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.
In Baltimore and across the country, academic performance is largely a function of wealth and access to resources.
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.