Baltimore City Schools: Where Failure Gets Rewarded

It has been a while since I wrote about Baltimore City Schools but there have been a lot of entries over the years and all of them have been bad. Back in 2021, local station WBFF learned about a student enrolled in a local high school who had passed a total of three high school classes in four years. His GPA was 0.13 and he should have technically still been a freshman despite being passed along each year and promoted to being a senior. 

But the really shocking part of the story was that his GPA meant he was ranked 62nd out of 120 students in his grade. In other words, a 0.13 GPA was the middle of the pack. Fully half the students in his grade had lower GPAs.

How is that possible? Well, further investigation by WBFF revealed there were more than 900 “ghost students” enrolled at this school. They were kept on the rolls even though many of them never showed up for class. The school system apparently did this because schools get paid per student who attends. So the cost of these ghost students to the taxpayers was nearly $10 million.

Sean Kennedy of The Maryland Public Policy Institute, the group that requested the investigation, told WBFF, “It’s a big deal that we are catching them spending money that they should not have had.” He added, “This is nothing less than theft. They’re stealing money from the taxpayers of Maryland in order to line their pockets or to spend money on other programs when the money was not designated for that.”

And this wasn’t a one off scandal. In 2023 the same station revealed that Baltimore County’s math scores were the lowest in the state. In fact, there were 23 schools where not a single student could do math at grade level. Overall, only 7% of students in grades 3-8 were deemed proficient. One mother in the city said the schools were little more than a babysitting service:

“They go there to get babysit for eight hours and come home,” she said of her son’s school. She added, “I feel like they don’t care. It’s not they’re children. They don’t care.”

Meanwhile the person in charge of Baltimore City Schools was being profiled in the local paper as if she were doing a bang up job.

Dr. Sonja Santelises was profiled by the Baltimore Sun last Sunday for a story titled “25 Black Marylanders to Watch for 2023.” Fox 45 reports she’s earning $445,000 a year as CEO of these schools but so far she hasn’t said anything about this report on math scores.

When WBFF showed up at an event where Dr. Santelises was speaking to ask her about the math scores, she practically ran out a back door.

It’s infuriating to watch and yet somehow the situation has gotten even worse. The same station that has uncovered all of these stories recently learned that Dr. Santelises is a finalist for National Superintendent of the Year. That’s right, she’s one of four people in the nation currently considered the best of the best at what she does. The School Superintendents Association, which gives out this award, posted a list of her accomplishments on their website. Not mentioned are any of the stories above, all of which happened under her watch. WBFF sent the Association a letter asking if they were even aware of these scandals. They got a non-responsive response explaining that a “Blue Ribbon Panel” selected the winners. 

Baltimore schools have seen some improvement in English testing, rebounding from the lows experienced during the pandemic. That puts it ahead of some districts that have not rebounded at all, but Baltimore’s math scores have not faired as well. Overall the record of ghost students, outright fraud and having the lowest math scores in the state doesn’t seem like a recipe for a national award. But somehow in Baltimore it is.

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