Grade Scandals, Bureaucracy, and the Truth About the Teacher Shortage with Chris Papst

Why are public school budgets skyrocketing while student proficiency scores tank? How do districts artificially inflate graduation rates while leaving children entirely illiterate? In this episode of Varnblog, we sit down with Emmy award-winning investigative journalist Chris Papst to uncover the disturbing reality exposed in his new book, Failure Factory.

For nearly a decade, Chris Papst and his team at Project Baltimore have investigated the deep-seated corruption, administration failures, and academic integrity issues within the Baltimore public school system. In this eye-opening conversation, Chris breaks down why Baltimore encapsulates a playbook used by major urban school districts across the United States to prioritize funding over educational outcomes.

We pull back the curtain on shocking grade-changing scandals, the erasure of standardized testing, and the systematic hiding of school violence data to avoid "persistently dangerous" labels. Chris also explains the toxic structural mechanics that are driving real educators out of the profession, revealing that the nationwide teacher shortage is a direct symptom of unmanageable classroom conditions and a total lack of administrative discipline enforcement.

If you are a parent, taxpayer, or educator looking to understand how the bureaucratic state manipulates public education, this breakdown of the "50% rule" and institutional data juking is essential listening.

✨ Order Chris Papst’s book, Failure Factory: How Baltimore City Public Schools Deprive Taxpayers and Students of a Future, available now!

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

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Welcome And Project Baltimore

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello, and welcome to Varmblog. And today I'm talking to investigative journalist Chris Papst, who has been working with an investigative team for Fox 45 News in Baltimore, investigating primarily the Baltimore public school system for what, eight, nine years now? It's been a while. You and your team have done a lot of work on all kinds of issues in the Baltimore public school system, such as administration failure, school safety issues, academic integrity issues. And you have been working on the accountability gap in public education for quite a while. You are releasing a book on the topic, Failure Factory, Help Baltimore City Public Schools Deprive Taxpayers and Students of a Future that is out. I think it's out now, yeah? Yes, sir. Yep. Yep. Which kind of synthesizes the work you've been doing for Farx 45 for a long time. I I wanted to ask you, as someone who has you know been studying public school accountability ethics for a long time, Baltimore comes up a lot. And why do you think Baltimore sort of encapsulates the problem that a lot of these major urban districts have? And and what do you think the problems actually are?

Chris Papst 2:14

Well, there's a there's a 45 minutes to answer for you right there. So, well, first off, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. And I think that, you know, part of the reason that I wrote Failure Factory is because when I when I started doing this in January of 2017, we started Project Baltimore in 2017, which is a a long-term investigative unit that we have only we've only focused on one topic, you know, the past nine months or nine years and a few months, and that's been public education. And we've been doing that because we believe public education is the most important topic in the country because public education affects everything else. It affects your housing values, it affects your local tax climate, it affects your local crime incarceration rates, it affects your local economy. It all comes down to the quality of your local public school system. And what we can see in Baltimore, and it was like this in January of 2017, still like this today, nine years later, is that it is one of the most funded large school systems in America. We know that through the federal government and federal data, but it's also one of the lowest performing large school systems in America. We know that through federal data. And, you know, we asked a question in January of 2017: how and why is this happening? How does this happen every single year? Why is this happening every single year? And I wrote Failure Factory because I think we now know why this is happening and how this is happening. And more importantly, I wrote the book because I think it's happening throughout the entire country. It's the same playbook, it's the same problems, it's the same, we're putting massive amounts of funding into education, and we're not getting better educational outcomes for our students. It's happening all across the country. We can see it, we know it. And I really wrote this book to try to educate people. No, no pun there intended, uh, on what's happening and why it's happening so we can prevent more school systems like Baltimore from forming and we can improve the quality of education in our country.

C. Derick Varn 4:17

So let's start off with a statistic I got from your book. Baltimore is one of the more funded public school systems, lots of federal aid.

High Funding Low Performance Puzzle

C. Derick Varn 4:28

It has a $1.7 billion budget, but also very, very low basic proficiency scores. So we're talking like 10% in math, slightly better in reading. Yeah, you imply that part of that is because this money isn't totally reaching the classroom. Where's all this money actually going in your investigations?

