17 ms·

Several Baltimore schools have no students proficient in state tests

swampthinker 9y ago
Wish the article would like to the study that examined these schools
- e2e8 9y ago
  As far as I can see, Project Baltimore is just this organization's name for its articles on Baltimore issues. There was not any separate study.
leemailll 9y ago
i hate to say this but Baltimore city is kind of a mess in recently years. Crime, riot, administration corruption. Also lead paint is still a thing there, which is really harmful for developing brain
x0x0 9y ago
Navon Warren grew up in West Baltimore. He was three months old when his father was shot to death. Before his 18th birthday, he would lose two uncles and a classmate, all gunned down on the streets of Baltimore. If Navon is in any way representative, I'm really not sure what they expect schools to do. The school only gets them for 35 hours a week, 8 months per year. Over half the school qualifies for free lunch, which I think is a standard poverty indicator (though crazily enough, half isn't high poverty! [1]). Not much of that sounds like a home life or environment conducive to learning. I'm guessing the school pays poorly too, combined with what sounds like pretty horrific circumstances for much of the student body, makes me guess they aren't getting the best teachers either... [1] https://nces.ed.gov/blogs/nces/post/free-or-reduced-price-lunch-a-proxy-for-poverty https://nces.ed.gov/blogs/nces/post/free-or-reduced-price-lu...
- daveFNbuck 9y ago
  If the kid with the skill, effort and determination to get 4th place in the junior Olympics is representative and they can't get a single one of them to pass a test, the school is failing these kids a lot worse than I thought.
  - pmorici 9y ago
    Baltimore has hundreds of schools. Did that kid even go to one of these bad ones? It also has a hand full that are very good.
    - daveFNbuck 9y ago
      It would be incredibly bizarre and misleading to include an interview with a kid that didn't go to one of the failing schools the article is about. From the article: > Warren is set to graduate this year from Frederick Douglass High School A little later in the article Frederick Douglass High School is listed as one of the 6 failing schools.
      - pmorici 9y ago
        Ah, I'm getting my Baltimore stories confused I was thinking we were talking about the chess champion from Baltimore. The kid in this article is successful at sports not academics. Those tests aren't testing their athletic ability.
        daveFNbuck 9y ago
        He is successful at sports to such a degree that his upbringing is clearly not a complete barrier to success. Yet none of the students at his high school are proficient in english or math. This indicates that it's probably not the students' fault.
        pmorici 9y ago
        I'm guessing if you went and talked with the parents and peers at those schools that they would place high value on athletics and low value on academics.
golergka 9y ago
Out of curiosity, what are those math tests like?
- michaelt 9y ago
  http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/look_like/2009/algebra/view.html#/01 http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/look_... Looks OK to me, for an 18 year old. Nothing on integration/differentiation or imaginary numbers, and the use of matrices doesn't really show why they're useful - but that stuff can be covered in the first year of college.
  - golergka 9y ago
    US education system doesn't stop amazing me. IMO, this looks like a middle school test for a 12 year old.
  - kofejnik 9y ago
    Checked it out. Actual math is trivial (too trivial, in ex-USSR most of that is covered by 5th-6th grade, or 12-13 y.o.), but the test itself is horrible imo. Multiple-choice sucks for math, by design it tends to focus on minutiae of definitions or your knowledge of exact approaches taught in school; also too many trick questions (like X axis labeled with uneven steps, who does that at all and how is this relevant to statistics understanding?) and questions like: --------------------------------------------- Look at the pattern below. 2.6, −5.2, 10.4, −20.8, . . . If this pattern continues, what is the sixth term? ------------------------------------------------------- which sound like a bad IQ test where any answer is valid but you need to guess what test designer had in mind that evening. Probably because they had a checklist of "competencies" and tried to separately test each of them.
markvdb 9y ago
Here's the example Maryland high school tests: http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/index.html#/04 http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/index...
adventured 9y ago
For reference on what these tests might look like (mostly Algebra). The article indicates they're primarily talking about high schools (and one middle school). I'd suspect that the testing questions are not too far removed from the HSA (High School Assessment) tests of prior years. The HSA used to be a required test you had to pass to graduate in Maryland high schools (I believe they've changed to a new testing platform in recent years, to something called PARCC). If you click on the following link, then click on the "What does HSA look like?" tab, then scroll down for Algebra for 2009. http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/index.html http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/index...
theprop 9y ago
