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Baltimore: Should We Laugh or Cry?
Truth be told, I have had no connections to Baltimore, Maryland since my ancestors landed there in 1703. (Although the city wasn’t officially founded until 1729, the initial settlement was established in 1661.) Eventually, those ancestors chose to move westward; at least as far as Ohio.
As I was growing up, it seemed that many of my sports heroes were located in Baltimore (Johnny U. and Raymond Berry for the Colts; Brooks Robinson and Boog Powell for the Orioles). Still, I knew very little about the City. That being said, I don’t think I’m interested in learning much more.
Perhaps Baltimore is a microcosm of American cities; perhaps it’s a trendsetter, I’m not sure. All I can be certain of is that it has become a sick joke and that its elected officials resemble failed comedians.
Probably, the most famous was the former mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake who achieved notoriety for her statement during the riots of 2015, “…We also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well, and we work very hard to keep that balance..” (Of course, the citizens of Baltimore shouldn’t have expected much more since her predecessor, Sheila Dixon, had been convicted of embezzlement.) Blake’s successor, Catherine Pugh, wasn’t exactly a resounding success; she couldn’t even finish out her term and is, at this moment, sitting out her three-year prison term for tax evasion.
Of course, the mayor’s office isn’t the only entity that has been affected by corruption and incompetence. The City’s District Attorney, Marilyn Mosby, seems to have a knack for losing high-profile cases. (For example, her overcharging of the 6 police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray resulted in the complete acquittal of all of them.) As of late, Mosby has come under fire for her frequent travel on the taxpayer’s dime (23 trips in 2018 and 2019 to such locales as Germany, Portugal, and Kenya). Curiously, she has set up a travel agency (Mahogany Elite Enterprises LLC.) with the stated purpose of “…helping underserved black families who don’t usually have the opportunity to travel outside of urban cities, so they can vacation at various destinations throughout the world at discount prices.”
I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised at corruption in city governments; it’s become almost commonplace. However, what does disturb me (and should disturb all of us) is how this corruption and incompetence has found its way into the school systems; especially in the Baltimore City Schools. Although Baltimore pays its administrators more than anywhere else in the nation, its schools are among the worst. In one year, 13 public schools had zero students proficient in math. Nine out of ten black males could not read at grade level. A 2021 report reveals that, throughout the entire district, the schools have an average math proficiency score of 18% and a reading proficiency score of 17%.
However, mere statistics do not tell the entire story. I recently read a story about a senior at one of those schools who had failed all but three classes (over four years) and still graduated in the top half of his class with a GPA of 0.13 (no word on what the GPA of the valedictorian might have been). Of course, that might have been due to the fact that he had been late or absent 272 days over his first three years in high school (but that’s just a hunch).
A reason for this somewhat inadequate performance (along with that of the other students) was readily explained by an ad hoc group called “Baltimore City Votes”. According to the group, wait for it; the real reason is systemic racism. And, the only solution for the situation is (unsurprisingly) “more funding”.
Perhaps some of us who do not reside in Baltimore believe that their situation does not affect us. However, this would be a mistake. A couple of weeks ago I read in our statewide newspaper (The Columbus Dispatch) an editorial titled, “Importance of learning Black history means it should never be optional”. The article had been written by Andrea K. McDaniels, The Baltimore Sun’s deputy editorial page editor. One memorable blurb from her piece read, “So when critics of the 1619 Project (named for the year African slaves arrived in the Colony of Virginia) say it is inaccurate and promotes divisiveness, they are mistaken. It tells the truth – and not what people want the truth to be.”
That editorial said a number of things to me but the most important thing was that “I’m not as concerned about the students in my city who can’t read or do math as much as I am about shoving a bastardized piece of history down the throats of every young student in the entire country.” For the self-appointed elites of our country (especially in the news media), a society of dullards is no big problem; after all, they’re more easily controlled.
Seeing all that is going on in Baltimore, I thought back to my ancestors and what they believed; “hard work is the key to success”, “work before play”, and “rational thinking”. Then reality set in; those are exactly the attributes that are today ridiculed as “white constructs”. To my chagrin, it appears that I have been a “white supremacist” from the moment my ancestors arrived in this country over three hundred years ago.
There was a novel written back in 1948 titled Cry the Beloved Country. As I recall, it was about South Africa but, as far as I’m concerned, that title is especially appropriate for what this country is becoming.
