Are Public Schools Failing Our Kids? | Inside the Failure Factory
The Rabbit Hole: Conspiracy Theories
Danielle Mercy
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 11 May 2026
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Baltimore City Public Schools serves over 76,000 students across more than 150 schools and programs, with a staggering $1.7 billion budget in 2024. Yet despite this level of funding, only about 10% of students are proficient in math. So… what’s going on?
In this episode, we dive into:
• How Baltimore City Public Schools first caught Chris’s attention
• What shocked him most during his investigation
• How grades and graduation metrics may be manipulated
• The truth about “ghost students” and how they impact funding
• Why massive budgets don’t always translate to student success
• Questions around equity, accountability, and systemic failure
• Warning signs parents should watch for in their own school systems
This conversation pulls back the curtain on a system that affects tens of thousands of students — and raises bigger questions about education across the country.
🎧 Tune in now and decide for yourself: Is this mismanagement, systemic failure, or something deeper?
📚 Check out Chris Papst’s book: Failure Factory
https://www.sunburypress.com/collections/all-books/products/failure-factory?variant=43575891099741
👍 Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share if you enjoy diving down the rabbit hole with us.
#Podcast #Education #Baltimore #FailureFactory #SchoolSystem #InvestigativeJournalism #PublicEducation
www.stayskeptical.com
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Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jcwvgWpPz8GqLxNwpeJM7AHqBJL2O3JWVdE8ggKK7_8/edit?usp=sharing
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, friends, and welcome back to the rabbit hole. I'm your host, Danny, and today we have the pleasure of having Chris Paps on the podcast. He is the author of the book Failure Factory, how Baltimore City's public schools deprive taxpayers and students of a future. The book raises a lot of questions about how public schools are failing our students. |
| 0:42.4 | Baltimore City Public Schools is one of America's largest and most funded school systems, |
| 0:45.4 | but it is also one of the lowest performing. |
| 0:49.8 | They have more than 150 schools in programs, depending on how you count it, |
| 0:57.7 | and they serve more than 76,000 students, 90% of them being minorities, with the majority of them being African American. |
| 1:06.7 | In 2024, they had a budget of $1.7 billion, but only 10% of the students tested proficient in math. |
| 1:08.5 | What is going on? |
| 1:09.3 | Hi, Chris. |
| 1:30.1 | Thank you so much for joining me on the rabbit hole. Yeah, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. I'm really interested. I, well, okay, so I talk a lot about public schooling versus homeschooling. And so I'm very interested to know what you found with your book. But I want to start with like how you came to even look into Baltimore City public schools. Like what drew your attention? So in 2017, in January of 2017, I launched |
| 1:37.9 | this thing called Project Baltimore. And we work for the Fox 45 News affiliate in Baltimore. And |
| 1:43.6 | what we are is that we're a team of five. |
| 1:46.6 | And there's two photographer editors, two producers, and myself as the reporter. |
| 1:51.4 | And we began focusing in January of 2017 on public education. |
| 1:58.8 | And what really drew me here, because at the time, prior to that, I was an investigative |
| 2:04.9 | reporter working for the ABC News affiliate in Washington, D.C. |
| 2:08.6 | And I left Washington, D.C. and came to Baltimore for this opportunity because it's a very rare |
| 2:13.4 | opportunity in local news to be able to focus on one topic with a team of five and really focus on |
| 2:20.2 | that one topic. |
| 2:21.5 | And when I was given this opportunity by our parent companies in Claire broadcasting, which |
| 2:26.1 | values this local type of investigative journalism, it was something that really intrigued me |
| 2:31.5 | because what we do is pretty rare. |
| 2:36.9 | Now, the reason we chose public education, |
... |
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