This is no surprise to anyone who's seen the Wire.
acjohnson55 9y ago
Wow, funny to see this on the front page of HN, as someone who once taught high school math there. That two-year stint was the most challenging experience of my life, by far. I was the founding math teacher at a brand new turnaround school with a rookie principal. I had 5 weeks of training, and my job my first year was to prepare my students for the very same state test mentioned in this article. To connect that with the typical HN world, I was literally a day 1 employee at a startup meant to replace an institution that had failed in more or less the exact same situation. Despite the intensity of the experience, it was deeply transformative for me. To briefly react to this article, I am not surprised. Baltimore is a poor and segregated city. But that socioeconomic stratum has many layers. There are many ways to end up at a better school. Some are selective, others are high demand and have a lottery, still others you simply sign up for. So you need to have good academic performance or have someone looking out with you with even just the modicum of savvy required to simply opt for a better school. If you have neither of those things, you end up going to your default neighborhood school (e.g. any of those 6 mentioned in the article), which is certain to be completely swamped with students coming from deep poverty and social dislocation. These are schools that tend to have the same number of 9th graders as 10th, 11th, and 12th combined, due drop outs and transfers. I'd be happy to answer any questions. ---- I journaled my experience here: https://alanjayteaching.wordpress.com/?order=asc https://alanjayteaching.wordpress.com/?order=asc. Another Teach For America Baltimore alumnus wrote a book on her experience. I found it to echo many of my own reflections, almost eerily so: https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Terrordome-Years-Baltimore-America/dp/0826219861 https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Terrordome-Years-Baltimore-A.... One of the schools mentioned, Fredrick Douglass High, has a deep history, and its modern day woes were profiled about a decade ago in the HBO documentary Hard Times At Douglass High: http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/hard-times-at-douglass-high-no-child-left-behind http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/hard-times-at-douglass-high....
- chillydawg 9y ago
  In your view, what would one of those failing schools require to improve performance to an acceptable level?
  - acjohnson55 9y ago
b6 9y ago
This is such an eggshells issue. I think a lot of people probably feel extremely reluctant to speak openly about this, or try to diagnose it, and that seems very bad, because children are suffering and their futures are being compromised. I don't doubt for a second that the school systems are letting kids down, at least somewhat. I'm a huge critic of public education, based on bitter experience. On the other hand, schools cannot be expected to produce great results no matter what else is happening in a child's life. If we were to look at the demographics of these schools, would we find that 99% of the students are black? It matters in this case because there's an epidemic of fatherlessness among American blacks, and it's known to be very detrimental to the development of children. Who knows how much of a role this factor plays, but not mentioning it seems like a doctor not mentioning smoking might be the culprit in a patient's cancer. If I'm wrong and there's some other more likely smoking gun in this situation, please tell me. I would like to know about it.
- watwut 9y ago
  I am all for ending war on drugs and sentencing disparity. I am also all for change of culture in which father role is primary seen as a walking wallet with little importance to actually spend time with children. However, none of it will magically change all that much unless school system changes fundamentally. As of now, schools with most difficult students get less funding and less experienced overworked teachers. They can not suceed, realistically.
- PKop 9y ago
  Took a while to find a comment that gets to the meat of the issue: Does culture matter? Most people on Hacker News will breathlessly tell you it does, at least when running a company. Well how about a community, a school, a neighborhood, a family? There is a cultural problem, with many layers. 72% of of black children are raised without fathers. Do people think that might have some impacts on culture, education, discipline, crime, poverty?
- extra88 9y ago
  Why would you latch onto fatherlessness rather than poverty, lack of safety, or lack of a healthy environment?
lhnz 9y ago
> Last year, not one student scored proficient > in any state testing. > > “That’s absurd to me. That’s absurd to me,” says > Warren’s mother Janel Nelson. “That’s your teachers > report card, ultimately.” This is bad. Teaching is an incredibly stressful job and putting more pressure on teachers only causes them to leave to schools in which their effort pays off. Children need to be taught to take on more autonomy for their grades and other outcomes in their life. It's okay if they need to be spoon-fed a little bit when they first join a school, but they must be weaned off this if they are to have a chance in the "real world".
- benchaney 9y ago
  It's ridiculous to blame the students in this case. If every single student failed, that is either a problem with the teacher, or a problem with the test.
