Hurricane Idalia did a quick roar yesterday across Florida, curling north and east as her strength diminished back to Tropical Storm intensity. Our pals in Tidewater said it rained all night after we watched a day filled with images of male and female reporters standing in water below their knees. It was soggy reporting, but that is what this storm was.

If we were not in soggy trousers, the biggest deal of the week was the re-opening of the public school system. Our Buddy Jon-Without has stepped up to do his best to convey the mysteries of Algebra to the Middle School audience. Most popular question for this week of renewal?

“Why does the value of X keep changing?”

We are going to leave that one hanging for now. Word from the Big City just up the road does not bode well for Maryland’s version of Public Education. There was a mild flurry about some of the problems yesterday, which of course is related to all the other emotional issues in which we are currently entangled. Project Baltimore is the group who did the reporting about the education matters. In addition to math scores, yesterday featured commentary on the suitability of some library books and which rest rooms should be used for which students.

Project Baltimore went on to claim that in 23 Baltimore City Schools, exactly “zero” students tested proficient in math for the 2022 school year.

There was more research and dismal news to report on the Middle School front. Analysis of 150 Baltimore City Schools revealed some of the disparities. Of those hundred-and-a-half schools, the ones with the appalling results included the 23, which were made up of 13 high schools, eight elementary schools and two middle schools. In those schools no students met math grade-level expectations. About 2,000 students took the state-administered math exams testing proficiency levels.

An additional 20 schools in Baltimore had no more than two students proficient in math with another three targeted for students with disabilities or incarcerated. None had students who could meet grade-level expectations. For 2022, approximately 7% of third-through-eighth graders at the Baltimore City School met grade level expectations in Math. That is the target audience for Jon-Without’s pedagogic skills back here in the Commonwealth.

There is some controversial commentary. Talk in the media about the results suggested the problem is in changing the educational mission from “teaching” to “babysitting with no accountability.” That would seem to be a theme across multiple disciplines. Education has been revealed to have deficiencies, but we are in a period of dramatic and rapid change in all our social institutions. One of the questions about all the change is what it means. Some of the Presidential candidates were reading the same analysis and claiming it reflects a breakdown in traditional family structure that directly reflects the absence of father-figures in the raising of children.

We have been through that line of reasoning many times since the reforms of The Great Society in the 1960s. We are now reaping the fruits of those changes in three twenty-year generational chunks. It doesn’t seem to be working out that well. The schools have become temporary lodgings for unsupervised kids to have some structure in single-parent homes. The other aspects of modern child-raising have similar alterations in social manners. There seems to be a rising resentment to that, but there are indications the age of vaxx and mask may be returning as a reflection of electoral politics. We will see if the mail-in voting exuberance returns as well.

It was lots of fun last time, and we suspect this next electoral cycle is shouting out “Hold our Beer!” already. The rest of the stuff on the attached slide? It is all going on. The news from Ukraine is horrific. There appears to be a possibility China may have to act out in a military fashion against Taiwan, Japan or the Philippines. Kim Jong Un is launching ballistic missiles from his DPRK across the contiguous seas.

One thing we might want to keep in mind: survival is going to require the ability to count. We ought to pay some attention to that matter in 2023, you know? And beyond the Baltimore City Limits!

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra