The media has spent years celebrating the public school that LeBron James founded in Ohio. It s a school based around the principles of equity. And now we know that it is also an abysmal failure. What does that teach us about our society s approach to education in general?
00:00:00.000Today on The Matt Walsh Show, the media has spent years celebrating the public school that LeBron James founded in Ohio.
00:00:05.800It's a school based around the principles of equity, and now we know that it is also an abysmal failure.
00:00:10.660But what does that teach us about our society's approach to education in general? We'll discuss that.
00:00:14.480Also, over 100 students in New York City identify as some kind of non-male, non-female alien species.
00:00:21.000And some lawmakers are starting to think twice about legalizing weed everywhere.
00:00:24.360A drag queen ends up on top of the Christian music charts, and I am forced to utterly destroy Ben Shapiro with facts and logic.
00:00:32.120All of that and more today on The Matt Walsh Show.
00:00:41.660We are days away from the Durban Accords, the greatest threat to the U.S. dollar's global dominance in the past 80 years.
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00:01:12.360How much more time does the dollar have? Ask yourself that.
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00:02:12.900Well, that's a question you'll never get a real answer to.
00:02:15.160But in this case, we know what equity means from a practical perspective.
00:02:18.640It means spending more money for worse schools.
00:02:21.660It also means creating new schools from the ground up because the only way to guarantee that you're not perpetuating white supremacy is to start from scratch.
00:02:28.980One of these new non-racist schools was founded five years ago in Akron, Ohio, with help from NBA all-star LeBron James.
00:02:35.740This was a big deal, we were assured at the time.
00:02:38.100NBC News was on the scene when the school launched.
00:02:41.280Kids arrive for the first day of school today in Ohio as a new approach to fix an old problem takes center court, led by someone who knows their stories more than they could imagine.
00:02:56.340I know exactly what these 240 kids are going through.
00:03:04.300I know the trials and tribulations that they go through because I've been there.
00:03:07.940Which is why NBA superstar LeBron James and his foundation are opening this school in Akron for at-risk third and fourth graders who struggle both in school and at home.
00:03:19.600The most important thing that we can give them is structure and a sense of they just want someone to feel like we care.
00:03:31.140I promise is a public non-charter school.
00:03:35.060It offers an innovative approach, a longer class day and a longer school year and provides support to help kids with trauma.
00:03:43.200The school will also help parents find a job and have an on-site food pantry for families.
00:03:49.160Now, NBC News touts this school as a new approach to fix an old problem.
00:03:54.520The most important thing, LeBron James says, isn't test scores or grades or any objective sense of achievement whatsoever.
00:04:00.420Instead, the key is giving students, quote, the sense that someone cares about them.
00:04:05.020That's not really an educational approach at all.
00:04:06.860It's simply a cliche, not a new one either.
00:04:09.520But it's one that taxpayers in Ohio have been compelled to fund.
00:04:13.120As one local news report puts it, quote, the district will pay more than half the cost for the school, perhaps around 75%.
00:04:18.880That total amounts to nearly $10 million a year charged to taxpayers for this I Promise school.
00:04:26.000Yet the experiment was well worth the cost, the media reassured us over and over again.
00:04:29.340You can go back over the past several years and find many, many media reports gushing over LeBron's school, calling for more schools just like it.
00:04:38.060Maybe we should even make LeBron James the secretary of education while we're at it.
00:05:51.780How are the students actually performing in the classroom?
00:05:55.280That bit of information was left out of the report, which seems a little odd.
00:05:58.420I mean, wasn't the whole point of the school to help these children?
00:06:00.280Just a month later, now we know exactly why NBC News overlooked that little detail.
00:06:05.540A new piece in the Akron Beacon Journal reports that, quote,
00:06:09.280Now, to restate, they haven't had a single student in the eighth grade class pass the state math test since they started at the school in the third grade five years ago.
00:06:31.660And to be honest, it's a little surprising because not all that long ago, the school claimed in a documentary that its students do extremely well on mandatory proficiency tests, including the so-called MAP standardized tests.
00:06:42.540So here are some clips from that documentary in chronological order.
00:08:26.500The students destroyed the standardized test, LeBron James says.
00:08:29.740Later in the film, a thrilled administrator says that the students were at the 25th percentile and below.
00:08:35.100But that now 91% of students are meeting their goals.
00:08:39.140And they're all very happy about this.
00:08:40.220But if you parse what they're saying carefully, it sounds like an apples to oranges comparison.
00:08:43.320The administrator makes it sound like the students went from the 25th percentile in the district to the 91st percentile, which would be an extraordinary achievement.
00:08:51.880But in fact, the 91% number just refers to students who are meeting their goals, whatever that means and however that's defined.
00:08:57.820They're presenting the data like this in order to suggest falsely that their new method of education was working and specifically enhancing these test scores.
00:09:07.160But in fact, it was doing exactly the opposite.
00:09:09.960And in a brief moment at the very end of the documentary, we get some confirmation of that.
00:09:13.540So watch as an official with the school admits that the district is not happy with the students' performance.
00:09:20.800Students can either make progress in growth or achievement or both.
00:09:25.560Growth is just that year and a half or more from the beginning of the school year.
00:09:30.000Achievement is whether they're on grade level.
00:09:31.980On growth, we were in the 99th percentile, but achievement on our state report card, we got an F.
00:09:39.780The overall percentage of students who made their grade level markers was too low to warrant anything other than an F.
00:09:49.640So if you're following all this, there's all this celebration from LeBron James and all the taxpayer-funded administrators about how good the school's test results are.
00:09:59.500And then they admit that despite this success, this alleged success, the school has somehow received an F from the district for student achievement.
00:10:34.560The truth is that corporate media didn't want to look too deep into the data because it's not just bad, it's terrible.
00:10:40.240And it keeps getting worse the more you read it.
00:10:42.000As the Albany Beacon Journal reports, the English scores for the eighth graders were not much better than the math numbers.
00:10:48.840Quote, when the school's first class of eighth graders graduated from I-Promise, just 11% of them tested proficient on the state English language arts test.
00:10:56.800The article goes on, two of I-Promise's biggest subgroups of students, black students and those with disabilities, are now testing in the bottom 5% in the state, landing the school on the Ohio Department of Education's list of those requiring targeted intervention.
00:11:09.120Now, you often hear the counterargument that this is a school for troubled children, so of course their scores are going to be low.
00:11:16.600That doesn't exactly explain why the scores are going backwards.
00:11:20.600According to the data, quote, last year, sixth graders lost ground.
00:11:23.740When they were in fifth grade, 7% were proficient on the reading test, and sixth grade, just 2% were.
00:11:29.640Now, the point here is not to gloat over the failure of this experiment.