  - pmorici 9y ago
    Problem with the parents.
    - benchaney 9y ago
      Every parent in the school? If it were a problem with a handful of students maybe, but if every student fails, there is a more systematic issue at play.
      - pmorici 9y ago
        It's self selecting. Any parent that cares even a little bit will realize the school is crap and get their kid out of that situation asap.
        benchaney 9y ago
        Maybe if they are can afford to move and switch school districts. Or if they live in a school district where they can choose their school (which also correlates with income). Edit: Also, If a school is so bad that you have to move away from it to avoid being considered a bad parent, that reflects worse on the school more so than the parents.
logicallee 9y ago
I don't believe the headline and report. (The schools include "Excel Academy" and "Achievement Academy". Statistically, zero proficient students at any of these schools would essentially have to mean not one student can spell the name of their school.) Sorry. No matter the shape of their bell curve, the article is sensationalist and cannot possibly be correct. What's their source? How can such an absurd fact be so? Edit: I thought proficient meant "competent" (one of the definitions). According to the article, "Just one student approached expectations and scored a three." whereas 4 and 5 on the 5-point scale were deemed "proficient.". However, I still have trouble believing it. This includes graduates. At Frederick Douglas, just one of the schools surveyed, "half the students graduate and just a few dozen will go to college". Apparently we are to believe that among all these schools, with all its graduates, and all its college attendees, not 1 student scored a 4/5 in English and Math. That's not how bell curves work.
- linkmotif 9y ago
  You're definitely not from Baltimore and most likely not from the United States.
  - logicallee 9y ago
    No, I'm not from Baltimore. The article says "a few dozen" kids will go to college from Frederick Douglass High School, which is one of the 6 named high schools and middle schools. If we take "a few dozen" to mean 25, and apply it to the 6 schools, that is at least 150 college-bound students. Out of 150 college-bound students, you believe that exactly 0 had a 4 out of 5 in both math and English? We are not talking about generalities or averages here. The article makes the extraordinary claim of "exactly 0." This is simply an extraordinary claim. Like saying nobody is over 6 feet tall in an American city of a population of 500,000. I mean sure, the average could be lower - but not one? Since you seem to know a bit more about Baltimore, could you expand on the reason for this extraordinary fact? Maybe it is a statistical anomaly based on the total number of high schools and middle schools, that 6 should happen not to have any students with an over 4 in math and English. Plus I note that they say math and English. Perhaps if they said "math or English" they would have. So it definitely seems a bit fishy to me.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
yeasayer 9y ago
10 years since The Wire season 4, the situation is still the same.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Seven years since Waiting for Superman.
DanielBMarkham 9y ago
These are not schools. I don't know what to call them, "Public institutions for young people waiting to go into dysfunctional lifestyles" comes to mind. There could be others. Shut them down. Seriously. If you are failing this terribly, the very least you owe taxpayers and the poor kids and parents associated with those schools is honesty. Not spin. Not statistical bullshit. Honesty. Shut the damned schools down. The resources we are allocating there are actively working against the public interest. I'm sure the cries will come out "What to do with these at-risk kids?" That's a great question, and folks can have a wonderful public discussion about that. Unfortunately, that discussion gets into winners and losers -- various interests have various goals that they want to achieve. So let's separate that out, put it aside for a few months. For now, close them down. Immediately. Try some brutal honesty and see if it doesn't move the dial forward a little bit.
- SolaceQuantum 9y ago
  Why deprive students of even more resources? Why starve them? Why put parents in a situation where they have to take care of children 24/7 when over half the school qualifies for meals, that they then will no longer have and parents have to figure out where to get the extra money? The only people who will suffer the most from schools closing are the kids.
  - DanielBMarkham 9y ago
    I think you've answered your own question. We've invested tens of millions of dollars into each of these institutions. They are not meeting up to the reason for their existence. Feeding kids, providing a place for them to play sports, and so on? Sounds like we may actually be doing that. Ok, so keep the buildings and fund them to achieve that purpose and that purpose only. Then, immediately afterwards, begin a discussion about education which is separate from the concerns you outline. The goal here isn't some temper tantrum to punish kids. The goal here is actually being honest about what we are doing and why. If we're honest, we might have a way forward. If we keep up the political bickering, we never will. And the kids will continue to suffer.

