By Rod DREHER
We live in a time when people are losing faith in institutions. This story from Baltimore offers a vivid illustration of why:
A shocking discovery out of a Baltimore City high school, where Project Baltimore has found hundreds of students are failing. It’s a school where a student who passed three classes in four years, ranks near the top half of his class with a 0.13 grade point average.
Tiffany France thought her son would receive his diploma this coming June. But after four years of high school, France just learned, her 17-year-old must start over. He’s been moved back to ninth grade.
“He’s stressed and I am too. I told him I’m probably going to start crying. I don’t know what to do for him,” France told Project Baltimore. “Why would he do three more years in school? He didn’t fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job. They failed. They failed, that’s the problem here. They failed. They failed. He didn’t deserve that.”
France’s son attends Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts in west Baltimore. His transcripts show he’s passed just three classes in four years, earning 2.5 credits, placing him in ninth grade. But France says she didn’t know that until February. She has three children and works three jobs. She thought her oldest son was doing well because even though he failed most of his classes, he was being promoted. His transcripts show he failed Spanish I and Algebra I but was promoted to Spanish II and Algebra II. He also failed English II but was passed on to English III.
“I’m just assuming that if you are passing, that you have the proper things to go to the next grade and the right grades, you have the right credits,” said France.
As we dig deeper into her son’s records, we can see in his first three years at Augusta Fells, he failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days. But in those three years, only one teacher requested a parent conference, which France says never happened. No one from the school told France her son was failing and not going to class.
Read it all. You can say that Tiffany France ought to have been more on top of things with her kid’s grades, but she’s right to say that if the school was passing him, there is a basic trust that every parent has to have in their children’s school — and this school violated it.
Clearly not, but I bet Woke Inc. can explain why. It’s probably on account of racism!
Maybe the Augusta Fells Savage Institute leaders need to rebrand themselves as at the forefront of woke pedagogy. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in collaboration with a number of California educational institutions, have produced Equitable Math, a guide to teach “anti-racist mathematics.” In what ways does mathematics instruction uphold white supremacy? Well, check out the guide:
Sarcasm over. The thing is, sensible middle class parents of all races are not going to subject their kids to this kind of garbage pedagogy. They are going to move to school districts where their kids are taught actual math, or put them in private school. It’s going to be the children of the poor, especially the racial minority poor, who suffer the most.
