DarkStar Spouts Off

Hard Times...

I don't have much time but that documentary laid it out very clearly. Parents/guardians/students are a major component in the failures of Douglass High School.

The entire household saw the show. Mrs. D.S. and I are STILL talking about it. It confirms EVERY. DAMN. THING. I have said about the Baltimore city school system, plus some. Passing kids along to pass them along! What the hell are the degrees worth? Nothing! I've also mentioned the parents/grandparents/guardians not doing what is required for their children.

And then to say NCLB is to blame? There is no way a school can meet the NCLB requirements under those circumstances. None. But even saying that, the movie did a SEVERE injustice in not going into the details of the attempted take over of the school by the state and how the state assembly blocked the plan simply because the assembly is dominated by Democrats and the take over was attempted during a Republican governor's administration.

Like I said before, to hell with the students! Democrats can't look bad!

Or was NCLB really just a hook to really show "inner city school" dysfunction and non-participation by students and parents/grandparents/guardians without having cries of "racism!" being made?

Hmmmmm.....

Baltimore Schools Chief Alonso Is A Putz

About 6 years ago I attended a Baltimore City school board meeting addressing the fact that students who don't live up to magnet school standards, such as those at City, Poly, and Western, were being sent back to their zoned schools. The meeting included students who were sent back. I do not exaggerate or lie when I say THE STUDENTS ADMITTED THEY DIDN'T DO WHAT WAS NECESSARY TO STAY IN THOSE SCHOOLS!

So, when I read this, I went postal!

Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso is making it harder for the city's elite magnet high schools to remove students who are struggling academically.

Alonso says that the schools are already getting the city's brightest students and that they have an obligation to work with them. Historically, he said, a significant number of students who began as freshmen at Polytechnic Institute, City College and Western High were not still enrolled four years later at graduation.

"That's unacceptable," Alonso said in an interview. "It represents a lack of accountability on the part of the school given the fact that they begin with students who by definition are the most academically able students in the city. ... My expectation is that they succeed with them, that they put in place not only extraordinary educational programs but also the interventions that are necessary."

Alonso is a putz! There ARE interventions in place! Students cannot be returned without having not met the interventions!

Sure, ruin the magnet schools just like the regular schools! AGAIN: Blow up the damn system and let the magnets become charters!

No Parents Involved, No Education

[Updated]

Education Week has come out with another study on graduation rates. Baltimore has the 3rd worst graduation rate in the nation.

Almost two-thirds of Baltimore high school students fail to get diplomas, a figure so low that it ranks as the nation's third-worst, according to a study released by the publication Education Week.

Only 34.6 percent of Baltimore high school students graduated four years after they began school, according to the study, which analyzed 2004 data. The only school systems with worse figures were Detroit and Cleveland, where the graduation rates were 24.9 percent and 34.1 percent, respectively.

Baltimore schools officials disputed Education Week's new findings, just as they did last year when the journal reported that the city's graduation rate was 38.5 percent in 2003, which ranked as the nation's second-worst, behind Detroit with 21.7 percent.

Although Baltimore's graduation rate dropped nearly 4 percentage points from 2003 to 2004, according to Education Week, its ranking moved up a notch to third-worst because of falling figures in Cleveland.

A Baltimore schools official said the system's graduation rate was 54.3 percent for 2004 and that the figure rose to 60 percent last year.

[ UPDATE ]

I'll write this again.

In Baltimore, there is no core group of parents who give a damn. In politics, you get what you deserve. When parents don't care enough about their kids, when they don't care enough to pressure schools, administration, and politicians, you get what you get in Baltimore.

You get massive failure. And even if the estimated 10% of people in Baltimore are heroin addicts, that's still not an excuse for this failure rate. Parents get 60% of the reason. The other is the almost total dysfunction of the Baltimore City Public School System (BCPSS).

I don't live in Baltimore and I bet I'm more upset about this than most BCPSS parents!

And should I even mention the Black Democrat politicians who have stood in the way of giving parents who care other options?

Why I Say The Baltimore School System Must Go

Here is another data point to support my idea that the Baltimore City Public School System must be "blown up."

The Baltimore school board has approved a $1.2 billion budget for the next academic year that is filled with errors and tens of millions of dollars of discrepancies, a Sun review has found.