Wish the article would like to the study that examined these schools

e2e8 9y ago
As far as I can see, Project Baltimore is just this organization's name for its articles on Baltimore issues. There was not any separate study.

i hate to say this but Baltimore city is kind of a mess in recently years. Crime, riot, administration corruption. Also lead paint is still a thing there, which is really harmful for developing brain

x0x0 9y ago

Navon Warren grew up in West Baltimore. He was three months old when his father was shot to death. Before his 18th birthday, he would lose two uncles and a classmate, all gunned down on the streets of Baltimore. If Navon is in any way representative, I'm really not sure what they expect schools to do. The school only gets them for 35 hours a week, 8 months per year. Over half the school qualifies for free lunch, which I think is a standard poverty indicator (though crazily enough, half isn't high poverty! [1]). Not much of that sounds like a home life or environment conducive to learning. I'm guessing the school pays poorly too, combined with what sounds like pretty horrific circumstances for much of the student body, makes me guess they aren't getting the best teachers either... [1] https://nces.ed.gov/blogs/nces/post/free-or-reduced-price-lunch-a-proxy-for-poverty https://nces.ed.gov/blogs/nces/post/free-or-reduced-price-lu...

daveFNbuck 9y ago
If the kid with the skill, effort and determination to get 4th place in the junior Olympics is representative and they can't get a single one of them to pass a test, the school is failing these kids a lot worse than I thought.
- pmorici 9y ago
  Baltimore has hundreds of schools. Did that kid even go to one of these bad ones? It also has a hand full that are very good.
  - daveFNbuck 9y ago
    It would be incredibly bizarre and misleading to include an interview with a kid that didn't go to one of the failing schools the article is about. From the article: > Warren is set to graduate this year from Frederick Douglass High School A little later in the article Frederick Douglass High School is listed as one of the 6 failing schools.
    - pmorici 9y ago
      Ah, I'm getting my Baltimore stories confused I was thinking we were talking about the chess champion from Baltimore. The kid in this article is successful at sports not academics. Those tests aren't testing their athletic ability.
      - daveFNbuck 9y ago
        He is successful at sports to such a degree that his upbringing is clearly not a complete barrier to success. Yet none of the students at his high school are proficient in english or math. This indicates that it's probably not the students' fault.
        pmorici 9y ago
        I'm guessing if you went and talked with the parents and peers at those schools that they would place high value on athletics and low value on academics.

golergka 9y ago

Out of curiosity, what are those math tests like?

michaelt 9y ago
http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/look_like/2009/algebra/view.html#/01 http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/look_... Looks OK to me, for an 18 year old. Nothing on integration/differentiation or imaginary numbers, and the use of matrices doesn't really show why they're useful - but that stuff can be covered in the first year of college.
- golergka 9y ago
  US education system doesn't stop amazing me. IMO, this looks like a middle school test for a 12 year old.
- kofejnik 9y ago
  Checked it out. Actual math is trivial (too trivial, in ex-USSR most of that is covered by 5th-6th grade, or 12-13 y.o.), but the test itself is horrible imo. Multiple-choice sucks for math, by design it tends to focus on minutiae of definitions or your knowledge of exact approaches taught in school; also too many trick questions (like X axis labeled with uneven steps, who does that at all and how is this relevant to statistics understanding?) and questions like: --------------------------------------------- Look at the pattern below. 2.6, −5.2, 10.4, −20.8, . . . If this pattern continues, what is the sixth term? ------------------------------------------------------- which sound like a bad IQ test where any answer is valid but you need to guess what test designer had in mind that evening. Probably because they had a checklist of "competencies" and tried to separately test each of them.

markvdb 9y ago

Here's the example Maryland high school tests: http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/index.html#/04 http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/index...

adventured 9y ago

For reference on what these tests might look like (mostly Algebra). The article indicates they're primarily talking about high schools (and one middle school). I'd suspect that the testing questions are not too far removed from the HSA (High School Assessment) tests of prior years. The HSA used to be a required test you had to pass to graduate in Maryland high schools (I believe they've changed to a new testing platform in recent years, to something called PARCC). If you click on the following link, then click on the "What does HSA look like?" tab, then scroll down for Algebra for 2009. http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/index.html http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/index...

