Chris Papst

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday Morning with Us today is Chris PEPs and he wrote a new book, A Failure Factory, and he believes that our education system is broken needs to be fixed. And Chris Paps is a reporter for Project Baltimore for Fox forty five in Baltimore. And well, Chris, give us a give us an indicator how bad is our education system?

0:31 Speaker 2 Well, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. So it’s you know, we’ve all seen over the years how taxpayers are putting massive amounts of additional funding into public education, but we’re not seeing that the student academic outcomes are improving with that funding. And largely why I wrote Failure Factory is because in Baltimore City specifically, But

0:54 this is certainly not a Baltimore problem. This is an America problem. We have seen the past eight years that the funding for the school system has increased by thirty percent over the past eight school years, but the graduation rate has remained exactly the same. It’s been seventy percent.

1:13 It was seventy percent eight years ago, and it’s seventy percent now with a thirty percent funding increase, And we are seeing that throughout the entire country. And the reason that I wrote Failure Factory is because I see Baltimore as that in the end stages of what a failing public education system does to a community and does to

1:36 a society. Baltimore is a struggling city. Its population is dwindling, very high crime, very high murder rates, very high poverty rates. It’s struggling. And I make the case in the book that those things are not the problem. Those things are a symptom of the problem. The problem is a very expensive public education system that is not providing the proper

1:59 education to its people. But it’s not just Baltimore. This is happening throughout the country.

2:05 Speaker 1 I understood it. You know, I live in New York City, and ever since COVID, I’m very very much concerned about the education system in New York City. And it happens that it’s not only Baltimore, not only in New York City, but I’m concerned that it’s about it’s in a lot of our cities and states.

2:26 Speaker 2 And what do you think, Well, what failure Factory is. It’s eight years of me working for Fox forty five News and as an investigative reporter covering public education every single day talking to parents, talking to students, talking to administrators and kids and teachers, and I have a lot of these interviews in the book, and one of the

2:49 main themes that it always seems to come back to is that public education, not just in Baltimore, not just in New York City, but throughout the country has come to price. They are ties not educating students, but acquiring funding and then using that funding to hire more adults, which then grows to political power and influence of public education.

3:13 So we talked about in the beginning of this interview that funding has gone up thirty percent in Baltimore City public schools, but the graduation rate has remained unchanged at seventy percent. Well, how can that happen, Well, it happens because the priority is not educating the kids. If the priority we’re educating the kids, the graduation rate would move up.

3:36 And by the way, seventy percent is the lowest in the state of Maryland. You have to look at where the school systems are improving, and where they’re improving is the amount of money that they’re collecting. And this is an American problem. It started about fifteen twenty years ago, where really the acquisition of funding became the primary focus

3:57 of so many of our public schools.

4:01 Speaker 1 And that’s what I’m concerned about. And I’m concerned about our kids in every city, in every state. And now we have challenges in our Congress. Now in our Congress, our colleges and our universities. Have you thought about how do we challenge that?

4:19 Speaker 2 Well, what we’re seeing in the colleges and universities, and as you know, we’re seeing massive amounts of debt. We’re massive Kids are coming out of these colleges and universities with massive amounts of debt. And one of the main reasons for that is because these students are being under educated in K through twelve and when they get to college,

4:38 they’re not ready and they have to take a year’s worth of remedial classes just to get ready for the college classes. And the issue with that is kids are spending all of their money just to get ready for college.

4:53 Now the time they start taking the college classes, they’re already fifteen twenty thousand dollars in debt. And it’s because the pub bbolk education system did not give them the education they needed in K through twelve. But here’s the kicker is that the colleges. They don’t want that to change either, because they’re making a lot of money. They’re

5:14 making money off these kids not being properly educated. And that’s the big issue here. When you have giant school systems like New York, like Baltimore City that are not properly educating the kids. There are so many adults and so many other institutions that are profiting off of that.

5:32 And it’s not just the administrators in the K through twelve public education system and also the teachers in those systems like we’re talking about now, the colleges are benefiting off of that as well.

5:44 Speaker 1 Now, what happens is when I ran familiar in New York City in twenty thirteen, I believed and I was saying that there should be more vocational high schools for kids are not really qualified to go to colleges and universities.

5:59 And then up with two hundred thousand dollars in debt.

6:03 Speaker 2 That’s a huge problem as well. My father was a teacher in southeastern Pennsylvania for thirty five years. He was a wood shop teacher, and when he retired in two thousand and eight, he was never replaced. His wood shop was taken away and I know that I grew up in a wood shop, and I know the memories that

6:22 I had doing that, But more importantly, I know the skills that I developed doing that, and those skills. Kids are leaving high school not just not being able to read or write proficiently, but they don’t have skills like wood shop, they don’t have skills like motor shop. I had that as well. I used to change my own

6:40 oil and stuff in high school. And public education has really gotten away from a lot of those things because the focus, as we said, is not on educating the kids. It’s on.

6:52 Speaker 2 Getting as much funding as you can. So how do you keep the money coming in. You keep the money coming in by keeping the students enroll in the schools for as long as you can. That’s what the focus in many public schools really has been.

7:07 Speaker 1 Well, the name of the book is Failure Factory and the author is Chris Paps, who is the investigative reporter at Fox forty five in Baltimore. And you could buy this, I guess, at any Amazon’s Amazon in your computer.

7:24 Speaker 2 Right, Amazons and Noble, good Reads anywhere books are sold.

7:29 Speaker 1 Failure Factory by Chris Paps pap st Thank you so much, Chris Paps for coming on and thank you for what you do for our children. Thank you