City student passes 3 classes in four years, ranks near top half of class with 0.13 GPA

Yes they have, and as I stated before when it comes to most "things" in society they impact the Black community in America the most unfortunately. The normalization of single parent households and out of wedlock births is a trend across the America as a whole, and while that has impacted every demographic it has impacted the Black community most severely.

If the traditional nuclear family is deemed to be a lost cause then that is a choice society has chosen to make and will also have to bear the consequences of it. Cultures can be changed it happens all the time and we establish "new normal's" routinely in America. Growing up it was universally believed among the Black community that even I as a child during that time would be dead before America ever elected a Black President. How wrong we were. Back then we also never believed we would see the normalization of interracial relationships in public and seeing a Black man with a White woman was met with shrieks and horror from both white AND black people. Nowadays nobody bats an eye when seeing that. I have plenty of older lesbian friends who are now married who would always make the claim that them being accepted in this "Christian America" would never happen. Now they are married.

Point is culture drives society, culture is what normalizes things or makes things abnormal. The first step to doing that is to re-establish the baseline. How did smoking go from being what the cool kids did to only something that gross losers do? We changed the perception of it, we stopped promoting it in media as a positive thing by getting rid of infamous icons like the Marlboro man on his horse that many young boys wanted to emulate. We than began to run campaigns flat out making it look terrible. I'm not saying we should do the latter regarding single parenthood but we can certainly do the former. Knock it off with TV shows like "Teen Mom" or "16 and Pregnant", why the hell is that a show on a network directly aimed at teenagers and young adults?

As you said this has impacted everyone but every other demographic has done better with the breakdown of the family than the Black community. Yes there is more at play here and that is the black culture of the black community. Which does, once again, go back to the family structure. As I stated before if you are a black boy growing up in Baltimore with no father you WILL find a father figure, human children are biologically programmed to do that. And if virtually every older male around you is a gangster or drug dealer then guess what you are going to look up to? Those are your role models. Without a father in the home to grab you by the head and tell you not to follow that sort of lifestyle then you have no safety net. You are listening to rap music full of profanity glorifying drug dealing and murder and the amount of "hoes" you have because that's how you refer to women. There is nobody there to tell you that you can't listen to that. On your wall are probably pictures idolizing these rappers who rap about the things that you see your older boys do on a daily basis. And there is NOBODY to grab you and say NO.

That's how you create little monsters running around places like Baltimore. Things go on routinely in places like that which are so extraordinary that most people who have never experienced anything like that believe it to be exaggerated because it's unfathomable to the outside world. There are 7 year old CHILDREN running around Baltimore who sell drugs, use the F word as an adjective, and will literally take a lead pipe and bash your face in to steal your wallet. All because they've been brainwashed into that way of life since literally the day they could walk. I remember decades ago one of my cousins who was a toddler learned how to speak a few words. What was the word she could say? "Bitch". And her mother thought that was soooo "cute". Why? Because all the child hears all day is profanity laced language from her mother because her mother has no sense. Fast forward to today and guess how my cousin is doing now? The one who's first words were cuss words? Most recent update about her from the family was that she had stolen my Grandmothers car and refused to return it and there is now a warrant out for her arrest.

The Black community has two choices, fix the family structure or fail. Period. Stop glorifying the culture of gangsters and thugs or fail. It's not about lack of funding and it's not about racism, it's about the CULTURE of the Black community that it itself believes to be acceptable. Why has the "new normal" society effected all demographics in America yet the Black community suffers the hardest from it? That's why.

 

Unfortunately in this case charter schools wouldn't help much in my opinion. I went to public school in Baltimore many decades ago and even back then the schools themselves weren't "bad" nor really underfunded. I attended various grade schools growing up and from what I remember the only thing that was "weird" about Baltimore schools in particular was the fact that backpacks had to be clear and you had to walk through a metal detector to get it in. The food, books, curriculum, etc was the same as the other schools I went to in other places. The biggest overall difference was the children who attended the school.

Popping up charter schools will do very little unless we address the type of children that are being raised and sent to school. We could build the most state of the art modern charter school staffed with esteemed scholars but if we fill it with the same little monsters that inner city Baltimore culture creates then the results will be the same. We have to fix the children before they even step foot in the school. They need that solid foundation beforehand unless we expect the school system to establish that discipline in them. I'm not necessarily against that latter notion either but society itself is. I'm certainly willing to entertain the idea. It worked for my sister....she was one of those little monsters created in Baltimore and my mother had enough of her crap so she put her in Catholic School. This was back in the day when it was REAL Catholic School, Nuns with rulers and backhands who aren't tolerating any lip from you kid type places. She still has a massive attitude problem to this day but during the years she was in that school you would have never known it because she very quickly learned how to shut the hell up and respect adults lol.

