0.13 GPA in Baltimore city schools is child abuse and its normal
Sending rovers to mars and multimillion-dollar failed rocket landings and underperforming public schools. How many marches do we see for failing schools? The failing schools are in the same areas where police brutality is running rampant. Saving failing schools isn’t and never has been a priority. Hopefully, a story of out Baltimore gaining traction can stop that. A transcript of a 17-year-old 9th grader revealed that his 0.13 GPA ranks near the top of his class. Here’s why the Baltimore city schools allowing this is child abuse.
Public inner-city school teachers have it tough. Their underpaid, underappreciated by society and their students. Furthermore, they often have to tolerate the responsibility of bad parenting in their classrooms. Teachers are expected to make diamonds out of broken glass. This doesn’t make them exempt from critique.
In fact, Baltimore city schools are notorious for failing as a system and even not having heat during the winter. The numerous reasons why teachers aren’t getting the respect they deserve definitely plays a role in how they teach children.
It doesn’t make the teachers bad people it just means they may be dealing with more than they can handle and are victims of a system themselves.
Schools have to meet quotas in terms of attendances, if the majority of a class fails and the previous grade passes that would make too many kids in a room. But this issue is bigger than the classroom. We can’t wait until someone is shot by the police to march to our school district. Our value system in America values entertainment over education.
For instance, one of the nation’s top football schools is in Baltimore, but they didn’t have a field. The city decided to put a new football field in the community as apart of the revitalization plan, which is a code word for gentrification. What about the majority of other students who don’t play sports? The emphasis on prioritizing sports is evident as it monopolizes the few efforts made to help the students.
That’s just on a high school level with their stadium. NFL fans in Baltimore in 1998 were against the public funding of their stadium as well. Yet in the same year, Baltimore city schools average 200 points less than the national average sat scores.
Brother coming from jail are respected more in their communities more than those who get degrees. Our music doesn’t glorify getting an education or it wouldn’t sell on the charts, clubs, or strip clubs. Our professional athletes aren’t taught to prioritize education either and they have a massive influence on kids in school.
These are just some of the reasons why a 0.13 grade can be near the top half of a class. Furthermore, the same student only passed 3 classes in 4 years and his mother just found out a month ago. This is obviously a parental neglect issue as well as the school’s fault. Our lack of activism towards the incompetent educational system shows our lack of value.
It reveals our lack of proper planning for our children’s lives, our ill-advised trust in the school system, and more. We refer to the school as training camps for the prison industrial complex system. Our kids spend more time at school than with their parents who are busy working. The mother of the 17-year-old is a single mother of 3 working 3 jobs. These are the very same communities we can expect Digidogs to police in the near future.
In conclusion, our public educational school system is in a crisis. It’s not just Baltimore city schools either. Our values have to be rearranged in order to stop this self extermination. We can’t continue to blame the system and be dependent on it without even trying to better our school system. Malcolm X said it best, “Only a fool would let an oppressor teach his kids”.