reports. Lane is partly correct.
Many factors are being blamed for the debacle (although since there are virtually no Republicans or conservatives in office, they have escaped the blame this time).
As usual, teachers’ unions and bureaucrats claim they need more money and resources. But that is absurd when realizing that Baltimore schools spend the third-highest amount per pupil among the 100 largest school districts in America at around $16,000 per student.
Part of the problem, of course, has been the carefully engineered destruction of the family, especially in black communities. Many of the children in these schools are not only victims of a dumbed-down indoctrination program masquerading as “education,” but they’ve also grown up in homes without fathers, a natural consequence of federal welfare and pseudo-“education” policies. Certainly, personal responsibility also plays a role.
But the most important factor, in this writer’s view, is still the quack methods used to teach reading in government schools across America, sometimes known as “whole word” or “sight words” or “look-say,” as opposed to phonics. By turning these otherwise healthy children into functional illiterates with quackery first exposed more than 100 years ago, the government schools set the stage for a lifetime of failure, dependency, and deception.
Illiteracy prevents these children from going out and learning on their own — no reading of the Bible, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or anything else. And the results of that are predictable, too: violence, broken families, drugs, gangs, hatred, support for government dependence, and more.
Reforms of these “failure factories” will not be enough to solve the problem. That is especially true when one realizes that these government schools are doing precisely what they were established to do by their architects such as socialist and humanist John Dewey. Any parent, grandparent, aunt, or uncle who loves the children in their lives must do everything possible to protect them from these dangerous institutions masquerading as “schools.” The alternative is disaster.
