Why One Reporter Trusts Test Scores Over Graduation Rates

Want to know whether a school is actually teaching? Look at the one number it can't easily dress up. That was the core argument from Chris Papst, lead investigative reporter for Fox45 News' Project Baltimore, on the latest Students Incorporated episode. Attendance, graduation rates, suspensions and violence reports can all be shaped to look better, he told co-hosts Lucy and Ceres and host Mr. Jason. Standardized test scores are much harder to fake.

His proof comes from Baltimore City Public Schools: 13% of students are proficient in math, yet 72% graduate.

"How do you graduate 72% of your kids when 13% of your kids are proficient in math?" Papst asked. Answering that took nine years, a lawsuit and a book.

The gap that tells the story

Papst has covered Baltimore's schools and nothing else since Project Baltimore launched in January 2017 with a five-person team. That focus is rare in local news, and he says it's the point: reporters who cover one subject daily "can really become experts on that topic," sometimes knowing more than the officials they cover.

What he learned surprised him, even though he grew up in public schools and his father taught in Pennsylvania for 35 years. "I thought I understood how public education worked," he said. "And after doing this job, I realized that I didn't." That became his book, Failure Factory: How Baltimore City Public Schools Deprive Taxpayers and Students of a Future.

The figure holds up. The Baltimore Banner reported this year that 13.3% of city students passed Maryland's 2025-26 state math test, up from 12.6% the year before. The district notes it is a fourth straight year of gains. Statewide proficiency is 27.1%.

National data shows the same split. A 2022 ACT study, reported by K-12 Dive and The 74, found average high school GPAs rose from 3.17 to 3.36 between 2010 and 2021, while average ACT composite scores fell to their lowest point of the decade. In 2024, Reason reported ACT research finding that GPA had become a weaker predictor of first-year college success since the pandemic, while test scores held steady. Grades rose; skill didn't.

Inside the gradebook

It started with a spreadsheet. New to Baltimore after investigative work in Washington, D.C., Papst spent about 40 hours combing through grade 3 to 8 test results for roughly 160 city schools, looking for outliers.

He found six schools where no student tested proficient in math or English, and the story went viral. Then teachers there started calling with something worse. The data was right, they said, but the kids still graduated, because administrators were going into teachers' gradebooks and changing failing grades to passing ones.

Papst ties this to funding. In Maryland, he said, a school gets the full per-student allocation, roughly $20,000 to $22,000 by his estimate, once a student enrolls, whether or not that student learns anything or even shows up. He said he interviewed enrolled students who never attended. Passing struggling students along keeps them enrolled because "they see a light at the end of the tunnel, and that light's a high school diploma."

You can't solve a problem until you know what the problem is.

A records request that ended in court

In December 2017, Papst requested the district's emails and internal investigations about grade changing under public records law. He said the district gave him nothing, so Fox45 sued.

Papst testified for hours at the February 2019 trial. In March, a Baltimore City Circuit Court judge found the school system had "willfully and knowingly" violated Maryland's public records law. Fox45's coverage said the judge ordered the release of the documents and more than $122,000 in legal fees. (Papst recalled closer to $200,000; the court figure is the one reported in 2019.) The district had already released more than 10,000 pages, many heavily redacted; the ruling forced full disclosure.

The documents, Papst said, showed grade changing districtwide. The ruling also set a Maryland precedent he says still stands. The district rewrote its grading policy, and graduation rates dropped noticeably the next year. He's careful not to overclaim: the drop was "likely" because fewer failing grades were being changed, he said, but "now we don't know this for a fact."

After Fox45 won, Papst said, agencies became far more willing to release records; none wanted to be next. "I also think they're being better stewards of the taxpayer dollar," he said, "because they don't want to get caught."

Can test scores be faked?

His rule has one well-documented exception. In Atlanta, a 2009 state analysis flagged an unusually high rate of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets. In 2015, according to CNN, CBS News and Marketplace, a Fulton County jury convicted 11 former educators of racketeering in a cheating conspiracy prosecutors said dated to 2005. Prosecutors said educators faced heavy pressure from then-Superintendent Beverly Hall to raise scores.

That case supports his point more than it weakens it. Papst called tests "very difficult" to manipulate, not impossible, because students submit them to the state, often by computer. The Atlanta fraud took many adults, left physical evidence and ended in prison sentences. A grade changed in an online gradebook leaves far less of a trace.

Where the money goes

On budgets, Papst was just as direct. Since 2017, he said, Baltimore City Schools' budget has grown from about $1.2 billion to $1.8 billion, roughly 50%. Meanwhile, he said, attendance has fallen, chronic absenteeism has risen, and average SAT scores and AP exam grades have dropped. About 85% goes to salaries and benefits. Statewide, he said, public education added roughly 10,200 employees in five years, with non-instructional staff growing about three times faster than teachers.

To Papst, that's a system serving adults before students. A great principal and a poor one earn the same, he noted, a rule no pro sports team would accept. The strong schools he highlights in the book serve the same low-income neighborhoods on the same funding, and they share one thing, he said: a great principal.

His fix isn't partisan. "It's not Democrat, Republican," he said. Parents and voters have to choose school board members and officials who will "take your tax dollars, give them to a school, and then hold the school accountable."

Not just a Baltimore problem

Asked whether reporters elsewhere had contacted him, Papst said, "All the time." That same day, he had spoken with a Nashville reporter hearing from teachers who said failing grades in their gradebooks had been changed to passing.

In August 2026, WSMV and FOX 17 reported, citing internal emails, that several former Metro Nashville Public Schools teachers said they were pressured or directed to change failing grades. The district disputes any broader pattern. To Papst, that reporter is where he was in 2017.

Advice for students who want to investigate

Asked by Lucy and Ceres how students could use reporting skills in their own schools, Papst gave an editor's answer: go to the source. "Don't go to an email of an email of an email," he said. "Go to the original email." Before reporting that grades were changed, he needs to see the transcripts, even if he never publishes them. Some stories take three or four months to confirm.

He also warned against going public before the evidence is complete; the documentation, he said, "is the ammunition." Pick something you care about, he added, because seeing a problem through takes far longer than pointing it out.

The episode opened with a line from future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, from a 1913 Harper's Weekly essay later collected in Other People's Money: "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants." Papst's nine years in Baltimore show what that sunlight can cost: a lawsuit and thousands of pages pried loose by court order.

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