I doubt those types of places exist anymore though in 2021 and I don't think most parents would take too kindly to that sort of environment nowadays.

 

There are quite a few charter schools in the Baltimore area from what I understand. I think what makes these school work better is the fact that they are not as abundant as the public schools and they work on a lottery system. With this system they can receive students from all over the Baltimore area and deal with a more manageable mix of normal children and little monsters. The zoned public schools in inner city Baltimore get filled with nothing but little monsters which is why the schools are the way they are.

I like the idea and I agree it would be a step in the right direction. The bottom line is that the school system itself just needs to spread the love around, these little monsters from inner city Baltimore need to be spread out and not congregated into their own schools where they commit nothing but chaos. Zoning laws and all that other things are a big problem but unfortunately another problem regarding that is the society itself. Baltimore isn't all bad there are some "normal" parts of the city left but those living in the normal parts want nothing to do with those in the crime ridden areas. I have family who works for the school board and from what I was told this idea of spreading the children out was flirted with on a few occasions in the past and it was actually the parents who went into an uproar about it. Basically the more "normal(ish)" districts around the city didn't want the horror children of the inner city getting sent out to their districts infecting the schools.

Not sure of the validity of that statement or if its just the school unions trying to pass the buck for incompetence or something but it does make sense. If I were a parent raising children one of Baltimore's "better" neighborhoods I wouldn't want those inner city kids anywhere near my kids school. I watched in real time over the years as the crime and destruction slowly creeped it's way out of concentrated areas in Baltimore to infecting damn near the entire city. It's like a virus spreading. When I was young my grandmother's neighborhood was one of the safer and peaceful areas of the city where children played outside and dogs barked and it had the normal community feel. The infamous "Baltimore hellhole" was "over there". Over the years it slowly crept closer and closer to where nowadays it's infected them as well. When I was a kid we used to slide down the hill in the snow with all of our friends and it was perfectly safe and normal. A few years ago my mother called me in horror in the middle of the night as the SWAT team kicked in her front door because her neighbors teenage son got the top of his head blown off by a drug dealer on her front porch...That virus is there now as well in that once peaceful bustling neighborhood.

Maybe building a whole bunch more charter schools all over the city to spread it out that way or something may work. But as harsh as it may sound the culture that creates these little monsters in Baltimore is a biohazard that needs to be contained where it is. If I lived in the outlying community of Baltimore in the normal areas I too would be fighting hard against redirecting those little monsters out of their inner city holding cell schools and letting them run around my neighborhood with my kids...

 

Every single thing you just said would be hailed as absolutely racist in this new modern America of 2021. So that's the biggest hurdle that you'll never overcome.

The curfew thing would be about as enforceable as the "no hanging on the street corner" law in Baltimore which nobody follows and nobody enforces. Plus a curfew hard time is a perceived easy solution to a way more complex problem. Plenty of kids are roaming around Baltimore after hours for legit reasons as well as nefarious ones. Also Baltimore is so damn bad that the bad stuff doesn't happen only at night it's conducted in broad daylight half the time. I personally watched somebody shoot up a local pet store and rob the place in broad daylight on a random weekday afternoon in that place. Drug deals are conducted in broad daylight in front of everybody at the local drug "shop" that everybody knows about on the block. It's not the back alley look over your shoulder nervously thing of Hollywood. The cops aren't oblivious to the known drug houses or drug pop up lemonade stand type things everywhere, they just don't care.

Gangs are very well known. Everybody knows who the gangsters are they aren't hiding anywhere they wear specific colors and flags and walk around most of the time. They aren't trying to hide or anything. It's a complex issue as to why they are around including various reasons. For one if you live there then you are probably related to a few of them and you don't want to necessarily rat out your family. They likely give you money sometimes, they get drugs for you because you probably do SOME type of drug, and you don't like the cops yourself so you don't want to talk to them. And if you did try to get them in trouble for something then they or their gang is probably going to kill you, and yes they will get to you before the cops come to help you. They run the neighborhoods through extortion and fear and loyalty. This is "their" world.

For every person who hates the gangs there is another person who likes the gangs or is part of them. And even if we snapped our fingers and sent the full force of the Baltimore PD to just raid these areas then you'd see half of the people who don't even like the gangs trying to disrupt the cops looking for them. They may not like the gangs but they hate the cops more. I mean hell the last time the damn cops came around here ya'll arrested my father, why would I help you? That's the mentality. And there's the entrenched culture within these inner city Black communities of never snitch. Doesn't matter what happened, you don't snitch.

Remember these gangsters are not some foreign occupational force in these cities, they are your sons or uncles or cousins or fathers or husbands, etc. Sure they are mostly terrible people but not too many folks are going to be in support of the cops arresting your family even if you don't particular like what your family is doing.