Chris Papst 4:53

A significant amount of that is not reaching the classroom. So when you have a budget like Baltimore City, 85% of that budget is going to salaries and it's going to benefits and things like that for the for the staff. Essentially, it's going to staff. But as you start to break these numbers down more, what you see is that a a big percentage of that staff are not teachers. So in Baltimore City, you have about 12,500 employees right now in Baltimore City Public Schools. Only about 5,500 of them are teachers. So less than half, fewer than half of the people employed in Baltimore City public schools are teachers. Now, you would think that if you're a school system and your primary goal, your primary objective is to educate kids that a majority of your employees would be teachers, but that's not the case. Now, with that said, you obviously need other roles in there. You need people working in the cafeteria, you need security, you need, you know, janitors, you need the bus drivers. Those things are very important, obviously. They're not directly in the classroom. But it's it's the administration, it's the top-heavy aspect of it. Baltimore City Schools, we can see in federal data, is one of the most top-heavy school systems in the country, which means it has more money per student going to administration than other schools. So that is money that is certainly not getting to the classroom. And one of the things that I try to do in Failure Factory is I try to teach people how they can find this data on their own and where they can look for it. Because you know, a lot of the people that are watching us right now, they're very busy. They have kids, they have jobs. You know, they don't they don't have a job like mine where they can take 40 or 50 hours a week and they can look at this data. So I try to make it really easy for people to say, okay, well, this is where you can go, this is where you can find data, and this is how you interpret that data, and this is what it means. But when you look at a school system, not just Baltimore, but you look at school systems around the country, you know, you can see how they're spending their money. And a lot of these school systems, the money is getting tied up in the bureaucratic state, never making it to the classroom.

C. Derick Varn 7:08

Yeah. My own research has indicated that's true pretty much across the country. So, like what you see is like between 84 and 92 percent of any district's budget's going to be staffing. Teacher pay is relatively static, it's gone down a little bit, actually, as far as like purchasing power goes. And yet the cost of that budget has doubled. And I assure you, it's not in lunch ladies or front-end staff. And almost every school district that that I've looked at, and Utah is a lower administration district, but what you've seen is these like district buildings going up everywhere, and more and more centralized district.

Chris Papst 7:51

Well, because it's a lot of there's so much money now, and it there's you know, I make the case in Failure Factory that, and I think that you know, I'm willing to have this conversation with anyone, then I think at some point we've put too much money into public education. Because what we have seen is that while there's still a lot of people that are getting into public education for the right reasons, I think there's a growing number of people that are getting into public education because it's now a means to acquire wealth. So when you look at a school system like Baltimore City, between let's just go over a little bit of the data because I think it's really important and it's also extremely telling about what's really going on. In 2017, in January of 2017, when this book begins, Baltimore City schools had a $1.3 billion budget. In 2025, the data that was just released, actually, the data was released a little bit after this book. So the book goes to 2024, but you know, we'll we'll use the most updated data. So in 2025, the school district's budget was $1.8 billion. So the school system got a $500 million a year increase over those eight school years, and that's a 38% increase in funding. 38% increase in funding. But the enrollment went down 7%. So the enrollment is going down, but the budget is skyrocketing, 38% in eight years. And what's the school system doing with that money? Well, they're hiring more adults. So there's about 10,500 employees when the school sit when we started Project Baltimore, when the book starts in 2017, you know, 10,500. Now there's about 12,800. So the school system has hired a massive amount of people to educate fewer kids, and a majority of the academic outcomes are worse now than they were in 2017. We just did a story, I did a story a couple weeks ago for Fox 45. And of those 12,800 employees in Baltimore City schools, 34% of them now make six-figure salaries. So two years ago, that was just 19%. So in the past two years, the number of employees in Baltimore City schools making six-figure salaries, more than $100,000, went from 19% to 34%. More than a third of the employees are making that much money. And I don't think a lot of people would have a problem with that, except Baltimore City Schools has the lowest graduation rate in the state. It has the lowest attendance rate in the state, the lowest SAT scores in the state, the lowest math proficiencies in the state, the highest dropout rate in the state, the highest rate of chronic absenteeism, and it's the most funded school system in the state. So you're just getting massive amounts of money that are put into this school system. And I mean, it is the worst school system in the state, and there's a lot of people that are making very good salaries. And actually, I'll make this last point that when we were doing that statistical analysis on the on the salaries, there are 56 employees in Baltimore City schools that make more than $200,000 a year, more than the governor, more than the mayor. $200,000 a year, 56 employees for very, very low