theprop 9y ago

This is no surprise to anyone who's seen the Wire.

acjohnson55 9y ago

Wow, funny to see this on the front page of HN, as someone who once taught high school math there. That two-year stint was the most challenging experience of my life, by far. I was the founding math teacher at a brand new turnaround school with a rookie principal. I had 5 weeks of training, and my job my first year was to prepare my students for the very same state test mentioned in this article. To connect that with the typical HN world, I was literally a day 1 employee at a startup meant to replace an institution that had failed in more or less the exact same situation. Despite the intensity of the experience, it was deeply transformative for me. To briefly react to this article, I am not surprised. Baltimore is a poor and segregated city. But that socioeconomic stratum has many layers. There are many ways to end up at a better school. Some are selective, others are high demand and have a lottery, still others you simply sign up for. So you need to have good academic performance or have someone looking out with you with even just the modicum of savvy required to simply opt for a better school. If you have neither of those things, you end up going to your default neighborhood school (e.g. any of those 6 mentioned in the article), which is certain to be completely swamped with students coming from deep poverty and social dislocation. These are schools that tend to have the same number of 9th graders as 10th, 11th, and 12th combined, due drop outs and transfers. I'd be happy to answer any questions. ---- I journaled my experience here: https://alanjayteaching.wordpress.com/?order=asc https://alanjayteaching.wordpress.com/?order=asc. Another Teach For America Baltimore alumnus wrote a book on her experience. I found it to echo many of my own reflections, almost eerily so: https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Terrordome-Years-Baltimore-America/dp/0826219861 https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Terrordome-Years-Baltimore-A.... One of the schools mentioned, Fredrick Douglass High, has a deep history, and its modern day woes were profiled about a decade ago in the HBO documentary Hard Times At Douglass High: http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/hard-times-at-douglass-high-no-child-left-behind http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/hard-times-at-douglass-high....

chillydawg 9y ago
In your view, what would one of those failing schools require to improve performance to an acceptable level?
- acjohnson55 9y ago

b6 9y ago

This is such an eggshells issue. I think a lot of people probably feel extremely reluctant to speak openly about this, or try to diagnose it, and that seems very bad, because children are suffering and their futures are being compromised. I don't doubt for a second that the school systems are letting kids down, at least somewhat. I'm a huge critic of public education, based on bitter experience. On the other hand, schools cannot be expected to produce great results no matter what else is happening in a child's life. If we were to look at the demographics of these schools, would we find that 99% of the students are black? It matters in this case because there's an epidemic of fatherlessness among American blacks, and it's known to be very detrimental to the development of children. Who knows how much of a role this factor plays, but not mentioning it seems like a doctor not mentioning smoking might be the culprit in a patient's cancer. If I'm wrong and there's some other more likely smoking gun in this situation, please tell me. I would like to know about it.

watwut 9y ago
I am all for ending war on drugs and sentencing disparity. I am also all for change of culture in which father role is primary seen as a walking wallet with little importance to actually spend time with children. However, none of it will magically change all that much unless school system changes fundamentally. As of now, schools with most difficult students get less funding and less experienced overworked teachers. They can not suceed, realistically.
PKop 9y ago
Took a while to find a comment that gets to the meat of the issue: Does culture matter? Most people on Hacker News will breathlessly tell you it does, at least when running a company. Well how about a community, a school, a neighborhood, a family? There is a cultural problem, with many layers. 72% of of black children are raised without fathers. Do people think that might have some impacts on culture, education, discipline, crime, poverty?
extra88 9y ago
Why would you latch onto fatherlessness rather than poverty, lack of safety, or lack of a healthy environment?

lhnz 9y ago

> Last year, not one student scored proficient > in any state testing. > > “That’s absurd to me. That’s absurd to me,” says > Warren’s mother Janel Nelson. “That’s your teachers > report card, ultimately.” This is bad. Teaching is an incredibly stressful job and putting more pressure on teachers only causes them to leave to schools in which their effort pays off. Children need to be taught to take on more autonomy for their grades and other outcomes in their life. It's okay if they need to be spoon-fed a little bit when they first join a school, but they must be weaned off this if they are to have a chance in the "real world".

