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Two recent news stories converge into one urgent plea. One is the alarming and well-covered story of the Chinese spy balloon. The other: At 23 Baltimore public schools (out of 150), zero students tested proficient in math. That includes 10 high schools. Not surprisingly, this story received far less coverage, including none in The New York Times.
Also ignored was the follow-up news: 77% of Baltimore high-school students read only at elementary-school grade levels. Ignored too was the copy-cat story for Chicago: that of 649 Windy City public schools, 22 have zero students grade-level proficient in reading, and 33 have zero grade-level proficient in math.
Yet the appallingly bad performance stats are not the full horror, because “grade-level proficiency” in America is itself a scam.
And what unites this with the balloon stories is this: We cannot let our education problems fester any longer.
Among New York City activists for rigorous public education, protesting parents with roots in China, the old Soviet Union or the Caribbean all instantly react with disdain when we hear the words “grade-level proficient.”
“They do that in eighth grade? When I was little in (insert appropriate country), we did it in fifth grade!”
Often, that’s in discussing math or sciences, where different education systems are directly comparable. But even in the humanities, our foreign-born parents graduated from their high schools knowing Shakespeare, Sophocles and Hemingway, while their kids finish our US high schools remembering mostly ersatz “lived-experiences” of “literature” of the “I, me and myself” ilk.