In dozens of cases, the amounts budgeted for salaries do not match with the number of people who are supposed to be paid. One line item shows $6.2 million in salary money to pay zero employees.

The problems surface just months after the school system declared itself fiscally healthy after a major financial collapse and as the state infuses hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the city's chronically underfunded schools.

The school board chairman and the head of the board's finance committee acknowledged that no one had noticed the many discrepancies before the board unanimously approved the budget March 27, with one member absent.

Among The Sun's findings:

• If the figures listed in the budget were correct, at least 460 employees would earn more than $200,000 a year on average, while more than 2,000 employees would earn less than $9,000 a year. One person would earn $1.4 million, another would earn $1.9 million and 13 would earn more than $510,000 each.

• Different sections of the same document provide drastically different figures. A summary page lists 7,011 employees, including teachers and principals, assigned to work under the school system's chief academic officer. Elsewhere in the document, the number of employees exceeds 10,000.

• While the budget is supposed to include an extra $1.5 million to decrease class sizes in selected elementary schools, it would effectively increase class sizes by reducing the number of staff assigned to elementary schools citywide by 204 positions.

Format fix later.

The parents/guardians, who care, of Baltimore city school students need other options.

Past posts on the Baltimore City Public School System.

Talking Education, The Meeting

On Friday I had a meeting with 2 aides for Gov. Ehrlich. The aides are charged with coming up with reforms to improve education in Maryland.

I came "armed" with the suggestions that I wrote about here. I developed others and they follow:

• Disruptive students get suspended. The parents must go to the school to get the students back into school.
• Kids with multiple suspensions are suspended and not allowed to return to school until the students are tested to find academic deficiencies. This is done because many kids who are disruptive in school, are also having academic problems. They may also be having personal problems but that is a fine line that I don't want to cross with government intrusion.
• School and parents/guardians must agree to a plan to bring kid back up to speed. This may include being transfered to another school just for that purpose.
• State tax credit or state tax deduction for parents who get tutors for their children.
• State tax credit or state tax deduction for parents who have education savings accounts.
• State tax credit or state tax deduction for individuals who tutor. This would apply towards supplies and travel expenses.
• Mandatory vo-tech requirements starting in the 6th grade.
• Any child who drops out of school, gets 1 year of vo-tech training at a for-profit extended education school, free, if they pass the course. Or, as a requirement to “be allowed to drop out”, they get vo-tech training in the public school system with an internship program with partner private companies.
• How-to PSAs encouraging parents to take part in children’s education from pre-natal care to helping out in school work to attending school board meetings to volunteering in school to how to get tutor help Private/church tutoring programs encouraged by allowing programs to use school space to tutor.

It was a wide ranging discussion that covered my bullet points, what the administration was doing, the work of the year-long education commission chaired by Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, strategies, problems, successes, and future plans. It was a true discussion. By that I mean, they hit the points they wanted to hit, but so did I and we exchanged ideas, some of which were new to them, some of which were not.

First, read how a Black Democrat (they are friends of the Black population, right?), is blocking an effort to improve a low performing high school.

Political Realities

The political reality is Gov. Ehrlich is a Republican fighting a Democrat controlled state assembly and teacher unions. As such, things that are legislative in nature, are going to get a tough time. I knew that going into the meeting but I had to put the ideas on the table.

My Ideas They Liked

• They liked the idea about kids being able to attend schools, freely, across school district boundaries. The reality is, in some cases, it already exists. For example, county kids are able to attend schools in Baltimore if they want to do so. And, some do. Their parents pay the school system to do it, but they do it.
• The use of PSAs to encourage parents to be an active part in their child's education.
• Tax credits or deductions for parents who pay for tutors and for tutors who pay for supplies.

What Is Currently Being Done

They told me what the Ehrlich administration is currently doing in the area of education. This also included, naturally, them "defending" some of their actions and "attacking" the actions of the opposition. It was interesting to learn that the administration aided a Black pastor in Hartford County, MD, go through the process of applying to open a charter school and getting it approved. They wanted to show that charter schools are a concept that is applicable to the counties as well as Baltimore city. The school will be opened next school year.

They told me how Baltimore City underfunded charter schools and how the charter schools sued the city, and won, on the funding scheme.

              Public school systems must provide as  much money per pupil to charter school operators as they spend on regular public  schools, the state Court of Special Appeals  ruled Friday, siding with the state in a  dispute with Baltimore.