The solution must come from within the community itself, nobody can walk in there and fix it for them they won't let you and they won't welcome you. Overall American society won't let you either. Even if we disregard everything I just said and snapped our fingers and said lets do it, send in the troops and clean this place out of the criminals....

"Breaking News: 500 BLACK MEN arrested in unprecedented overnight raid in Baltimore Maryland with known ties to..."

Knowing what you know about this new America we live in right now in 2021. Defend that.

 

It's very true unfortunately, I've had this discussion about Baltimore on this forum before a few years ago and as you said the things I described most tend to believe are fabricated because of the absurdity of it all. But unfortunately I am not making this up, the place really is THAT bad. Put it this way, a decade ago I was deployed as a Soldier patrolling Kandahar Afghanistan during the troop surge. During the tour we are allowed 2 weeks of R&R leave to come home. I spent a week of that time visiting my mother who still currently lives in inner city Baltimore with most of the rest of my extended family. We walked to the store up the road from her house to get some things, I was genuinely more nervous and on guard walking down the road in Baltimore AMERICA than I was patrolling the streets of Kandahar Afghanistan during the height of the war 24 hours prior.

And I am not joking. She was trying to introduce me to all of the people roaming around the streets and a group of her friends came up to meet me....2 carrying lead pipes and the third carrying a baseball bat. We exchange introductions they say nice to meet you we love your mom shes a sweet lady and then I kid you not they look over, point, and said "Yeah that's him, yeah there he go right there, lets go". They take off running and shout back to me "Aye it was nice to meet you man be safe going back over there" and started chasing this guy down with weapons in their hands shouting something about money. My mother casually says "oh I wonder what they mad at him for that's not good"...

I'd been in Baltimore for a total of 90 MINUTES and walking 20 yards from my mothers house 3 guys are chasing someone down to beat them half to death with blunt weapons in BROAD DAYLIGHT. When I got to the corner store it was cash only and I had to use the ATM in there while 20 people are gathered right outside the place just hanging out on the corner all turning around to watch me as I'm pulling cash out of this thing to buy something. My mom was talking to somebody around the corner. I get what I need and walk out and these people all crowd around me asking to borrow some money and of course you can't say you don't have any because they just saw me pull it out of the ATM. One of them steps up and says hey man ya'll chill out that's (my mom's) son "Nightmare". The stiffness drained out of everybody immediately and they were like "Oh you're Nightmare? Whats up man how you been we ain't even recognize you it's been forever". (Which literally translates to, oh we had no idea your mom was her we were about to crack your head open and take that money you just pulled out). And one of them turned out to be my cousin apparently....

I remember that story so well because it was so absolutely absurd to me. Here I was having survived the damn WAR and was about to get knocked unconscious or killed 24 hours later in my own damn country if somebody wouldn't have spoken up for me and who's kid I was. People who have never experienced these types of places can't even fathom stuff like that and to the normal American living their everyday life they read that and believe it has to be completely bogus.

The best portrayal of life in inner city Baltimore is the HBO show The Wire. It was filmed on location in Baltimore and a few of the extras in it are actually my real world family and the neighborhood where much of the filming took place is about 3 blocks away from where my mother lives. If you watch it just know that those are not "set pieces", that neighborhood actually looks like that in real life they didn't board up the windows and tear the buildings up to make it look worse, that's how it actually looks. It's actually a true(ish) story about the real infamous drug kingpins of Baltimore during 90s and 2000's. The only thing not "real" about that entire series are the actors who play the main characters. The stories in the show and the depictions of how life is lived every day are not exaggerated or dramatized. The people walking around in broad daylight with weapons, the drug dealers openly selling drugs in broad daylight, the stores that look like the reception center at Pelican Bay Prison where you have to slide your money through slots through bullet proof glass for the cashier, etc. It REALLY IS like that.

As far as the other question I don't think that would work in Baltimore. Nobody wants to invest in Baltimore and property is going down not up there. Baltimore is trending in the other direction to where even once "good" neighborhoods have been overrun with the virus of drugs and gangs. Back in the day it used to be what we called "West Baltimore" which was the hellhole and slowly over time that virus has spread in all directions. You can take a look at one of those websites that talks about property value and crime stats, etc. You'll see Baltimore is like an explosion going off from the center with the virus creeping outward slowly and slowly in all directions based on the crime rating of the neighborhoods surrounding the epicenter.

I'm one who usually criticizes those who just complain without offering up a solution but when it comes to Baltimore I seriously don't even know what the solution could be. It's a failed state. Reestablishing the family structure to help raise proper children and then hopefully trying again in the next generations is my best solution.