In 2005, when the Emmy Award-winning television drama “The Wire” shined a harsh light on Baltimore City Schools, it proved to be an eye-opening experience for viewers who were not familiar with the tragic plight of students in Baltimore. The show presented a dystopic reality for students, who faced violence and poverty, living amid blighted neighborhoods riddled with drugs, crime and decay.
Although the dramatic depiction of inner-city horror in “The Wire” was a tragedy of almost Shakespearean proportions, the real-life tragedy in Baltimore is in many respects far worse. According to information uncovered by the “Project Baltimore Investigation” by the local Fox News affiliate WBFF in Baltimore, Baltimore spends roughly $1.4 billion annually for education—roughly $16,000 per student. Baltimore’s spending on education is the fourth highest of any municipality in the country. And yet, despite this massive commitment of resources, Baltimore schools have some of the lowest educational proficiency levels in the country.
According to “Project Baltimore” investigative journalist Chris Papst, reading proficiency rates among Baltimore high school graduates hover at around 11 percent, and math proficiency rates hover around 12 percent. These low proficiencies are in a school system that graduates roughly 70 percent of its students each year. There is clearly a major disconnection between the high graduation rate and the extremely dismal academic proficiency rate.
This discrepancy alone, given the money that goes into the system, is prima facie evidence of a crime. As “Project Baltimore” continues to follow the path of the money, it becomes increasingly obvious that there are strong institutional incentives to keep Baltimore’s clearly failing system in place. In a very real sense, the dysfunction in Baltimore’s schools mirrors a similar dysfunction in the city’s political establishment. In a city of fewer than 600,00 residents, with a rapidly declining school enrollment, literally thousands of individuals in the school system receive salaries in excess of $100,000 per year. Most of the recipients of this government largesse are not teachers, but consultants, contractors and administrators.
The school system, it seems, has become a platform for political patronage, and rewarding allies of the city’s political class. How else could the school system’s budget be so saddled with bureaucracy and blight? To be sure, the Baltimore school system faces social problems among its student populations—the traumas of violence, crime and drugs—that necessitate committing more resources. The school system has in many ways become an extension of the welfare state, playing social worker, nanny and counselor for children ravaged by the ills of inner city decline.
But that is no excuse when the primary role of the school system remains its ability to produce productive citizens who will, in turn, contribute to society in meaningful ways. This responsibility is clearly not being met in Baltimore. In one high school, six students were murdered in one school year alone. Others have gone on to illustrious careers as criminals, and many of the school system’s graduates are populating the city’s overcrowded jails and prisons. Despite facing tough challenges among its student population, it is imperative that schools succeed in graduating students who are proficient enough in basic skills to enter the job market.
Teachers in Baltimore and around the country have complained about the statewide testing requirements imposed by the No Child Left Behind legislation initiated under former President George W. Bush. Even in the show, “The Wire,” teachers chafed under “onerous” requirements of “teaching to the tests.” They complained that the standardized tests bore little relation to the lives faced by students out on the mean streets of Baltimore. And although that might be true to some extent, the response by the school system seemed to be mainly focused on warehousing students and passing them on to the next grade, irrespective of their academic performance.
The perverse incentives in Baltimore, where students are permitted to attend any school of their choice, is that students have tended to choose the schools with the highest graduation rates, or rather, the highest social promotion rates. The tragic consequence of sweeping academic progress under the rug in favor of social promotion has produced wildly absurd results. At Frederick Douglas High School, which had an 87 percent graduation rate, just one student out of a student body of 185 students, tested in the proficient range in math. In several other public high schools around the city, not a single student passed the state proficiency test.
The consequences of this tragedy—thousands of students graduating each year without even basic education attainment—reveal a crime of almost epic proportions. Individuals and firms that service the Baltimore school system are making off with literally billions of taxpayer dollars and providing nothing to show for it. In any for-profit corporation, such dismal results would have caused it to go bankrupt long ago, pushed out of the market by companies that could better serve the consumer. Some teachers have even begun to argue that preparing students for college-level proficiency is too high a mark at which to reasonably aim. The bigotry of lowered expectations always leads to a predictable cycle of decline. It is a moral hazard whose logic is inexorable in a bureaucracy in which the agents are not held personally or politically accountable by principles.
But in the tortured logic of Baltimore’s political bureaucracy, failure is incentivized. Social promotion and even outright falsification of students’ grades is a crime. It is at best a massive fraud committed against the students, who are cheated out of a future, and taxpayers, whose hard-earned money is being wasted. At worst, Baltimore’s performance is a genocidal crime against generations of children who are then turned out into the streets to face a world of crime, drugs, prison and death that has resulted in a murder rate of more than 300 per year. The buck has to stop somewhere. And cutting off the flow of unaccounted tax dollars to an underperforming, bloated school system that is cynically betraying children needs to be seriously considered.
Mr. Williams is manager/sole owner of Howard Stirk Holdings I & II Broadcast Television Stations and the 2016 Multicultural Media Broadcast Owner of the year. Listen to Mr. Williams on Sirius XM126 Urban View nightly, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., EST.