Administrative Bloat And Staffing Math

Chris Papst 11:13

outcomes for students.

C. Derick Varn 11:16

What kinds of fields are these employees who make this top in salaries in? Where are they at?

Chris Papst 11:21

Some of them are police officers because they're working a massive amount of overtime. Some of them are school administrators. Obviously, most of them are school administrators. You're talking about the C-suite, chief academic officer, chief executive officer. The CEO of Baltimore City Schools makes about $500,000 a year in total compensation. 12% of the students in Baltimore City are proficient in math. This is 2025 data. In 2025, with a $1.8 billion budget, a 38% increase over eight years, 12% of the students in that school system are proficient in math, meaning 88% are not proficient in math. And the leader of that organization has been there for 10 years, making a half a million dollars in total compensation. And I think that's the reason a lot of people are getting into public education now, is because you can make that kind of money and the student academic outcomes don't need to be there. And that's that's really, I think, one of the things that frustrates a lot of people because you're, you know, you're doing this show, you know, you're trying to build your show and grow your audience. And can you imagine that you know if that didn't matter? You know, if you got paid $500,000 a year and the success of your organization didn't matter and you would still make that kind of money, wouldn't that be a great job to have? And and in many ways, that's what public education has become. It doesn't matter if if all of your kids are proficient in math or none of your kids are proficient in math, you make the same amount of money.

C. Derick Varn 12:57

Yeah. In the case of some supers, you'd make it even if you don't do the job. I mean, that literally they they can fire you and still have to pay you because the way the contracts are worded.

Chris Papst 13:06

Oh which happens often, by the way.

C. Derick Varn 13:08

Yeah, I know. Well, one of the things that I find kind of interesting, but I didn't tell you this, I also work as a teacher. But yes, I I I have seen a lot of this. I was really moved by some of your arguments around ghost success because I've told people that it's very hard to compel academic matrix, even something that is standardized, like the SAT and ACT, the question complexity is actually declined, and that is trade secret, so we don't know it. And if you think it's bad in that, think about the tests that are made by the states themselves or the exemptions they give to them. So you were talking about the number of metrics that get altered to have graduation rates go up. And here, even in Utah, we'll see graduation rates of up or upwards of 85%. Some schools will have A rates of like 70%, so 70% of the students have A's, and they have an ACT average of 20, which is not terrible, but it's nowhere near what should be producing 70, 80% A's. And I wanted to ask you what you saw in Baltimore, but how are they juking the stats? Because you have this weird scenario where the graduation rates are going up and the literacy rates are staying stagnant or going down, depending on the specific area and city. And I've even seen it reported in the same newspapers, and then not correlate the two that we're celebrating higher graduation rates, like the highest, I think nationally highest graduation rates ever have happened in the 2020s. And yet the the PISA data, the in the NAEP data, the the ACT data, they're all bad, and that's with those tests being made easier. So, what did you see?

