Certainly for this headline you could probably swap out any number of large (and even medium-sized) urban areas around the nation, but Baltimore already has a reputation as a failure of a school system. That was backed up recently by a story broken by a local television station.

WBFF-TV, Baltimore’s Fox affiliate, ran the latest news as part of a series dubbed “Project Baltimore.” Reporters learned that, in the first three quarters of the 2020-21 academic year, 41% of the high school students in the city had a grade point average of less than 1.0, or less than a D average. Even worse, according to their report: “In January, City Schools CEO Dr. Sonja Santelises first sounded the alarm, announcing the course failure rate for students nearly doubled during the Covid shutdown. A few months later, in May, [the school administration] announced students would not be held back for failing classes. This most recent GPA data could indicate why City Schools made that decision.”