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Comment by dkhenry | Hacker News Reader

The Baltimore city-wide graduation rate is 70%[1]. Its not at all unbelievable that this single school would be below 50%. Public education in the US is a failed system, and we have rewarded it by throwing more money at the problem.

1. https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2020/02/25/baltimore-city-sch...

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For people not from the US, selective defunding of education was part of a strategy begun in the mid-1800s to further disenfranchise free blacks around the nation.

By shifting schools to local funded, areas with multiple (segregated) school systems used "plain and simple economic reason" to shut down excess schools to save cost, somehow always the black ones. The proof that blacks could not lift themselves out of these situations was used as further proof of their inherent inferiority, not the systemic racism they faced.

To compound this, states that organized "literacy tests"[1] to vote rarely required them for whites. Further removed from the ability to affect their circumstances, many black communities languished for generations.

As a natural extension of this, many school districts in the US are still operating under unequal resources while their constituents' tax revenues go towards the landscaping and infrastructure costs of wealthier areas, while the blame is placed on the victims (eg- "absent parents" who are largely working class victims of exploitation from extreme rent seeking, over-policing harsher monetary and legal penalties, payday loan traps, and other things you don't encounter in wealthy areas).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test

Baltimore spends $16,184 per pupil per year.[1] That places it 3rd of the 100 largest school systems in the country and far above the national average of $12,201. This is not a funding problem.

1. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/school-s...

Imagine how much they would have if they weren’t systematically defunded in the mid-1800s.

Spend per pupil isn't meaningful beyond showing administrative efficiency.

Given the outcomes, intentionally and severely failing students to game well-meaning initiatives smells like high level corruption a la the Cash for Kids scandal.

Someone's getting that funding, sure, but it's not the students or their families.

I understand and appreciate the overt racist actions that have happened in the past, and maybe I am just jaded at this point, but saying this is caused by historical racism is giving a pass to the corrupt and failed system that has just given this kid a one way ticket to a lifetime of poverty and incarceration. This isn't the fault of some racist city manager in the 60's who diverted funds away from this school. There is a whole building full of teachers and administrators that are directly responsible for this.

Teachers in this situation have an impossible job, as it stands they will never be able to make kids with this kind of background succeed, and they haven't been able to for 40 years. Their culpability begins because they are willing participants in this education theater. Its funny that the teachers union will put their foot down about not participating in school because of Covid, but they are very content to participate in a system that condemns a majority of the kids to a futureless life.

> Public education in the US is a failed system

Public education failed? Or these kids' parents' failed? Doesn't seem fair to force schools to pick up the slack of failing parents and families and then chalk it up to school failures when the kids still aren't attending. You could have a gold-plated diamond-studded high school staffed by nobel prize winners, and it wouldn't amount to any value for the kids if they don't go...

I'd agree that it's not fully solvable by the school alone. But zooming out, I'd be inclined to say the "society that forced a mother to work 3 jobs to get by" failed. I imagine it's hard to give each child individual attention/care when you're spread that thin, hence being essentially forced to offload chunks of that parenting-responsibility onto institutions.

Which is a much larger and harder issue than a failure of individual responsibility. But it seems like that's the more foundational issue as far as I can tell.

> But zooming out, I'd be inclined to say the "society that forced a mother to work 3 jobs to get by" failed

But how did the mother get into position where a) she's single and b) she needs to work 3 jobs to get by?

One situation is teen pregnancy. Say a girl gets pregnant as a teenager and the father flees (common for single moms). Now she has to raise a kid by herself and drop out of school, limiting her career options.

Is this an individual responsibility fail or a societal fail? I guess you could argue "society failed by not providing her with free contraceptives and/or abortive services and/or social services" but it's just a bad, sad situation no matter how you slice it, and clearly there was some personal agency involved. Even worse, it's a self-perpetuating cycle (i.e. the pregnant teen's offspring is more likely to also be a pregnant teen)

I think your teenage pregnancy example is probably reasonable, I could see that being a big turning point in a mother's life, where things began getting tougher/worse.

I guess my point is that even if it's clearly an individual-failure, how long should that condemn her to a life of struggle and hardship, let alone her children? If one step off the straight-and-narrow in society means that you need to beat incredible odds to make it back onto the happy-path, we need to work to make that easier to do. Regardless of whether you fell off that path by your own actions today, last week, or decades ago when you were a child.

I'd want to live a society where those struggling get repeated lifelines and assistance to help find some stability. I guess I don't see what the other option is; I don't think we can just give up and let them (and their children, and their children's children...) struggle and fail forever. Even if that means that they need more support/attention than the average citizen for however long it takes.

In Baltimore? Don’t know this specific story obviously, but could have something to do with their insanely high incarceration rate. Not to suggest necessarily that those incarcerations are even unwarranted, but rather to point out that this is a feedback loop and not a straight chain of causality with a beginning and end. It doesn’t start anywhere in particular - looking for that “root cause” is a fools errand (aside from centuries of racism, which is what almost certainly spawned these toxic feedback loops, now without “beginnings”).

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/maryland/maryland-l...

Parents are responsible for the education of their children. Public school is a failure because it promises parents they don't have to be active participants in the education of their kids. Building your society around the idea that both parents work outside the house and they outsource the nurture and development of their kids to a professional class of child development experts for their whole life will never work. It effects those with limited resources the most.

I can't blame a parent who has bought into a system that was doomed to failure from the very beginning.

Extra money is rarely used to improve the schools at issue rather than testing and administration overhead. What I found interesting was:

The district’s five-year graduation rate increased by .02 percentage points, to 75 percentage points overall. Since 2010, the four-year graduation rate has increased by 8.8 percentage points overall.

“The new graduation requirements raised the bar for all Maryland students

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