40% of Baltimore high schools had zero students proficient in math

At 13 Baltimore City high schools, not a single student tested proficient in math on the 2023 state exam, leaving 40% of the district’s 32 public high schools with zero proficiency and raising the stakes far beyond report cards. For Baltimore families, the consequence is concrete: fewer students are cleared for college-level math, fewer can move straight into apprenticeships, and fewer can qualify for entry-level jobs that require algebra skills.

Maryland’s math exam, the MCAP, is given in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. The high school test covers Algebra I, Geometry and Algebra II, the kinds of courses that open the door to community college programs, technical training and career pathways that depend on solid math readiness. When a school produces zero proficient students, it signals that too many teenagers are reaching graduation without the academic baseline many employers and training programs expect.

Baltimore City Public Schools has said the district is still working through pandemic-era learning disruption and has pushed back on what it calls cherry-picked reporting. Under Dr. Sonja Santelises, the district has pointed to broader gains, saying students posted three consecutive years of math improvement on state tests as of August 2025. The district also said its fourth-graders recorded the third-largest math growth among large city districts on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released Jan. 29, 2025.

Still, the city remains at the bottom of Maryland’s math rankings. Media coverage of the 2025 MCAP results reported that Baltimore City was the state’s lowest-performing system in math, with 12.6% of students proficient. The Maryland State Department of Education said the 2024-25 results continued to rebound from post-pandemic learning loss, but that recovery has not yet lifted Baltimore out of the deepest trouble spots.

The numbers matter for the city’s economy as much as for its classrooms. Baltimore City Public Schools reported 2025-26 enrollment of 76,362 students, down 479 from the previous year, or 0.6%. At the same time, the district has been rolling out McGraw Hill Reveal Math across schools, with some campuses in phase one of a three-year adoption plan aimed at districtwide use by 2027. That rollout sits alongside the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, the state’s 2021 school funding overhaul, which was supposed to turn bigger investment into better outcomes.

Baltimore has seen signs of progress in younger grades, but the high school figures show how much of the system still fails to convert those gains into readiness for the next step.