On March 20, Donald Trump signed an executive order venturing to end the United States Department of Education. At a press conference, reasoning through his administration’s hostility towards public schools, he had grievances with one city in particular that needed urgent spelling out — Baltimore. The president stated: “In Baltimore, 40% of high schools have zero students who can do basic mathematics. Not even the very simplest of mathematics.” 

Indeed, the alarming “40% of high schools” line has become a widely accepted right-wing talking point pushed by former congressional candidate Kim Klacik and TV news station Fox45’s Project Baltimore. During her 2020 campaign to succeed the late Congressman Elijah Cummings, Klacik took aim at Baltimore City Public Schools and called for school choice. Since its establishment in 2017, Project Baltimore and Fox45 have also pushed partisan calls for the resignation of City Schools Superintendent Sonja Santelises.

The news organization alleges that in 13 city high schools where the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program (MCAP) Algebra I exam was administered, not a single student scored proficiently. Any Baltimore City Schools graduate, myself included, can testify that, contrary to the president’s insistence that “even the very simplest of mathematics” like “adding a few numbers together” is too difficult for Baltimore teenagers, the MCAP covers material more difficult than mere basic addition.

And in any event, the statistic misses the full picture. In 2023, Project Baltimore reported that fewer than one in five students at the top five Baltimore high schools (including my alma mater, the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute) scored proficiently on the MCAP. But as Baltimore Polytechnic Intitute teacher Josh Headley pointed out in a piece published to his personal social media, students already enrolled in a math course beyond Algebra I, such as geometry or calculus, are not tested on the MCAP. So many students test out of the MCAP, and in many schools (BPI included), these students are the majority. 

It is self-evidently untrue that some of the best public high schools in Maryland, BPI amongst them, are somehow full of students unable to do basic math. And yet this has been a recurring red herring used by Project Baltimore and its Republican allies for years as a political bludgeon against the public school system.

And while the number of students passing the MCAP is absolutely inadequate and an ample cause for serious urgency within Baltimore City Schools, it is important to contextualize the relative achievement of city students. Only about a quarter of peer students nationwide are proficient in Algebra I topics. Childhood math proficiency is not a problem unique to Baltimore, it is a nationwide challenge compounded by decades of disinvestment in urban public schools, championed historically by conservative Republicans. In Baltimore and across the country, academic performance is largely a function of wealth and access to resources.

It is noteworthy that Trump and his bedfellows are now attempting to single out Baltimore as a case study for failing public education in their quest to delegitimize public schools and cull the Department of Education. But how does scaling back the supportive services of government improve academic performance in public schools? The research is clear: state support strengthens rather than weakens academic performance.

Though the argument itself is patently disingenuous, is it hardly surprising. Project Baltimore, which produced the lines of inquest used in Trump’s press conference word for word, is an initiative of Fox45, which is itself controlled by Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair’s executive chairman is David Smith, a Cockeysville business mogul whose long personal association with officials in both the first and second Trump administrations is well documented.

The multimillionaire, who has donated extensively to groups such as Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty, and Project Veritas, simultaneously owns the Baltimore Sun, the city’s well-circulated paper of record, in addition to Fox45, one of the city’s influential TV news channels. At Smith’s direction, these media groups have been publicizing conservative framing against public schools for years, uncontested on the airwaves in a city where 87.9 percent of voters cast ballots for someone other than Donald Trump.

Instead of contributing to ongoing efforts to improve academic performance in City Schools, these influential suburban Republicans have succeeded in accomplishing their true goal — empowering Donald Trump to weaponize Baltimore’s equity crisis against public schools across the country. As people sincerely committed to strong public schools, we must be vocal in calling out this pattern of media manipulation for what it is: a partisan attempt to reconfigure urban American communities, and a disturbing obsession with using hard-working Baltimoreans to do it.

Ethan Eblaghie is a former Student Commissioner of Baltimore City Public Schools and current student at Columbia University.

The post Opinion: Don’t Listen to Donald Trump’s Insult Against City Schools appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Earlier this month, Baltimore City Public Schools leadership announced their recommendation to the Board of School Commissioners that Creative City Public Charter School and Southwest Baltimore Charter School close their doors at the end of this school year. Combined with the closure of Steuart Hill Academic Academy and Eutaw-Marshburn Elementary School last spring, the closure of these schools would mark the loss of four elementary schools in West Baltimore in half as many years.

