Longtime educator gives an inside view of deplorable conditions and poor learning environment as city officials prepare to layoff nearly 1000 employees to address budget deficit crisis.
Baltimore Whistleblower Teacher Says 'All Systems Down' in City SchoolsTAYA GRAHAM: This is Taya Graham and Stephen Janis reporting for The Real News Network in Baltimore City, Maryland. The crumbling Baltimore city school system faces yet another setback. School CEO Sonja Santelises says the $129 million deficit is due to declining enrolment and generous teacher contracts. The rhetoric(?) is prompting cutbacks with layoffs planned for over 1,000 employees, including teachers.But questions about money usually land here, at North Avenue. It's the home of the city school bureaucracy, which some say it's just bloated, but wasteful. As part of our ongoing investigation into the details of how the city does and does not work, we have an exclusive interview with a city teacher who peels back the curtain on spending and reveals just how bad city schools are ? before the cuts ? and he also offered solutions on how to serve teachers and students better.
We disguised his identity in order to protect him from retaliation. Now, Stephen, the monies that were generated by the casinos that were supposed to be allotted to the school budget, what happened to them?
STEPHEN JANIS: Well, as an excellent article by Luke Water from the Baltimore Sun pointed out, out of the $1.7 billion that has been taken in by casinos, very little of it has gone to fund increases in funding for school, which is where the money was promised, which just shows that the city is always in a rock and a hard place. We have casinos, but the city has actually experienced budget cuts since the casinos have opened, so it hasn't worked out for the city.
You put on top of that the tax breaks, like TIS(?) which technical reduce the city's overall assessed value and thus reduce the amount of money that the school(?) gets from the state based on funding mechanisms, and the school system is actually suffering even more.
TAYA GRAHAM: Now, Mayor Catherine Pugh just agreed in the Consent Decree that she was going to allot a fair amount of money for the Baltimore City Police Department. What does this mean for schools?
STEPHEN JANIS: Well, this again shows how Baltimore continues to fund policing, but schools are always secondary. The biggest part of the city budget goes to police funding, about $500 million ? a fraction of that, $200 and something million goes to teachers. Recently, the mayor said she was allotting $3 million to hire 100 more police officers to fill patrol positions, meanwhile they're going to cut $129 million from school. It's not that they're going to cut, it's that the school has a deficit that they can't pay for. So if the school system was funded as much as the police department there wouldn't be a budget deficit. So, clearly we're still in that dilemma where we're paying more to police than we are to teach.
TAYA GRAHAM: And now let's go to our interview with our whistleblower.
WHISTLEBLOWER: I'll give you a typical day. The bell will ring, many kids won't come to class. They'll be in the hallway. There's supposed to be staff and administrative staff to deal with that, but kids are still in the hallway. By first or second period, I'll already smell pot in my room, in the hallway. There's no censorship of any language. What I hear all day, I hear, "Shit," "Bitch," "Motherfucker," "Nigger," all day, and then every combination of that ? all day, every day. They'll talk to the teacher that way, to other kids. There's no consequence for that.
Truancy is a big problem in and outside of the school. No discipline, no consequences. And we haven't even gotten to academically where the kids are. They've tested the i-Ready test this year. Ninety-seven percent of the seniors were reading on a... not on a 12th grade level. Ninety-seven percent. Only 3% of the kids were reading on a 12th grade level, and the average grade level was about 5th grade to 6th grade. They are ? in all fairness ? they are over-tested. I think we had 24 weeks of testing this year. So they have these testing windows in which they're supposed to carry on this test, but they had all the kind of pre-tests you have in every class in the beginning, when you come in, so teachers can see where you are. They have i-Ready testing, then they have HSA testing in October. They have HSA testing again in December. They have PARCC testing in the beginning of the year, also. Then they have PARCC testing again right after the holiday with the HSA testing again. Then they'll have PARCC testing and i-Ready testing and HSA testing ? or whatever new test comes down the pipeline ? again in the end of the year. Which basically destroys the fourth quarter. So it's testing, testing, testing, testing, testing all the time. And there are other tests, too, standardized tests. So that's a big problem also.
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http://therealnews.com/t2/story:18292:Baltimore-Whistleblower-Teacher-Says-%27All-Systems-Down%27-in-City-Schools
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