Baltimore school system is a joke

This is one the craziest stories I’ve ever heard. This kid with a .13 GPA ranks at the top half of class. He has only passed 3 classes in 4 years.

Blame all around. The kid has some blame but not as much as the parents and the school. How is he allowed to progress in grade if he never passes a class, how would the school expect him to pass algebra 2 if he failed algebra 1? I don’t understand how they didn’t held him back each year.

The parent…how can you let you kid fail almost every single class and just be ok with it? It seems he missed most school days and that’s the parent’s responsibility.

This is incredibly sad.

This news popped up on my google feed, but the headline looked so audacious that I didn’t open it.
I can’t imagine wtf is happening in those kids’ lives/families/environment to be in such a mess.
Reading the remarks of the mother, I am even more confused. Honestly, wtf?

There’s a pretty well known TV series that addresses a lot of these questions.

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This is par for the course in the UK. Kids routinely progress from year to year without having passed anything at all, and eventually leave school barely able to read and write. Everyone knows they’re just going through the motions.

The only difference is that nobody makes anything more than a halfhearted attempt to pretend these kids are actually succeeding.

Is public school funding tied to property taxes in the U.K. the way it is in the U.S.?

Talk about a way to preserve a class structure!

It certainly used to be, although I haven’t lived there for 20 years. People used to make a concerted effort to live in certain area codes so that their kids could go to schools that actually made some attempt at education.

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Actually just season 4.

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Yes I have seen the Wire. @McNulty

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2 posts were split to a new topic: From joke

I think overall student success at schools is most to do with who attends them, which is a problem pretty much impossible for policy makers to defeat.

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Don’t worry.

Things should be looking up…now that a few million kids are out of the system?

https://bellwethereducation.org/publication/missing-margins-estimating-scale-covid-19-attendance-crisis#How%20did%20you%20estimate%201-3%20million%20missing%20students?

True. However I think it would help if teachers were allowed to exclude students permanently. A big problem in the truly hopeless schools is that classes are dominated by three or four incorrigible little bastards who make everybody’s life a living hell. If they weren’t there, the rest of the kids could get on with being mediocre instead of failing completely.

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I believe you’re restricted to public schools in your locality in most circumstances
How does it work in the US? The schools are only funded by property taxes?

America is in the big debate of public vs charter schools. When a public school fails many clamor to switch public funds to support charter schools. The result is lower quality public schools and a whole host of poor charter schools wasting public funding.

So many sad stories of tax payer money wasted. My favorite is actually stories in Florida where charter schools receiving government grants were holding classes in cargo containers…some schools without desks or text books. Finally a whole set of schools managed by a government official’s friend was shut down. Result? The friend’s wife opened schools under her friend’s name and got more grant money. The government official was just feeding grants to people he had connections with.

Over 1500 charter schools taking government money have closed or never even opened. Many are just scams. The government does not have the bandwidth to try to manage public schools while also handing out money to private schools which for a long time were not even required to report how the schools used the grants.

Michigan’s charter school failure rate is over 20%. More often than not charter school performance is not better than public schools.

New Report: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought (forbes.com)

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This is completely overgeneralized. In many cases the charter schools are better than public schools. It’s case by case.

Lots of schools have to make do with makeshift classrooms for a lot of reasons, esp after COVID. The question that should be asked is why is education so underfunded.

This is common in very poor areas in the U.S. why is education so poorly funded is again the question.

Are you surprised there is graft in a state run by DeSantis?

Thanks Betsy Devos!

Which the previous admin knew all too well when appointing Betsy Effing Devoss as director of schools. Let’s never hear the ‘they’re both the same’ song and dance again, eh?

Yet people hate governments and regulations. Another case of a certain segment of Americans wanting it both ways.

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Half comes from property taxes. http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/may02/vol59/num08/Unequal-School-Funding-in-the-United-States.aspx#:~:text=Public%20school%20funding%20in%20the,between%20wealthy%20and%20impoverished%20communities.

Now take a mentality of defunding public sector education because conservative, and it’s not hard to see why city schools are badly underfunded and teachers have to bring their own materials to school.

I also heard this from an Ontario public school teacher, a few years ago (when Wynne was in charge). Just sayin’.

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Is attendance enforced in America?

Not if your parents declare that they’re homeschooling you. Then there’s absolutely no enforcement of a child’s education and the parents can get tax credits. If you’re enrolled in public schools, however, truancy is enforced by law and can result in arrests, in poor/nonwhite areas more than rich ones (school to prison pipeline take II)

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They should really have this listed as an official career path. Then at least people would know where they stand.

“So, what do you want to do when you grow up, young man?”
“Oh, I’m on the school-to-prison pipeline. My homework for this week is to start shoplifting.”

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