Published in General
I live in Baltimore. How bad is it? Sheila Dixon, the embezzler, ran in the mayoral primary, and finished a close second. The Democratic nominee always wins. I was rooting for Dixon. She was a crook, but a smart, competent mayor, the last one we’ve had. The new mayor is a lapdog ideologue, sworn for life to the latest leftist nostrum. Don’t know how crooked he is. Yet.
Marilyn Mosby is dangerous: a looker, articulate and smooth, far left and unburdened by conscience, she is the one constant through multiple changes of mayor and police chief; the crime wave began with her accession to the office of attorney general. Even if she were a competent lawyer, and her handling of the Freddy Gray case indicates otherwise, the ideological strictures she places on her prosecutors vitiate the basic performance of the department she heads. Taking the lead from another attractive, incompetent executive, Barack Obama, she has decided, by fiat, not to prosecute certain types of offenses; in Baltimore drugs. Good at getting elected; no good at doing the jobs they’re elected to. Her husband is now president of the city council. Oh brother.
I hate to make comments about a city I never spent a lot of time in. But Baltimore does have a reputation. I was a claims adjuster and I stayed in Laurel and even parts of Laurel made me decide I’d mainly stay in the hotel at night. I was pushed through the harbor area twice and it was absolutely beautiful. Gorgeous! But man. Parts of Baltimore I went through I was super thankful I wasn’t born there or lived there. Of course, of course, my experience is extremely biased and should be discounted.
I feel bad saying that because of course, of course, my experience is extremely biased and should be discounted. I don’t know Maryland. I can’t really judge Maryland. I’m sure many people love it there and I’m happy for them. I worked Laurel a little. A few B’More claims but mainly I was running up and down from Laurel to Frederick corridor up to PA. I went over to Delaware a couple of times for work. I met my DC friend in Bethesda a few times. Bethesda seemed nice.
I’ll say, I heard about Chap’s Pit Beef and I decided to go get some sandwiches from there and it was amazing. I’ve been all over the country and that is an amazing place. It’s worth the risk.
Well what if there actually is a kind of systemic racism ? Maybe affirmative action is a symptom of it. Maybe the way money keeps being poured into areas where the schools continue to be terrible is a symptom of it. Maybe the way Americans who are black seem to be being targeted by people intent on flattering and schmoozing them into separating themselves in different ways from whites is a symptom of it. Another symptom might be the high number of abortions among black women. (Predominantly white progressives always seem to me to be practically salivating over the prospect of ensuring black women have “access” to that “health care”.) Maybe another sign of systemic racism was the effort to leave economically pinched people who happened to be both black and living in bad neighborhoods without police protection. And maybe the way the left seemed to target black neighborhoods for destruction in the riots of last spring and summer is another sign of it.
Does trapped in schools with substandard teachers and weak admin count?
That is certainly a major part of the leverage.
Quite a lot of kids will choose comfort and convenience over study and effort and why not? They have no experience of the real costs of not studying, so any goads are artificial and don’t have meaning as such.
I think with pro-active parents such a hurdle can be overcome. The boldest measure is to home-school your own children. If that can’t be done, they can at least be active in helping or overseeing that the child completes his homework. A lot of the kids in the inner cities are simply allowed to roam the streets after school and are not supervised by their parent(s).
Larry Elder had a chapter in one of his books talking about how he saw Black kids in L.A. spend most of their time skate-boarding and hanging out with their friends while Korean kids were either in the library or at home studying school lessons with their parents. Of course the Korean kids scored magnitudes higher on school tests in L.A.
My on-the-ground report from Baltimore a couple years ago:
https://ricochet.com/619175/archives/baltimore/
I used to spend a lot of time in Baltimore. My best man was a third-generation native, the youngest of thirteen kids whose father worked ugly jobs in the harbor (and I don’t mean the tourist area). The perfect day consisted of lunch at the Lexington market, often with oysters and a National Boh. Afternoon at Pimlico or Memorial Stadium. Evening back down for dinner in Little Italy. There was some depth, some flavor, some sense of community identity in many neighborhoods. Gritty with some really ugly spots it was still a real city.
Like most cities, in Baltimore genius planning consists of glittering urban developments for upscale businesses and shops, some tourist draw, expensive condos and office space, and the casual obliteration of all that came before, the overriding goal of which is to create a city of the rich and the poor with as few as possible from the middle–kinda the vision of the Democratic Party put into practice.