The court -- the second-highest in the  state -- said the funding must be in cash  rather than in-kind services. Baltimore now  spends the equivalent of about $11,000 per  child in its regular public schools. Charter  schools in the city receive $5,859 per child  in cash and the rest in services that the school system provides, such as special education and food.

There is more that I may write about, especially since much of it can "tweak" those Blacks who think Democrats are "our" "friends".

What Can Be Done

I mentioned that I thought the Baltimore school board should be blown up. They asked me to provide names of people who I would like to see on the board. I provided 3 names, one of which would be a strong advocate for children, but who thinks the Ehrlich administration is racist. This person also thinks O'Malley is racist, but it would be nice to put this person in the middle of it. Surprisingly, they were receptive to the idea.

I suggested that more should be done to encourage colleges to adopt schools in Baltimore in particular. I pointed out the work that Coppin is doing and stated Bowie, Morgan, and University of Maryland Eastern Shore should be used more effectively. That is when I was told about the situation at Coppin. This brought up another discussion on political realities, and I started thinking of ways to subvert the perverse politics being played by Black Democrat politicians in Maryland.

I suggested they contact groups like 100 Black Men, who they already are working with, the Positive Black Men's Coalition, the Black Greeks, and some of the megga churches in the area. I'll see what I can do in that area. (Cobb? You reading? Your frat had an announcement, so can you provide points of contact here?)

More later...

Greg Kane Nails Baltimore City Schools

Gregory Kane's article on Black America web takes Democrats to task for the poor state of schools in Baltimore.

...Henderson told a room full of black folks at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University that Maryland’s Republican governor was trying to take over Baltimore schools. Then he told them about how teachers in predominantly-white Baltimore County schools are better than those in predominantly-black Baltimore schools and about disparities in the availability of advanced placement courses between the two systems.

Here’s what Henderson failed to mention: schools in Baltimore County and in Baltimore are run by Democrats. Maryland’s legislature, which funds both systems, has been a Democratic body for decades.

Any failures of Baltimore’s school system -- which, according to a Manhattan Institute study, graduates only 48 percent of its students and only 39 percent of its black male students -- have to be blamed on the political party that’s run the system for years.

That would be Democrats.

...

I’ll use as Exhibit A Baltimore’s KIPP Ujima Village Academy, a fifth-through-eighth grade school that sits in a poor, predominantly black section of northwest Baltimore. On recent state assessment tests, these “poor black kids” Democrats claim to have so much affection for rocked it, totally blitzing their counterparts in predominantly white, affluent areas of the state.

Nearly 92 percent of KIPP’s sixth-graders scored at advanced or proficient levels in reading on the Maryland School Assessments. They beat 24 of 25 schools in Baltimore County and 15 of 19 schools in ritzy Howard County, just south of Baltimore.

In math, just over 89 percent of KIPP’s sixth-graders scored at advanced or proficient levels, beating 23 of 25 Baltimore County schools and 12 of 19 Howard County schools. One hundred percent of KIPP’s seventh and eighth graders scored at advanced or proficient in math, beating ALL schools in Baltimore County and Howard County.

I'll have to say this: parents are also to blame for the Baltimore City schools. There are not enough parents -- I'm drawing a blank on the phrase I want to use -- who care enough about the school system to raise hell.

MD Dems Don't Care About Black Kids in Baltimore

Maryland Democrats in the Maryland State House don't care about Black kids in Baltimore City schools which have been failing kids for 9 years.

From Monday's Baltimore Sun:

With just one vote to spare, the Senate today overrode Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s veto of a bill that would stall the state from taking over 11 failing Baltimore schools.

Voting 30-17, the Senate joined the House in defeating the governor's veto. The bill would put a one-year moratorium on the state's move to assume control of four high schools and put seven middle schools into the hands of independent operators by the fall of 2007.

Before the vote, Sen. Nathaniel J. McFadden, a Baltimore City Democrat, urged his colleagues to remember that this is an issue of "courtesy and local control."

"I'd like to thank the members of the Senate who were supportive of this effort," McFadden said. "The students and the citizens of Baltimore thank those who have gotten behind us."

McFadden ain't nuthin.

See:

Baltimore City Schools Don't Give A Damn
NCLB: A School Take Over

for the history.

This isn't the first time McFadden has worked against the interest of Blacks in Baltimore.