According to information uncovered by the Project Baltimore Investigation by the local Fox News affiliate WBFF in Baltimore, Baltimore Spends roughly $1.4 billion annually for education — roughly $16,000 per student. Baltimore’s spending on education is the fourth highest of any municipality in the country. And yet, despite this massive commitment of resources, Baltimore Schools have some of the lowest educational proficiency levels in the country.
According to Project Baltimore investigative journalist Chris Papst, reading proficiency rates among Baltimore High School graduates hover at around 11 percent, and math proficiency rates hover around 12 percent. This is in a school system that graduates roughly 70 percent of its students each year. There is clearly a major disconnection between the high graduation rate and the extremely dismal academic proficiency rate.
This discrepancy alone, given the money that goes into the system, is prima facie evidence of a crime. As Project Baltimore continues to follow the path of the money, it becomes increasingly obvious that there are strong institutional incentives to keep Baltimore’s clearly failing system in place. In a very real sense, the dysfunction in Baltimore’s schools mirror a similar dysfunction in the city’s political establishment. In a city of fewer than 600,000 residents, with a rapidly declining school enrollment, literally thousands of individuals in the school system receive salaries in excess of $100,000 per year. Most of the recipients of this government largesse are not teachers — but consultants, contractors, and administrators.