Corruption is tolerable only if it is an alternative way for people to get things done. But corruption and incompetence is an intolerable mix. The level of stupid is amazing. Thousands of kids knowingly formed into resentful illiterates by the “school” system is scary.
When petty criminal Freddie Gray died in a freak accident in a police van more than five years ago his arrest had involved six cops (three white, three black) who reported to a black police chief, who reported to a black mayor and a black-majority city council and if there were a civil rights issue that would be under the purvey of a black US Attorney General appointed by a black president. And yet, it was racism that killed Freddy. And there were riots to exorcise this increasingly invisible demon of systemic racism instead of a conversation about not fostering more pathetic lives and lifestyles like that of poor Freddy Gray. Poor Baltimore.
The straining to apply racism to almost every possible negative event is reaching unbelievable heights. And it has not yet reached its pinnacle. Pretty soon all tragedies will be attributed to only two fundamental causes – Racism and Global Warming.
‘Strewth
Maybe the problem there is that the higher the grade level, the more “woke” it gets? It seems like they’re trying to extend the damage to the earlier grades, by “canceling” Dr Seuss etc. perhaps in order to eliminate this glaring statistical pattern.
Then you need the administrative overhead to manage the paying of those teachers, and buildings for the administration to be done in…
Sounds like another victim of the “whole language” nonsense.
Defective. There is no self-esteem category where American kids rock.
Have you joined the Conservative Migration group yet?
Haven’t you heard? Global Warming IS Racist!
My life is not bad. Charles Village is an island of safety, close to Johns Hopkins University (not the famous hospital, which is in a very dangerous neighborhood). I own an apartment in a 100-year-old co-op, an architectural gem, 9 1/2 foot ceilings, working fireplaces, lovely courtyard. Because there are so many students in apartments on my block, Hopkins supplies rent-a-cops to watch over us. Only once, about 15 years ago, have I had a gun pointed at the back of my head, and my wallet stolen, and that was in front of a house in nearby Roland Park that was well beyond my modest means. At 73, and fairly lazy, I’ll likely stick it out. Lots of family nearby.
Sounds like the real issue may be for the relatives to understand that THEY need to get out, and then you’ll follow, to somewhere better/safer.
kedavis, you made me laugh out loud. Most of my kin live outside the city limits, many in Catonsville, where a lot of us grew up (my immediate family in the neighborhood of Paradise, no kidding). Some are prosperous enough to own retreats on the Eastern Shore; they’re settled and safe.
There’s something about one’s native air. Fills me up to walk around the old neighborhood and remember. To see what’s changed, and what will never change, as it’s a part of me. . .
The areas of safety will probably outlast me. Sadly, for a lot of Baltimoreans, walking down the old block is taking your life in your hands.
Well, I guess we’ll have to narrow down all bad things to just a single cause. Don’t ya just love how nuanced and scrupulous the Left is?
So very well said.
Washington DC public school spending per child: $30,000
West Virginia public school spending per child: $11,500
National public school spending per child: $12,000.
Baltimore public school spending per child: $17,000
not sure if these are all the same year, but pretty close
I suppose the DC spending per child is at least 50% bribes to congresscreeps/senators etc.
Under-performing schools are just more expensive to run.
Dead weight is expensive.
As I’ve said before, minority children in the big inner-cities seem to be getting more funding for schools than their White counterparts in the rest of the country. For years we have heard the mantra that minorities were getting less funding for their education. I would also point out that a couple years ago when I looked up public school payscales for teachers, the pay was consistently higher for teaches in big Democrat-run cities than for teachers in smaller Republican-run cities, and the disparity was quite high. In Cleveland Ohio the Public School Board President makes more money than all Federal office-holders and cabinet members except the President of the United States.
And then there’s this charming “graduate” from the Cleveland Public Schools system. Barbara Byrd Bennett convicted of fraud. In Chicago, no less. So what happened to that missing money from her Cleveland years???
Amazing! I didn’t even know that the former Cleveland School President (who was in charge when more than $20 Million went missing) is now sitting in jail for getting kickbacks in Chicago and Detroit School Districts. Nice to hear that there is some justice out there! I will also point out that she is a Black Woman, who took advantage of mostly Black students and families. Probably why I never heard about her conviction.
I would think that $30, 000 a year opens the door for a completely private school system with schools competing for students. There would probably develop a lot of corruption with schools kicking back cash to bad parents, but as Thomas Sowell says, it’s all about trade-offs. Nothing is perfect. Time to set the DC students free.
Well, under president Abraham Biden, no slaves will be freed.