Is Baltimore a failed city?  What do you call a city where kids graduate without minimum reading skills?

This is from Baltimore:

An alarming discovery coming out of a Baltimore City High School caught up in a scandal. Project Baltimore has obtained student assessment data from Augusta Fells Savage in west Baltimore, showing just how far behind some students are in that school.

The discovery is that kids are graduating but can't read.  Remember the student with a 0.13 GPA and ranked 62 of 120 in his class?  What happened to the 61 below that student?  By the way, the student with the 0.13 GPA passed three classes in four years!

It gets worse if that's possible.  An 8th-grade teacher said: "I would say around half of them couldn't read to the point where they could fully understand what they were supposed to be doing."

This is terrible, and I understand why so many teachers are frustrated.  They get no support from the local leadership.  I guess the mayor and the city council just want to graduate kids to get their federal grant or whatever they get.

Back in the late 1970s, I went to college in Maryland, and I lived and eventually got my first job in the Baltimore area.  I knew people who graduated from public schools and never heard anything about kids graduating who can't read.

No fathers.  No reading.  Wonder why Baltimore is a failed city?  Sadly, no one cares about these young men and women being thrown into the real world without the ability to read a newspaper ad.

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Image via Pixabay.