Remember everything I said yesterday about the natural laws of bureaucracy?

Well, it was national news when the entire graduating senior class of Washington D.C.’s Ballou High School applied to college.  The school is in a poorer section of D.C. and is overwhelming a minority school.

Turns out, the entire administration of the school cheated.

But all the excitement and accomplishment couldn’t shake one question from Butcher’s mind:

How did all these students graduate from high school?

“You saw kids walking across the stage, who, they’re nice young people, but they don’t deserve to be walking across the stage,” Butcher says.

WAMU and NPR talked to nearly a dozen current and recent Ballou teachers — as well as four recent graduates — who tell the same story: Teachers felt pressure from administration to pass chronically absent students, and students knew the school administration would do as much as possible to get them to graduation.

“It’s oppressive to the kids because you’re giving them a false sense of success,” says one current Ballou teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her job.

The quality of education at Ballou for those who graduated was about as good as you could exepct.

Last school year, 3 percent of Ballou students tested met reading standards on citywide standardized exams. Almost none met math standards.

D.C. is about 40 miles from Baltimore, and politically, even closer than that.

Based on 2017 state test scores, 13 out of 39 high school had zero students proficient in math, the report said. Another six schools had only one percent of their students who tested proficient in math.

Doing the math, that means that 49% of Baltimore schools can’t produce a statistically significant number of students with proficiency in math.

According to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, a proficient student has certain mathematical abilities including “apply the mathematics they know to solve problems arising in everyday life, society, and the workplace.”

Given what we know about Baltimore and Ballou, virtually none of the students that graduate have the ability to solve everyday math problems, like… how to make exact change, calculate a percent tip, or figure out the square feet of area given the dimensions of a room.

These kids are unemployable by the lowest standards of any industry.

This is what happens when you graduate a city that can’t do basic math.

I guarantee that these kids did learn three things in Baltimore and D.C. schools.

Not how to read, write, or do math, of course, that’s hard.

They learned that when they are unemployed, living in poverty and misery, that:

1. It’s because they are black/brown/[victim minority status].
2. America is racist.
3. It’s all Trump’s/the Republican’s fault.

Welcome to the laws of bureaucracy in action.