Thread by @JewhadiTM

"I hope we don’t take the bait," said @RepRichmond, the former head of the Congressional Black Caucus, of which Cummings is also a powerful member. "The president always plays [the] race card when he is having a bad news cycle. “

“[It's] easier to call people names, when you don’t have anything else to point to."

He pointed to rat infestation, structurally crumbling schools, poor education (some of the lowest educational proficiency levels in the country), violence and poverty in Baltimore.

reading proficiency rates among Baltimore High School graduates hover at around 11%, and math proficiency rates hover around 12%. This is in a school system that graduates roughly 70% of its students each year.

There is clearly a major disconnection between the high graduation rate and the extremely dismal academic proficiency rate.

This discrepancy alone, given the money that goes into the system, is prima facie evidence of a crime.

As Project Baltimore continues to follow the path of the money, it becomes increasingly obvious that there are strong institutional incentives to keep Baltimore's clearly failing system in place.

In a very real sense, the dysfunction in Baltimore's schools mirror a similar dysfunction in the city's political establishment.

In a city of fewer than 600K residents & a rapidly declining school enrollment, literally thousands of individuals in the school system receive salaries in excess of $100K per year. Most recipients are not teachers but consultants, contractors, and administrators.

The consequences of this tragedy - thousands of students graduating each year without even basic education attainment - reveal a crime of almost epic proportions.

Individuals and firms that service the Baltimore school system are making off with literally billions of taxpayer dollars with nothing to show for it.

But in the tortured logic of Baltimore's political bureaucracy, failure is incentivized. It is at best a massive fraud committed against students who are cheated out of a future, and taxpayers whose hard-earned money is being wasted.

At worst, Baltimore's performance is a genocidal crime against generations of children who are then turned out into the streets to face a world of crime, drugs, prison and death that has resulted in a murder rate of over 300 per year.

The buck has to stop somewhere. Cutting off the flow of unaccounted tax dollars to an underperforming, bloated school system that is cynically betraying children should be seriously considered.

Cold, hard truths about Baltimore’s crumbling city schools

Decades of under-funding have shortchanged city students, but so has a tradition of incompetence and corruption in school facilities management

baltimorebrew.com/2018/01/08/col…