Chris Papst 15:00

Yeah, so what we're seeing is that, and I can speak specifically to Maryland on this, but this is happening around the country, is that there's a significant amount of lowering of the academic expectations. And what the schools are doing, and I I this is something that we've really seen a lot in Baltimore City, is that they're they're trying to make the schools look more successful on paper. And many people would say, well, if you want the schools to be more successful, just educate the kids better. Well, I think that's what most Americans would say, but that's not what the schools are necessarily doing. They're making it, they're changing the metric. So here's what I mean Maryland recently in 2020 made it easier to graduate from high school. The state wanted graduation rates to go up. And in 2020, the state injected a lot of money into public education. It was called the Blueprint for Maryland's futures. It's new law that passed that pumped billions of additional dollars into public education. Well, that same year, what did not get a lot of publicity was that the state lowered the requirements to graduate from high school in Maryland. And prior to 2020, if you wanted to graduate from high school in Maryland, you had to do three things. You had to pass 75 service hours, which is complete like 75 community service hours. You had to do your 21 course credits, you know, your credits, the courses that you take in high school, and you had to pass proficiency tests, the assessments in math, English, science, and social studies. Well, after 2020, the state no longer made it mandatory to pass the assessments. So students in Maryland no longer have to prove that they're proficient in reading. They no longer have to prove that they're proficient in math and they can get a high school diploma. So when you're talking about high school graduation rates going up in states like Maryland, it's not because the kids are getting smarter, it's because they the state made it easier to graduate. And when you look at testing like SAT scores, SAT scores in Maryland are last time I looked, they were at like 11 or 12 year low. Their SAT scores are going in the wrong direction. And the National Assessment of Educational Progress scores are going in the wrong direction. So you're you're looking at graduation rates go up, but the metrics that determine the knowledge that a student has are going down. And those are the SAT scores. And this is one of the main things that I hit on in Failure Factory is how the schools are manipulating

Six Figure Salaries Without Results

Chris Papst 17:43

the data that they can. Attendance data, chronic absenteeism data, violence data is a big one. I have a whole chapter in this book where I do store over the past eight years, nine years, I've done stories on schools that are simply covering up weapons confiscations. They're covering up fights and violence and charges, criminal charges that are happening inside of schools because the principals don't want these things on the record of a school. They want the schools to look safer on paper. They want the schools to look more academically successful on paper so they can manipulate the data. And one thing that I say as I'm doing my book tour and I'm going around talking about failure factor is I'm I'm telling people, listen, what we're seeing in this country is we're seeing an attack on standardized testing. We're seeing a lot of schools don't like standardized testing. They want standardized testing to go away. And my argument is, well, why do you think that is? Because they can't manipulate that data. They're not sitting there with the student taking the test on that computer. It's very easy for a school to lower requirements for graduation and graduate more kids. It's very easy for schools to mark kids present when they're absent to increase the attendance rate. It's very hard for schools to increase their SAT scores, to increase their standardized testing scores, because a student actually has to do that.

C. Derick Varn 19:08

Right. I mean, I've seen this happen in a number of ways. One is something that I believe in on paper, but don't believe in in implementations, which is standards-based grading, where we implement a one through four scale. But the one is deemed a D, and to get the one, all you have to do is attempt the assessment. You don't even have to score anything on it. Yeah. Yeah. And thus you have these D rates. And I I've told people that as a teacher, it's like, of course, we we would like to have, I mean, we'd like to have more honest grades, but our administrators will stop us.

unknown 19:44

Yeah.

Chris Papst 19:44

You know, we that that is a so of the eight years that this book covers, as the book goes from 2017 to 2025, five of those years are a massive grade changing scandal that we uncovered in Baltimore City schools. And this is not B's to A's or C's to D's. This is F's or C's to B's. This is F's to D's. This is failing grades getting changed to a 60, uh, which is the minimum passing grade in Baltimore City. I mean, it's it's uh it was a five-year-long investigation we did. We ended up having to sue Baltimore City schools for violating the Maryland Public Information Act because they refused to give us documents that that we were legally required to have because they were trying to not let this get out publicly. But we ended up finding that there were thousands and thousands of failing grades that were being changed to passing because the school wants kids to pass. There are more, I interview teachers in this book that tell me that the schools are not focused on learning, the schools are focused on passing, past a student to the next grade. That's the most important thing. The learning aspect really doesn't have to happen. I mean, we talked about 12% of the kids in Baltimore City schools are proficient in math. Well, the graduation rate is 71%. Well, how can 71% of the students be graduating, but 12% of the students are proficient in math? Well, it's because the focus is on passing students, not educating students. Again, that's teachers that I talked to in Failure Factory. You can read the words from the teachers for yourselves. Like that's what the schools are focused on. And it's it's it's happening all across the country. This is not a Baltimore issue.