benchaney 9y ago
It's ridiculous to blame the students in this case. If every single student failed, that is either a problem with the teacher, or a problem with the test.
- pmorici 9y ago
  Problem with the parents.
  - benchaney 9y ago
    Every parent in the school? If it were a problem with a handful of students maybe, but if every student fails, there is a more systematic issue at play.
    - pmorici 9y ago
      It's self selecting. Any parent that cares even a little bit will realize the school is crap and get their kid out of that situation asap.
      - benchaney 9y ago
        Maybe if they are can afford to move and switch school districts. Or if they live in a school district where they can choose their school (which also correlates with income). Edit: Also, If a school is so bad that you have to move away from it to avoid being considered a bad parent, that reflects worse on the school more so than the parents.

logicallee 9y ago

I don't believe the headline and report. (The schools include "Excel Academy" and "Achievement Academy". Statistically, zero proficient students at any of these schools would essentially have to mean not one student can spell the name of their school.) Sorry. No matter the shape of their bell curve, the article is sensationalist and cannot possibly be correct. What's their source? How can such an absurd fact be so? Edit: I thought proficient meant "competent" (one of the definitions). According to the article, "Just one student approached expectations and scored a three." whereas 4 and 5 on the 5-point scale were deemed "proficient.". However, I still have trouble believing it. This includes graduates. At Frederick Douglas, just one of the schools surveyed, "half the students graduate and just a few dozen will go to college". Apparently we are to believe that among all these schools, with all its graduates, and all its college attendees, not 1 student scored a 4/5 in English and Math. That's not how bell curves work.

linkmotif 9y ago
You're definitely not from Baltimore and most likely not from the United States.
- logicallee 9y ago
  No, I'm not from Baltimore. The article says "a few dozen" kids will go to college from Frederick Douglass High School, which is one of the 6 named high schools and middle schools. If we take "a few dozen" to mean 25, and apply it to the 6 schools, that is at least 150 college-bound students. Out of 150 college-bound students, you believe that exactly 0 had a 4 out of 5 in both math and English? We are not talking about generalities or averages here. The article makes the extraordinary claim of "exactly 0." This is simply an extraordinary claim. Like saying nobody is over 6 feet tall in an American city of a population of 500,000. I mean sure, the average could be lower - but not one? Since you seem to know a bit more about Baltimore, could you expand on the reason for this extraordinary fact? Maybe it is a statistical anomaly based on the total number of high schools and middle schools, that 6 should happen not to have any students with an over 4 in math and English. Plus I note that they say math and English. Perhaps if they said "math or English" they would have. So it definitely seems a bit fishy to me.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

yeasayer 9y ago

10 years since The Wire season 4, the situation is still the same.

humanrebar 9y ago
Seven years since Waiting for Superman.

DanielBMarkham 9y ago

These are not schools. I don't know what to call them, "Public institutions for young people waiting to go into dysfunctional lifestyles" comes to mind. There could be others. Shut them down. Seriously. If you are failing this terribly, the very least you owe taxpayers and the poor kids and parents associated with those schools is honesty. Not spin. Not statistical bullshit. Honesty. Shut the damned schools down. The resources we are allocating there are actively working against the public interest. I'm sure the cries will come out "What to do with these at-risk kids?" That's a great question, and folks can have a wonderful public discussion about that. Unfortunately, that discussion gets into winners and losers -- various interests have various goals that they want to achieve. So let's separate that out, put it aside for a few months. For now, close them down. Immediately. Try some brutal honesty and see if it doesn't move the dial forward a little bit.

SolaceQuantum 9y ago
Why deprive students of even more resources? Why starve them? Why put parents in a situation where they have to take care of children 24/7 when over half the school qualifies for meals, that they then will no longer have and parents have to figure out where to get the extra money? The only people who will suffer the most from schools closing are the kids.
- DanielBMarkham 9y ago
  I think you've answered your own question. We've invested tens of millions of dollars into each of these institutions. They are not meeting up to the reason for their existence. Feeding kids, providing a place for them to play sports, and so on? Sounds like we may actually be doing that. Ok, so keep the buildings and fund them to achieve that purpose and that purpose only. Then, immediately afterwards, begin a discussion about education which is separate from the concerns you outline. The goal here isn't some temper tantrum to punish kids. The goal here is actually being honest about what we are doing and why. If we're honest, we might have a way forward. If we keep up the political bickering, we never will. And the kids will continue to suffer.