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Things like that puzzle me. Baltimore, MD high school graduation rate is under 70% [1]. They spend $18k per student [2] - more than 45 other states on average

Things like that puzzle me. Baltimore, MD high school graduation rate is under 70% [1]. They spend $18k per student [2] - more than 45 other states on average [3] Citizens of Baltimore even elected a black grassroot mayor who understands needs of the community [4] and Maryland's police brutality is among the lowest in the country [5]. Yet something doesn't work. WHY? [1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-city-schools-graduation-rate-drops-to-six-year-low https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/baltimore-city-public-schools-promoted-student-with-013-gpa-while-spending-a-14-billion-budget https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/bal... [3] https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Scott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Scott [5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123317/rate-people-killed-police-us-state-population/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123317/rate-people-kill...

tomschlick 5y ago
> WHY? Because no matter how much better the schools / administration of it get, it all falls down if the kids don't have a culture at home of valuing education. My sister taught in a few different low income school districts and each time it was the same thing. Probably 75% of the parents just don't care if their kid is misbehaving or straight up not attending at all. Discipline of those kids was met with accusations of racism by both the kid and the parent as a tool to stop the conversation all together. Phone calls home about performance were generally met with "its your job to teach them not mine". Almost no one showed up to parent teacher meetings. Kids who did want to learn were made fun of by other kids as "acting white". All of this leads to administrations and teachers pushing under-qualified students through to get them out of the way. There is little incentive for them to personally invest in kids when there is no investment at home. Something has got to give.
oh_sigh 5y ago
It's not really clear to me that being a "black grassroot mayor who understands the needs of the community" is a benefit without any kind of experience managing and operating large organizations. The operating budget of Baltimore is approximately $4B/year. I can't imagine many companies with that kind of budget that would hire a CEO/COO with Scott's resume to run it.
- AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  The sky will fall before a greedy fat cat corporate CEO will be elected as a public official - no matter what his track record in managing other people's money is.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Sure - I wasn't saying a corporate CEO would even be the right person to run a large city(though Bloomberg did pretty well relative to the expectations of a NYC mayor), but merely pointing out that businesses with operating budgets of a similar size are much choosier with who they put in charge. In Baltimore, the democratic mayoral candidate is a shoe-in. So the Democratic mayoral primaries are actually the real election. And Scott bested his opponents in that competition with ~45,000 votes total. So really only about 7% of the city(pop 620,000) voted for him, but that's just how the system works.
mcguire 5y ago
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h9mp8cWP7GQfrthZ1A4ccTfrHlx8lGiD/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h9mp8cWP7GQfrthZ1A4ccTfrHlx... Looks like Baltimore bit big into the charter school idea, where the cost-per-student at the school level is apparently somewhat higher (30%, $10,000 vs $7,900 judging by the first couple of pages of the per-school table). Administration is about 11% of the expenses. Interestingly, the City Schools' "District Offices" average $174,000 per "Full-Time Equivalent" for whatever that's worth.

tomschlick 5y ago

> WHY? Because no matter how much better the schools / administration of it get, it all falls down if the kids don't have a culture at home of valuing education. My sister taught in a few different low income school districts and each time it was the same thing. Probably 75% of the parents just don't care if their kid is misbehaving or straight up not attending at all. Discipline of those kids was met with accusations of racism by both the kid and the parent as a tool to stop the conversation all together. Phone calls home about performance were generally met with "its your job to teach them not mine". Almost no one showed up to parent teacher meetings. Kids who did want to learn were made fun of by other kids as "acting white". All of this leads to administrations and teachers pushing under-qualified students through to get them out of the way. There is little incentive for them to personally invest in kids when there is no investment at home. Something has got to give.

oh_sigh 5y ago

It's not really clear to me that being a "black grassroot mayor who understands the needs of the community" is a benefit without any kind of experience managing and operating large organizations. The operating budget of Baltimore is approximately $4B/year. I can't imagine many companies with that kind of budget that would hire a CEO/COO with Scott's resume to run it.

AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
The sky will fall before a greedy fat cat corporate CEO will be elected as a public official - no matter what his track record in managing other people's money is.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Sure - I wasn't saying a corporate CEO would even be the right person to run a large city(though Bloomberg did pretty well relative to the expectations of a NYC mayor), but merely pointing out that businesses with operating budgets of a similar size are much choosier with who they put in charge. In Baltimore, the democratic mayoral candidate is a shoe-in. So the Democratic mayoral primaries are actually the real election. And Scott bested his opponents in that competition with ~45,000 votes total. So really only about 7% of the city(pop 620,000) voted for him, but that's just how the system works.

mcguire 5y ago

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h9mp8cWP7GQfrthZ1A4ccTfrHlx8lGiD/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h9mp8cWP7GQfrthZ1A4ccTfrHlx... Looks like Baltimore bit big into the charter school idea, where the cost-per-student at the school level is apparently somewhat higher (30%, $10,000 vs $7,900 judging by the first couple of pages of the per-school table). Administration is about 11% of the expenses. Interestingly, the City Schools' "District Offices" average $174,000 per "Full-Time Equivalent" for whatever that's worth.