On Saturday, The New York Post posted an article about students in Baltimore, Maryland, schools and their mathematics test scores.

The article reports:

Something doesn’t add up.

None of the students at 40% of Baltimore’s public high schools tested proficient on the state math exam given this past spring — with a staggering three-quarters earning the lowest possible score, an alarming report revealed this week.

At 13 of the school district’s 32 public high schools, 1,295 students of the 1,736 who took the exams scored a 1 out of 4, meaning they were nowhere close to proficiency, Fox 45 reported.

“This is educational homicide,” Jason Rodriguez, deputy director of the Baltimore-based nonprofit People Empowered by the Struggle, told the outlet.

The results were shockingly low even at the city’s top high schools, where just 92 students, or 11.4% of the 809 students who took the exam, tested proficient, the outlet later found.

This is obviously an education problem, but is it also a cultural problem? Have we stopped teaching children that they need certain skills to prosper in life? How many of these students assume that they will be supported by social programs all of their lives and really don’t need an education or need to get a job? How many of these students are growing up in families that encourage them to do well in school and support those efforts?

We know from the story of Ben Carson that growing up poor in a one-parent family does not mean a life of little accomplishment and lots of poverty. Most of us have heard the story of Ben Carson’s illiterate mother requiring Ben and his brother to read a book every week and give her a book report. They had no idea that she couldn’t read the reports.

Our schools need to do better, but so do our parents and our culture. Doing well in school shouldn’t be a negative thing in any culture, and we need to make sure that it is not. The parents and the community can turn this around if they choose to.