C. Derick Varn 21:31

Yeah, I mean there's there's all kinds of ways that that happens, and one of which is administrative prerogative, and most states' administrators can override a teacher's grade if they want to. They just but the other way is you know, as a person who's worked in education off and on for 20, 25 years, I've actually seen a completely different focus on what we're supposed to have as a spread of grades to the idea that we just don't have failing grades. And which leads you to the question okay, well, then in that 71% notion that you have in Baltimore, you know, in Utah we're hitting like 85, 90, but but we're also seeing other things such as massive expansions of remediation programs, yeah, colleges not knowing what to do, even with our top students, because we went from having one valedictorian to 14 valedictorians because there's so many perfect scores. And all kinds of ways these grades are changed, even by just changing grading policies, adopting things that sound rigorous and progressive sometimes, but when you actually look at how they're implemented, they're implemented. In a way that is different from what they're sold as. You talk a lot about the safety. The safety stuff actually really concerns me, and I've seen

Graduation Rates Up By Lowering Bars

C. Derick Varn 22:57

it too. And I would say, you know, and Utah does not have the safety issues that urban Maryland does. However, we have seen focuses on things like restorative discipline practices, etc. etc. But what that has actually meant in most cases, again, not as what's sold, because you know, restorative discipline sounds great. What normally happens is with it's just the student apologizes to the teacher and it's over. And the administrator does not see themselves as a disciplinary figure in the chain that you know they might be, we're gonna let you let off steam or whatever. And so you don't have a lot consistency and enforcement of rules, even rules that are legal, not just you know, individual school policies. And this also means that things like suspensions aren't happening when they normally would. So kids who would be suspended for, I don't know, punching another kid in middle school or something. Even if it was a relatively minor act of violence, they would have been suspended and recorded. There's a lot of ways where that's just rewritten as some other kind of offense and then not recorded because of the fear of suspension showing up. Your book actually indicates that this is actually happening on a much more worrying level, like that we are hiding police data and stuff like that. What did you find?

Chris Papst 24:43

This is one of those topics where schools don't want to be labeled dangerous. And that that is the very first job of a school is to keep a student safe. So if you're gonna rate what the public thinks a school should be doing, the first is safety, the second is education. You gotta have safety first. We have seen numerous examples of where the schools are trying everything they can to downplay the violence so that they can go to the public and say, look, our suspensions are down 30% over two years, our expulsions are down 80% over two years. We didn't have any weapons confiscations last year. Well, a lot of that is because it's just simply not getting reported. So in Failure Factory, I I tell a story, I tell multiple stories, but here's here's one of them. One of them is that there's a third grade girl who was assaulted in school, and she comes home and her head's bleeding, she has cuts, and her mom takes video of it because this is you know, there's been issues of violence at the school for a while. Her mom takes her to the doctor. Doctor calls the school, says she can't come to school for a couple days because she's been injured. She takes the she goes to the police, the police write up police reports saying that this girl was the victim of a second-degree assault because she had been attacked. And they also go to her pediatrician. Pediatrician writes a note to the school, and the note says, Your school is no longer safe. I am requesting that this student be transferred to another school. Well, we have all this data, and at the same time, the mom files a bullying report because schools try to encourage, you know, the report of bullying, at least that's what they tell parents. So the mom files a bullying report, and the conclusion of the school was that there was not enough evidence that this girl was bullied. Now, there's a police report of a second-degree assault happening inside of the school. There's a note from a doctor saying the girl had to stay home for a number of days to heal, and there's a note from a pediatrician saying that the school was no longer safe after this girl was attacked inside the school and she needs a transfer. The report from the school was that nothing happened and that they found that there was no bullying and that there was no concerns on behalf of the family about the safety of the girl. And these are the things that we're seeing a lot of times in schools. And there's a reason for that. And the reason is that in Maryland, there's a designation, a designation, and a lot of states have this as well, called Persistently Dangerous, where if a school has so many acts of violence, weapons, confiscations, fights, police are called to the school, suspensions, expulsions, there's a formula. And if the school meets that formula, the school will be labeled persistently dangerous. Well, I talk to teachers in Failure Factory where they tell me that the principals know the formula. And if the school starts getting close to meeting the thresholds of the formula, they just cut off all discipline. Because in Maryland, if a school is labeled persistently dangerous, this the kids are able to transfer out of that school. And oftentimes the principals will lose their jobs. So there's roughly 1,400 schools right now, public schools in the state of Maryland. You know how many are labeled persistently dangerous? None. There hasn't been one for I think it's 11 years. 11 years there has not been a school labeled persistently dangerous. Now, Maryland has Baltimore, and Baltimore every single year is not just labeled one of the most dangerous places in America. It's labeled one of the most dangerous places in the Western Hemisphere, but not one school is labeled persistently dangerous.

