It’s a disturbing reality in some of America’s public schools: diplomas are being handed out, but basic skills are nowhere to be found. One major city school system has become a national warning sign: skyrocketing budgets, stagnant or falling test scores, and a hidden practice of simply changing failing grades so students can graduate — even when they’re not ready. Today we hear from investigative reporter Chris Papst, he’s a fellow investigative reporter at Sinclair, the company responsible for this news program, and author of the book: Failure Factory: How Baltimore City Public Schools Deprive Taxpayers and Students of a Future.

The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.

Sharyl: 40% of Baltimore High Schools have zero students proficient in math. True?

Chris Papst: True. That was a statistic that, that we were able to uncover.

Sharyl: How’d you uncover that?

Papst: We looked at data from the Maryland State Department of Education. And we went in and we took all the data and we were able to organize it in spreadsheets and we could see that in 40% of the high schools in Baltimore City, there was not one student who could test proficient in math. Nearly half of the high schools.

Project Baltimore story (Sept. 18, 2023): The last school year Baltimore city schools received $1.6 billion from taxpayers the most ever. The District also received an additional $799 million from the federal government in Covid relief funding yet still not a single student at 13 city high schools tested proficient in math.

Papst: And when we would look at the data and we would see in 2017, for example, Baltimore City schools had a 70% graduation rate, but 11% of the kids were proficient in math. Fast forward to 2024, 70% of the kids were graduating, 10% are proficient in math. And in that timeframe, the budget of the school system went up $400 million a year. The school system got a 30% increase in funding. The graduation rate didn’t change. The math proficiency actually went down.

Sharyl: Summarize the grade changing scandal.

Papst: In 2017, we did a report where we found six schools in Baltimore City that did not have any students proficient in anything, English or math, six entire schools, no kids.

Project Baltimore story (May 17, 2017): Project Baltimore found half a dozen schools in the city that do not have a single student proficient in any state testing. And keep in mind city schools spend $16,000 per student every year, the fourth highest in the country.

Papst: And when we reported that, the story went viral and we started having teachers reach out to us saying, “This is true, but you understand these kids are graduating, and here’s how they’re graduating. They’re graduating because the school system is simply changing their failing grades to passing.” So we filed a public records request in late 2017, and we asked for emails and internal investigations and documents related to improper grade changing. School system gave us nothing, we sued them. And when the school system had to hand over 8,000 emails and all their internal investigations and the grade changing, we could see that it was a significant systemic problem throughout the entire school system. Our reporting led to the Inspector General for Education in Maryland to do a report, and he found over a four-year period that more than 12,500 grades from failing were changed to passing, without any extra work being done, 12,500 that led to upwards of 10% of kids at some schools graduating who should not have.

Sharyl: What would you say is the takeaway message of Failure Factory and what you’ve learned?

Papst: I hope that what people take away from this is that it can be fixed, it can be solved, but it has to happen from the people in the school. It has to happen from the parents, it has to happen from the community, and it has to happen for the taxpayer. And what’s terrifying about it is go to Baltimore, drive around Baltimore, look at what that city looks like. It is struggling. And it’s struggling because the public education system has been so bad for so long, we don’t want the rest of America looking like that.

Sharyl (on-camera): An interesting note on school standards, more states are requiring schools to teach cursive writing again, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are the latest. The number of schools teaching cursive dwindled to 14 just a decade ago but now numbers at more than half.

Watch the video here.