77% of Students at Baltimore High School Are Reading at Elementary and Kindergarten Level

Source

A Baltimore City teacher came forward with devastating information that showed 77% of students tested at one high school are reading at an elementary school level.

The teacher works at Patterson High School, one of the largest high schools in Baltimore with a 61% graduation rate and a nearly $12 million budget. We agreed not to identify this source who fears retribution for giving Project Baltimore the results of iReady assessments.

“Our children deserve better. They really do,” the Patterson High School teacher told Project Baltimore. “As a whole, the system has failed them.”

This is an absolute travesty. This nation used to be a leader in academia in the world, however we are becoming a nation of the illiterate. The public school systems need to be shut down, or at least 100% overhauled as they prefer to teach wokeism versus getting our children educated in academics.

We keep throwing bad money at the problem and we continue to sink! This, IMHO, is the greatest threat to our nation. Dumb societies never flourish.

 

Why would you have a problem with this? After the kids are taught that all white folks are evil, that a girl is a boy and a boy can be a cat, that the Democrat party was never pro-slavery or anti-civil rights........................there is no time left to teach the 3 R's

 

Due to Affirmative Action I’m sure they’ll still get into college.

 

I do not support getting rid of the public school system. Without it only the well off and rich would get schooling. And knowledge is power. Do you really want all the power all in the rich peoples hands? They already have quite a bit just by being rich.

I've given my own suggestion before on how to reform the schools. What would you do?

 

$12 million for how many students? That doesn't seem like a big budget to me.

 

This is what teachers unions have done to these students. The budget for Blatimore unified schools is 1.18B a year. And this is the best they can achieve in their district. Laughable.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/educat...0210429-x5zamr44ifhghp6fmxszdnhpuu-story.html

Give this a read. Instead of figuring out that 80% of their students are illiterate, they want to ensure the money is spent "with sensitivity in mind" given the "disruption" of lockdowns and all...

Utterly laughable.

 

Same thing we do with our police officers: body cameras. the video of which can be accessed by parents, students, and other faculty including the principle and superintendent.

The increased transparency in teaching methods and practices can help address and substantiate areas of concern for all parties involved.

 

I don't think that kind of hyperbole is helpful. I don't think the US has every been a leader in general public literacy, which is distinct from being a leader in academia, and I'm not convinced the situation now is necessarily significantly worse than it ever has been.

Reading at a elementary school level isn't the same a illiteracy and though you'd obviously want high school students to be doing better than that, the average adult reading level generally doesn't get much higher than that anyway. I think you'd need to present evidence of an actual decrease and some direct causal evidence, rather than just playing hollow politics with the issue.

 

According to this they spend 18,904 per student in Baltimore City School District. LINK: Average Public School Spending / Student (2022) (publicschoolreview.com)

If you follow the links you'll eventually find Patterson Highschool listed as having 1,103 students. LINK: Patterson High School (2022 Ranking) | Baltimore, MD (publicschoolreview.com) If they get 12 million then that averages out to $10,879 per student. Which is more than what the first link above gives as the average for the lowest.

 

The 61%graduation rate is all we really needed to see this school is doing a horrendous job in educating Baltimore's children.

 

Not sure I'm for that. What about student safety and privacy? And by safety I'm talking about kidnappings.

 

What I will add is the average spent on students.

K-12 public schools spend $12,624 per pupil.
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics

Do you mind rephrasing this? It sounds like you're saying $18904 is less than $10,879.

 

No problem. The $18,904 was the average for all the schools in the Baltimore City School District that's K-12. The amount that Patterson High School gets averages to $10,879. The first link shows that the lowest average in the entire US is $8,830 in Utah. So, Patterson receives more than Utah in average amount. But less than the whole of the Baltimore City School District.

Hope this helps in understanding what I was saying. It's too early in the AM for me.

 

Okay that's what I thought you were saying. Thank you. If this is the case, then we should probably see similar stories like this in Utah, especially in poorer communities.

 

If you went only by money as an indicator this would probably be true. But money is probably the last thing that should be looked at. How people are taught, willingness to learn of the students and a host of other things is what should be looked at LONG before money should be.

 

On a national level it's a good shorthand. Those things matter but having more money means more resources which means they can afford the better training, equipment, etc. The idea is that in any area on average there will be a normal distribution of students and teachers. So I don't know if I buy the "willingness of students" argument. I've taught students who swear they don't understand politics and history but with the right mentality and training on my part, they did amazing in class.

 

But are they woke? That's the important question.

 

They’ll graduate with Ph.D.s in critical race theory.

 

I hope the Dems eventually realize that there are consequences to giving people no consequences. If you make failure acceptable, then you'll get more failure. If you make crime acceptable, then you'll get more crime. You're not showing them mercy or grace by helping them avoid the consequences of their actions. You're destroying their lives and their communities by enabling them to become less.

 

Bad example. Utah has the highest literacy rate in the nation.

https://americanprofile.com/articles/utah-has-nations-highest-literacy-rate/

at 94%. 89.3 graduate from high school.

But if you think it is more important to defend the educational establishment than to educate the children, well, carry on.

btw, did you know that minorities do better in conservative school districts? It's true.

https://brightbeamnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/The-Secret-Shame_v4.pdf

 

Literacy rate is not the same thing as being able to read at a college level, or high school level. But then, your source doesn't have a source. So here's another one.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy-rates-by-state

The highest is New Hampshire at 94.2% according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Maryland as a whole is midtier at Though to be fair, the link to their data doesn't work properly.

Yeah in general kids who go to conservative areas tend to go to schools with more funding than their previous schools. That's why there was a push back in the 1970's to bus kids to other schools as part of desegregation before Nixon shut that down. Desegregating schools work. Ever since then schools who participate in these programs do better as a whole. Diversity is wonderful like that.

 

I've got to disagree with that. Diversity can be a severe weakness.

 

It can be in some circumstances, but those circumstances are ironically enough due to segregation. Tell me that you wouldn't want a Spanish speaking friend when you had to do Spanish homework.

 

This is what Democrat schools in Democrat cities, in Democrat states are destined to become.

 

Bad example. Utah has the highest literacy rate in the nation.

https://americanprofile.com/articles/utah-has-nations-highest-literacy-rate/

at 94%. 89.3 graduate from high school.
It spends 10,294 per pupil.

But if you think it is more important to defend the progressive educational establishment in education than to educate the children, well, carry on.

BTW Conservative cities do a much better job of educating minorities:

When we look at the data for public schools in the 12 most progressive and the 12 most conservative cities, we find that while all students have roughly the same proficiency rates (i.e., students in progressive cities perform slightly better, on average, than students in conservative cities on reading and slightly worse in math), the black-white and Latino-white gaps in math proficiency were, on average, 15 percentage points greater in progressive cities. We saw similar patterns for reading and graduation rates. In every case except Detroit, progressive cities have strikingly large achievement gaps.

https://brightbeamnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/The-Secret-Shame_v4.pdf