C. Derick Varn 29:04

Well, I mean, this leads to some paradoxes that we see right now, because we see a lot of ed research saying, and ed research coming from schools that train administrators, that suspensions are damaging the students, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And yet we've also we we see suspensions are down across the the country. At the same time, there is as of 2024 a massive increase in the number of recorded threats, not just to students, because there's no central database for that, but the APA uh has reported that like there's been a massive increase in student and teachers reporting threats made to them at all age levels, and an increase of like 50% of physical violence attacks against teachers that somehow is not showing up in the suspension data, etc. And the other thing that we've seen is other programs like in-school suspension have been just gotten rid of because supposedly we don't have money for them, but we haven't money for more administrators, yeah.

Grade Changes And Passing Over Learning

Chris Papst 30:22

This is this is one of those situations that you mentioned where when it's sold to the public, it sounds flowery, but when it's implemented, it doesn't work, and that's the whole concept of not suspending kids. And here's what I mean by that. What you have seen in Maryland, what you have seen throughout the country over the past 10 or 15 years has been a significant decline in suspensions, and there's a reason for that. In 2013, President Obama and his secretary of the Department of Education came to Baltimore again, 2013. And what they said was they looked at data and they determined that there is a disproportionate amount of minority students, specifically black males, that were being suspended or expelled from school. And their conclusion was the school systems must be discriminating against minority males, specifically black males. That's what President Obama and that is what his Secretary of Education concluded, that the school systems are discriminating. So what they did was they sent guidance to all 50 states. And I explained this in Failure Factory, is this this was this was one of the big reasons we are where we are as far as public education. They sent the guidance, and the guidance said, we think you're discriminating against young black males. We would like you to cut your rate of suspensions because when you suspend a kid, the kid is no longer in school, and they end up falling farther behind, and then they end up dropping out of school, and that's not good for society, and it's not good for the student. And that makes complete sense. I think anybody listening to us right now would say, yeah, if you're not in school for 10 days, you're going to fall behind, and then it gets more frustrating to catch up, and you're more likely to fall behind and then drop out. Makes complete sense. Well, so the opposite side of that is when you don't suspend the kid, you're supposed to put in interventions to find out what the problem is. Why are you acting out? Why did you create why did you do this behavior that would have led for you to you to be suspended, but you weren't? And try to help that child, diagnose the issue. Well, the one side of that happened. The student wasn't being suspended anymore. The other side of that, trying to help the student, in many cases, if not most cases, that part did not happen. And what America ended up doing was students who should have been suspended, who should not have been in school, who should have been held accountable, were no longer being held accountable. So it sent a message to other kids that hey, you're not going to be held accountable either. And what we have seen in America, and if you look at the data, and I lay this out in Failure Factory because I think this is so important, if you look at federal test scores, they peaked around 2013. After 2013, federal test scores in America began to decline across the entire country. At the exact moment that President Obama and the Secretary of Education told schools to no longer suspend problematic students. You saw places like Maryland where the suspension rate went down 50, 60, 70 percent. Huge amounts. I mean, massive amounts. This was not small, this was a massive amount. And at the same time, you saw test scores across the entire country begin to drop. Now, I would contend, and you're a teacher, anybody who's listening to us who's a teacher would contend. I would think if you have 25 kids in your classroom and two or three of those kids are acting up, it affects the learning for every other child. And what America effectively did starting in 2013 was say to teachers, we're not gonna take that kid out of your classroom anymore. We're not gonna suspend that child, we're not gonna discipline that child. You're gonna have to keep that child in your classroom. You can send them to the principal's office if you'd like, but we're gonna send them back to your class the following period. And that's what we did. And we can see that the outcome of that has been twofold. One, an overall lowering of academics for students, but two, the other thing it did was it created an environment in public schools that a lot of teachers don't want to be in. And we have a teacher shortage in America, we have a big teacher shortage in Baltimore. But I don't think it's because people don't want to teach. I think it's because people don't want to teach in the environments that have been created in many public school systems where students simply are not being held accountable for their actions.