These closures are the manifestation of an amputation policy that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the district’s effort to consolidate resources and slow the exodus of working families that is damaging every institution in Baltimore, including our school system, it is shuttering schools that cannot keep pace with enrollment and academic performance. Doing this forces even more families to educate their children elsewhere and facilitates further exodus.

As a proud City Schools graduate, I urge, in the strongest possible terms, that the School Board reject leadership’s recommendation and keep these schools open. As a former Student Commissioner on the school board, I know how difficult these votes are, and I want to offer three points of consideration for my former colleagues.

Closing Charter Schools Isn’t Equity

According to City Schools, “the guiding principles of the Annual Review process” include the notion that “communities that have experienced the most disinvestment and have the most need should be the first communities in which we focus investments.”

Baltimore’s demographic collapse has been concentrated in the poorest and least white neighborhoods. Reversing these trends depends, as the Annual Review guidelines correctly assert, on concentrating our resources in communities that already have less.

Per the city’s Community Conditions Index (CCI), all four of these West Baltimore closures are at orange or red zone schools. If our goal is to facilitate further investment in disinvested neighborhoods, these closures are antithetical to that goal.

Much of the closure process rests on academic performance. For charter school closures, called “operator non-renewals”, City Schools outlines its criteria: “operators are expected to accelerate improvement in student achievement in exchange for higher levels of school autonomy and flexibility.”

For charter schools to receive public funding but operate privately, they are rightfully expected to excel. Make no mistake: I am unapologetically a champion of public education and an advocate for traditional schools first. But the rise of charter schools in Baltimore, unideal as it is, has in large part been a rallying of our city’s nonprofit community to patch in gaps where our school district has lacked coverage. That’s most prevalent on the west side, where charter elementary schools dot the city blocks.

If City Schools’ intention is to walk back the advance of charter schools, they should move towards the restoration of traditional school programming in these neighborhoods. But closing these schools altogether helps no one, and comes at a greater expense to working families than to charter school operators.

Education is our Collective Responsibility

When we over-formulize the process of school closures, we put ourselves in a box and prevent leaders from solving policy problems creatively.

Too often, the conversation in the Board room on operator non-renewal revolves around where school leadership has fallen short, where staff have been unable to meet district standards, and what needs to change at the executive level of a school is granted a conditional or partial renewal.

But this sort of top-down reform in schools obfuscates a big component of what allows wealthier and better resourced schools to thrive.

Elementary schools like Roland Park benefit immensely from alumni foundations that organize annual delegations to the Running Festival, host multiple fundraisers throughout the year, and provide critical materials to patch in the school’s gaps where needed. These well-connected and well-resourced networks have become a feature of the city’s better off neighborhoods.

But for schools facing closure, the community is often treated as a passive bystander: a stakeholder whose opinion should be taken into account, but ultimately not a party to what changes within the school’s walls.

With every new proposed closure, a new wave of public outrage begins. Teachers and parents showed up in numbers to ask the School Board not to close Steuart Hill and Eutaw-Marshburn. Our neighbors care about their schools. Baltimoreans care. The extent to which residents are involved in these neighborhood fights to keep schools open is one of our school system’s greatest assets.

If a school appears hopelessly behind in academic performance or facility standards, why is little attention ever paid to channeling the community’s passion about keeping the school open into actually helping the school stay open?

The school board should make it its business to meet with neighborhood leaders and evaluate how residents can address district concerns. If parents are organized enough to pack the Board room, they are organized enough to be involved in whatever is needed to keep a school open, whether it’s supply shortages or staffing support.

For all of the district’s shortcomings, Youthworks and City Schools are the two most important vehicles for social mobility in Baltimore City. Every year, we funnel thousands of students into post-graduate education or directly into the workplace. Each flower in the City Schools garden, no matter how small or struggling, should be nurtured before being pruned.

