LinkedIn on Thursday, February 13, 2025
President Trump, I declare “bulls**t.”
In a press conference yesterday and I’m sure at other times as well, President Trump repeated his argument for shutting down the Department of Education. There are two things wrong with his explanation.
A conscientious reader of our website has sent us the following article from the Wednesday, February 13, 2019 edition of the Baltimore Sun. It’s by Daniel Parsons, an English teacher at Frederick Douglass High School and it is essential reading for anyone who cares about the City and its people. If you have trouble reading the version that you can see below, even after clicking on it to make it larger, you’ll need to find the article on the Sun’s website. …As for the uneven edges around the image of the paper version, it was cut out by a younger member of my family who is still perfecting his skills with a scissors. Until then, “Good work!”
As if you needed hard evidence of the failure of Baltimore’s public schools, here it is.
Take a look at the map that we’ve built for you. There’s one blue dot on the map for each of the 186 public schools listed by the city for SY 2015-2016. (“SY” stands for “School Year.”) The map fully interactive. You can blow it up, move it around within its frame. And you can mouse-over or click on any of the dots to see the name of the school, its street address, the grades taught and percentages for selected grades.
There was an article by Erica Green published in the Saturday, January 30 edition of the Sun, entitled “Baltimore schools lose hundreds of students, millions in funding.” The gist of this article is that it has been discovered that the city’s schools have been over counting the collective student body by roughly 1900 students. By setting the record straight, our public schools will now lose approximately $25 million in state subsidies and $4 million from the city.
In order to rebuild the Baltimore economy, we need to repopulate the city. To do that, we need to give people and businesses a safer environment, obviously, but also a superior public school system that young families with children can respect, that’s competitive with what the suburbs have to offer. That’s why Baltimore Rising is interested in effecting a dramatic, relatively short-term improvement in the quality of public education everywhere in the city. Everywhere. This isn’t about opening a special charter school here and there.
Don’t you just love pie charts? Actually, it’s the pie part that I like most. Cherry pie, the kind with crisscrossed strips of crust. Chocolate pecan pie. …Unfortunately, holiday season or not, that’s not the kind of pie we’re talking about, is it?
Leave a comment if you think we should run this ad in newspapers serving Anne Arundel County…
“Buildings don’t teach children. Teachers do.”
Remember where you heard that. It certainly wasn’t from Steve Schuh, the Tea Party Republican candidate for Anne Arundel County Executive.
Steve Schuh has a plan for improving the quality of public education in Anne Arundel County. Unfortunately, it’s not a good plan.