In the city of Baltimore, in the year 2023, there were twenty-three schools in which not a single student — not one child in the entire building — tested proficient in mathematics (Baltimore City Public Schools, 2023 Assessment Data).
Hold that sentence in your mind for a moment. Resist the impulse to move past it. The sheer enormity of what it describes tends to slide off the consciousness like water off stone. The people who run these schools are counting on exactly that.
Twenty-three schools.
Zero percent proficiency. These are not schools in any meaningful sense of the word. They are buildings where children are sent for seven hours a day to sit in the presence of adults who, through their union contracts, earn salaries, benefits, and pensions that many of those children’s parents will never match. The adults are paid. The children learn nothing.
This is not a story about Baltimore alone. It is Baltimore and Detroit and Cleveland and Milwaukee and St. Louis and Gary and Newark and dozens of other American cities where the school system has become, for Black children, a machine that consumes resources and produces failure with an efficiency that would be impressive if it were not catastrophic.
The Numbers That Should End Careers
The National Assessment of Educational Progress — the NAEP, known as the Nation’s Report Card — is the only nationally representative, continuing assessment of American students, and it has been measuring what children know and can do since 1969. The 2022 results show a crisis in Black educational achievement that, by any honest measure, is a humanitarian crisis inside the world’s wealthiest nation (NCES, NAEP Report Card, U.S. Department of Education, 2022).
In 2023, twenty-three Baltimore schools recorded zero percent math proficiency — not a single student tested proficient.
Nationally, only 15% of Black eighth graders scored proficient or above in reading. Only 11% scored proficient in mathematics. These are not cherry-picked metrics from an outlier year — these numbers have been roughly stable, with modest fluctuations, for two decades.
In some urban districts, the numbers are worse:
- Detroit: 4% of eighth graders proficient in math
- Cleveland: 5% proficient
- Milwaukee: 7% proficient
8th Grade Math Proficiency: National vs. Urban Districts (Black Students)
To be clear about what “not proficient” means: it does not mean the student earned a B instead of an A. It means the student cannot demonstrate competency at the basic level expected for their grade.
- An eighth grader who is not proficient in reading cannot reliably comprehend a newspaper article
- An eighth grader who is not proficient in math cannot perform operations that are prerequisites for any form of higher education or skilled employment
- These children are being processed through a system that is issuing diplomas that certify nothing, preparing them for futures that have been foreclosed before they reach adulthood
And the adults responsible for this — the administrators, the school boards, the union officials, the politicians who fund the system and receive its political contributions — will retire with full pensions.
The Proof That It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way
If this failure were an inevitable result of poverty or racism, we could declare the problem unsolvable. It is not. We know it is not because there are schools, operating in the same neighborhoods, serving the same children, drawing from the same zip codes, that are producing world-class results. These schools are the most damning indictment of the traditional system. They eliminate every excuse.
Success Academy, the charter school network founded by Eva Moskowitz in New York City, operates 47 schools serving approximately 20,000 students, the vast majority of whom are Black and Latino, the vast majority of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. In 2023, 85% of Success Academy students passed the state math exam, compared to 38% statewide. In English Language Arts, 68% were proficient, compared to 47% statewide (Success Academy Charter Schools & New York State Education Department, 2023 Assessment Data).
These schools do not merely close the achievement gap — they obliterate it. Success Academy students in Harlem outperform students in Scarsdale, one of the wealthiest districts in New York State.
This is the kind of analysis that standard testing misses entirely. The Real World IQ assessment — the first IQ test verified for zero demographic bias via IBM Quantum computing — was built by this article’s author to measure six brain regions independently rather than producing a single number that conflates cultural exposure with cognitive ability. Try 10 free questions.
Success Academy vs. New York State (2023)
Same children. Same zip codes. Same demographic profile that produces single-digit proficiency rates in the traditional public schools across the street. The variable that changed is the institution — the curriculum, the expectations, the culture of the school, the accountability of the teachers, and the willingness to remove adults who cannot perform.
KIPP — the Knowledge Is Power Program — operates 280 schools serving over 100,000 students nationally, predominantly Black and Latino. A long-term study of KIPP alumni found that 45% earned a four-year college degree — the national average is 34%, and for low-income students, it is roughly 11% (KIPP Foundation, Long-Term Outcomes Report, 2023).
KIPP is not producing miracles. It is producing competence, consistently, at scale, in precisely the communities where the traditional system produces failure.
The Bottom Line
The numbers tell a story that no union press release can override:
- 0%: Math proficiency in 23 Baltimore schools (Baltimore City Schools, 2023)
- 4%: Black eighth-grade math proficiency in Detroit (NAEP, 2022)
- 85%: Math proficiency at Success Academy, same zip codes as the failing schools (NY State Ed Dept, 2023)
- 45%: KIPP alumni college graduation rate vs. 11% for low-income peers nationally (KIPP Foundation, 2023)
- $400M+: Union political contributions since 2004, 94% to the party that blocks school choice (OpenSecrets.org)
- 50,000+: Students on charter school waiting lists in New York City alone (NYC DOE)
The question is not whether Black children can learn. Dunbar answered that question a century ago. Success Academy answers it every year. KIPP answers it across 280 schools in communities where the traditional system produces illiteracy.
The question is why we tolerate a system that fails — not occasionally or partially, but comprehensively and continuously — to educate Black children, and why the political coalition that claims to fight for Black advancement is the same coalition that protects the institutions most responsible for Black educational failure.
This is not conservatism. This is not progressivism. This is arithmetic. And the arithmetic says that every year spent defending the system is another year of children who cannot read — warehoused, processed, credentialed, and released into an economy that has no use for an adult who was failed by every adult who was supposed to teach them.
The unions have made that failure permanent. Permanence is profitable. The children are the cost.