C. Derick Varn 35:17

Yeah, that's that that's an interesting point because one of the things that I've talked to people, everyone thinks the teachers leave because of money. And I'm like, no, actually, normally it's for job conditions and and stuff related to job conditions more than more than compensation.

Chris Papst 35:34

And I've never had a teacher tell me they quit teaching because of money. Right. And and and why would you? You know what you're gonna get paid before you go in. I mean, you

Violence Data That Never Gets Filed

Chris Papst 35:42

got a 25-year union salary, it's gonna tell you what you're gonna make every single year. There's no surprises. Like for somebody to say that I'm leaving because I didn't think I'd make this much money. What do you mean you didn't think you'd make this much money? You're given the union contract your first day on the job. You knew what you were gonna make for the next 30 years.

C. Derick Varn 36:01

Yeah, so I I I also was just like, it's not money, it's it's it's work conditions. A lot of it has to do with discipline and then overriding teacher decisions, great grading policies being weakened. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about, though, is like you you suggest that this is not unique to Baltimore. I would say I know it's not. I'm like, you know, I'm in a very different state under very different conditions, and we have many of the same issues. But what red flags should people, parents, community members, teachers, whoever, look for in school districts when they start to head this way? And where can they find those flags? Because they're not always obvious.

Chris Papst 36:49

Um, in in Failure Factory, I have an entire chapter devoted to that question. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to educate people on where they can look in their school system for problems. And a lot of the problems that you're gonna find are in school board policy, which is probably the most boring topic you could ever talk about. But it is so monumentally important. And I know nobody listening who's you know who's working 50, 60 hours a week is gonna read school board policy. So that's where this book comes into play because I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna tell you exactly what you need to look for and where it's gonna be. And I go through a number of things in policies that you can very easily look for, where if your school system has these policies, it's an indication that your school system is going in the wrong direction and the school system is lowering standards to try to increase the number of students that are graduating and passing, not because they're getting a better education, but because the school system has made it easier to graduate or pass. And here's one of them. One of them is called the 50% rule. Baltimore City has the 50% rule. And in Failure Factory, I show you where to find it, where it would be in school board policy to see if your school system has it. And what the 50% rule says is that no matter how little work a student does, no matter how few times a student comes to class, the lowest possible grade they can get is a 50. So a student will get half credit for a course, even if they never take that course, never show up one day, they will get half credit in Baltimore City for that course. Now, if you talk to the school system, they will tell you that they institute this because they want more kids to pass. And they're helping the child. They're saying to the child, okay, you can miss the first 40 days of school, which in a place like Baltimore happens. But on that 34st day, when you come in, you're gonna start at a 50. Because if you start at a zero, you know mathematically you're not gonna be able to get up to a 60 to pass. So we're gonna start you at a 50, even if you missed the first 40 days of school. That is what the 50% rule says. And if you have that in your local school system, that is a giant red flag that your local school system is struggling. And what is happening, and teachers that I talk to in Failure Factory tell me that what the student, these these kids are smart, and they're gonna set, they're going to reach the level of expectation that the adult set for them. And the teachers tell me, the students know I can't give them less than a 50. So they won't come to school the first half of the year. And they know that they don't have to because they started a 50, and all they have to do is get earn 10 points and get to a 60 and they pass the course. So on a hundred-point scale, all they have to do is get 10 points and they get a 60 and they pass the course and they know that. And the teachers will tell me that the students will they'll come in, they'll be like, let's say they're on the 140th day of school, and they have their grade and they calculate it, and they're like, okay, well, Miss Johnson can't give me below a 50 for the rest of the school year. Oh, I'm gonna finish with a 61, and then they won't come to school the rest of the year. Like that, that's what these kids do with those types of policies. But those policies also do what they're supposed to do, which is pass more students. And the reason that I know that that's what this is for is because most of the school systems in Maryland do not have a 50% rule. Baltimore City does, the lowest performing school system in the state has a 50% rule, because without it, too many students would fail. Baltimore County in 2015 instituted a 50% rule. In 2015, again, two years after the the Barack Obama situation with the

