Ms. Education: So it's not just Baltimore

What I mean is poor education. Or in this case, a lack of a long-run dedication to being educated and the necessary support systems to facilitate that long-run dedication (one helluva run-on, huh?)...It's not just Baltimore.

I was reading this post over at Biochemical Slang and it made me think about my "Lowered Expectations" post on Baltimore City public schools.

One of my favorite lines from the Biochemical post is "If our exam scores included realness, flatness of hat brims, and Lacoste shirts, we'd be beating those damn Asian countries." LOL, but I agree wholeheartedly.

My point here is to re-iterate what's said about NY state schools in an effort to tie this into what I have said about Baltimore city public schools:

"'2/3 of New York state kids are proficient in math!' Yes! As our kids got older, they steady got dumberer! Our kids demonstrated an 80% math proficiency in third grade, but a 50 % proficiency by eighth grade. NYC is at 57% proficiency and Chancellor Joel Klein added, "Today’s math results, I think, represent real progress." If you're meter stick is an inch long, ANYTHING will look like progress... Klein added, “While we went down, we went down much less.” If you're meter stick is a centimeter, shit's LOOKIN' GOOD."

This is more likely than not prevalent in many urban school districts throughout the country. And it appears that Baltimore's solution was simply to lower the bar. More specifically, start off doing well in school but as you get older and start doing worse, we'll simply lower the bar for you. In Baltimore's case, the justification was that they're simply leveling the playing field for Baltimore city students so that they're being measured by the same metrics as students across the country. Whether or not you believe this is acceptable or just plain dumb is not the important part here. The signal that it undoubtedly being sent to some students (if not all) is of the utmost importance.

"You guys are underachieving or simply not achieving at all. Sooooooo, we're lowering the bar for you guys!"


Maybe those are pages from a math book en fuego???

You know what's sad is that some times I think that the writers of the WIRE could do a better job of running Baltimore City than the actual folks who run this place.