The School Board’s Job is to Govern

Unfortunately, one reason why the Board has largely declined to modify staff recommendations on closures is due to a pattern of deference politics on North Ave. Here, there is an understandable impulse. School closures and operator non-renewals are recommended by the Office of New Initiatives (ONI), whose staff carry significant administrative expertise and are integral to the central function of City Schools. The predecessor to Angela Alvarez, current head of the ONI, is Alison Perkins-Cohen, who is now chief of staff to district superintendent Sonja Santelises. 

Staff expertise is critical to informed school board decision-making. In the face of sustained population loss in Baltimore, the ONI team has consistently applied a cutting formula that balances utilization rates and test scores to determine which schools should close.

Even when there is an overwhelming community consensus against a decision, the Board often feels compelled to vote for a staff recommendation on the basis of deference to expertise. Charm City Virtual was closed by a 7-2 vote despite a packed public comment period and a sustained letter writing campaign to Board members.

Deference politics dominates an array of Board votes, not just school closures. I distinctly recall an instance where Commissioner Andrew Coy, someone definitively within the Board’s progressive bloc (and a man that I consider respect deeply), voted in favor of funding for new metal detectors in schools. In rationalizing his vote, he said “I appreciate the process. I appreciate the work that has gone into and is going to go into this.”

While well-intentioned, Board members are appointed on the basis of criteria that emphasizes their expertise in various areas, from business administration to classroom experience. There should never be an instance where school board members feel that they cannot back up a staff recommendation they are voting to adopt with their own rationale.

Staff makes recommendations to Board members. The school board is the political leadership, and must make political decisions. Community engagement is not just the work of staff, it is the responsibility of the Board, and Board members can and indeed must vote their conscience when the evidence requires it.

We have access to an abundance of research on this: school closures lead to worse academic outcomes for students. Within Baltimore, our empirical evidence is unambiguous: our amputation policy has not stopped population loss in City Schools.

Staff exist to assess decisions on metrics set by political leaders. Metrics are central to the decision-making process, but they are not decisions alone. 

As a former Board member, I hope to offer my experience and words of encouragement: we each have a commitment to the collective responsibility of educating Baltimore’s kids. We must build the strongest possible public school system for their sake.

Ethan Eblaghie is a former Student Commissioner on the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners and a student at Columbia University.

The post Op-Ed: Keep Creative City and Southwest Open appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

To attempt to remove a charter amendment already certified by the Board of Elections eight weeks after the primary election speaks to a concerning reality—that our elected officials have no qualms about overriding the will of thousands of residents exercising their civic right to place a question on the ballot and subverting the democratic process when it suits their immediate political needs. 

Last spring, Governor Wes Moore warned us that tough fiscal times were ahead. This month, he proposed a state budget that imposes nearly $150 million in spending cuts for the next year. With the loss of many Black and brown residents, our shrinking tax base compounds the state’s ongoing budgetary crisis.

But not all spending is created equal. Responsible, straightforward investments in young parents and children that incentivize our residents to stay and build their families in our city are not only smart and worthwhile budgetary choices, but they are also necessary to Baltimore’s future. Research suggests that the earlier in a child’s life we make a monetary investment, the higher the return on that investment down the line.

Governor Moore knows this — despite cuts to state agencies, he has pledged to retain every penny of funding for K-12 education, and is expanding resources for state childcare initiatives. In fact, in unveiling the ENOUGH Act, the Moore-Miller administration described “ending the cycle of generational poverty” as “the heart of our administration’s mission since day one.”

Mayor Scott also purports to recognize the value of investing in young parents and children. As organizers of the Baby Bonus campaign stated in their press release after City Hall’s announcement, the amendment’s funding structure was based on the Baltimore Children & Youth Fund, a basic income program introduced by Mayor Scott when he was a city councilman in 2016.

As the saying goes, budgets are moral documents. What we fund and how we fund it with our collective resources is a direct statement of our values as a city. At a time when thousands of families are leaving Baltimore City, what statement do we send to residents when funding our public schools is a “gut punch” to City Hall and we can’t afford to fund grassroots initiatives like the Baby Bonus, but the Baltimore Police Department receives a larger share of the City General Fund than city schools do? It tells Baltimoreans that our parents and children are not our city’s priority.