Suspension Declines And Classroom Chaos

Chris Papst 40:42

disciplining of the students, because their their metrics were getting really bad. So they instituted a 50% rule in 2015. But a lot of other school systems here don't have that because they don't need it, because the kids are passing on their own. So that's one of the main things that I think people should look out for. And there's a number of them, like the 50% rule that I mentioned in Failure Factor, that you can look for.

C. Derick Varn 41:08

All right. Well, I know you have to go, so I'm gonna ask you one kind of uh semi-provocative question. Sure. If you were given the authority to overhaul the bureaucratic system of accountability in Baltimore, what is the first bureaucratic structure you would dismantle and and or reform?

Chris Papst 41:35

The biggest problem that I hear from teachers, that the biggest, biggest problem is discipline and keeping problematic kids in the classroom. It affects the more the morality. Morality is not the right word, it it affects the educational environment of the entire school. And it makes it very difficult for teachers to teach and very difficult for the students who want to be there to learn. And what we have done in places like Baltimore City is that they do everything they can to keep problematic kids in school. And all the teachers that I talk to would say the very first thing they would do is that if you have a student who is acting out and repeatedly acting out over a prolonged period of time, that student has to be removed from the school. That student has to be put into an alternative setting and receive the help that they need. Find out why that student's acting up. Are they hungry? Are they not eating? Are their parents getting divorced? Like what's the situation? Why are you acting this way? Are you five grade levels behind in reading and you're frustrated and it's manifesting itself in violence or something like that? That's what needs to happen. If that one thing happened right there, it would make a significant difference in our public education system. But it's not happening. And the reason it's not happening is because of money, because it's what we talked about earlier. Now, whether all of your kids are proficient in math or none of your kids are proficient in math, you make the same amount of money. And if you're an administrator, you make the same amount of money whether your kids learn or not. And we don't have an incentive structure in many public schools to do what many of the teachers say needs to be done, which is remove the problematic kids from the classroom and put them somewhere else to get the help that they need. The system's not set up that way because it doesn't matter if the kids learn, the schools get the money.

C. Derick Varn 43:45

Oh, okay. Where can people find your work, Chris? And and thank you for your time.

Chris Papst 43:50

So let's go the book's called Failure Factory, how Baltimore City Public Schools Deprive Taxpayers and Students of a Future and everything that we talked about here on your show. You know, it's 25 pages of a 250-page book. And I really don't think a lot of people understand what's happening in public education. And what Failure Factory is, is it's what I didn't know. In January of 2017, when I started this job, was in this book, I had no idea how public education is actually run, how data is manipulated, how kids are passing when they can't read, how kids are getting diplomas when they can't even read that the words on the diploma. How does that happen? Well, it's like we talked about in in your show, and you know what I talk about in this book is I I really think that a lot of people don't understand how the public education system actually operates. The the how the sausage is made. And and I hope that people pick up a copy of the book, get a hold of me. I'm very easy to get a hold of. It's just crisp to C H R I S P A P S T. You know, I'm all over all the social media and pick up a copy of my book and let me know what you think and let's keep the conversation

Red Flags Like The 50% Rule

Chris Papst 44:57

going. All right. Well thank you so much. Have a great day. Sir, thank you.