We call on Mayor Scott and City Councilman Mark Conway, Chair of the Public Safety Committee, to issue a public withdrawal of their names from the lawsuit against the Baltimore Baby Bonus and endorse the democratic right of the people to vote on it in November.

Ethan Eblaghie is a sociology student at Columbia University, an organizer with Baltimore DSA, and former Student Commissioner of Baltimore City Public Schools.

Salimah Jasani is an education consultant, former Baltimore City Public Schools special education teacher, and former candidate for the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners.

The post OP-ED: Let the Voters Decide on the Baby Bonus appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

On October 7, 2023, Baltimoreans woke up, like untold millions around the globe, to the news of yet another outbreak of conflict in the Middle East. In the seven months since then, we have borne witness to the slaughter of over 30,000 men, women, and children in Gaza. It is one of the most visible genocides of our lifetime, bankrolled by the United States government and our tax dollars.

We know that this did not begin on October 7. The land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has already been home to decades of military occupation and oppression, and cycles of violence and pain that we have funded through our tax dollars. As Americans, our nation has a history of complicity and a history of manipulating vulnerable, marginalized people as tools for colonization. From the Maryland State Colonization Society’s employment of enslaved people in Liberia to our decades of extraction and imperial occupation in Puerto Rico, we are not strangers to these cycles of historical wrongdoing.

In conversation with the Baltimore Student Union, former Councilwoman Shannon Sneed said that we urgently need a cease-fire there, just as we urgently need a cease-fire here. Indeed, the reality of being a Baltimorean is bearing witness to the violence in our own communities. Being a Baltimorean is holding multiple truths at once, and holding compassion for the victims of bombs and bullets everywhere. 

Fannie Lou Hamer taught us that “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” To be a Baltimorean is to live by that rule, and to move through this city unapologetically in our call for collective liberation. In November, almost 200 community organizations, labor unions, small businesses, and newspapers united as one chorus to call for an urgent and lasting cease-fire in Palestine. It was the largest show of unity from Baltimore civil society since the outrage in response to the Baltimore Police Department’s murder of Freddie Gray in 2015.

From the Holy Week Uprising in 1968 to the 2020 reckoning after the murder of George Floyd; from the 2015 battle of Mondawmin Mall to the 2019 Garland Hall sit-in at Johns Hopkins University — some of Baltimore’s most formative political moments have coalesced when city residents have taken to the streets in the thousands and organized in response to injustice.

As Baltimoreans, we understand that our everyday struggle for survival is inseparable from the struggles facing people across the world. At a December rally in front of Senator Van Hollen’s office, school board Commissioner Ashley Esposito stated, “Right now, I am shouting from Baltimore to Gaza that I will fight for your kids too.” 

We can, must, and will fight for Palestinian kids to have fresh air and safety from the carnage of war in the same way that we fight for our own kids to be safe. The same story of occupation, apartheid, and oppression that has played out for generations in the Black and brown communities of this city afflicts our brown brothers and sisters in Palestine, and so we cannot help but bear witness and move to action.

On May 14, we will head to the polls to vote on the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. We ask you to vote “uncommitted.” Baltimore must show our elected leaders that our votes cannot be taken for granted, bought, or kettled — they must be won and earned; that we will not tolerate bombs raining down on innocent children; and that we will mobilize with just as much fervor as we do in defense of our own. 

Many of us move to action because we are the descendants of people who faced similar patterns of historical trauma and violence. We are uncommitted to a system that incarcerates university students in the United States for protesting war while fueling warfare that has demolished every university in Gaza and precluded the Palestinian class of 2024 from graduating. We are uncommitted to a system that harms our communities and inflicts immeasurable harm upon others overseas in our name. We are uncommitted to a system that never seems to have money or resources to build our public schools and provide for our families, but always has money to fuel bombing, destruction, and human suffering. An uncommitted vote is a vote for peace, and for the better world that is possible.

Ethan Eblaghie is an incoming sociology student at Columbia University, a community organizer with the Baltimore Student Union and Baltimore DSA, and former Student Commissioner of Baltimore City Public Schools.

The post  Op-Ed: Vote Uncommitted appeared first on Baltimore Beat.