While signing an executive order last week to shutter the U.S. Department of Education, President Donald Trump got in a few digs on Baltimore schools.

“In Baltimore, 40% of the high schools have zero students who can do basic mathematics. Not even the very simplest of mathematics — I said, ‘Give me your definition of basic.’ And, they’re talking about adding a few numbers together,” Trump said.

The academic struggles of students in Baltimore are real enough. Trump needn’t distort the facts. In truth, the state-mandated Algebra I test assesses much more than simple addition. And since the pandemic, students’ math scores have shown some improvement.

But Trump doesn’t mind belittling children.

Nonetheless, there’s no denying that most Baltimore students are woefully behind in math.

Some people blame kids: They don’t want to learn. Others blame parents: They don’t value education. Still others blame teachers: They’re just passing kids along.

Here’s another way to frame Baltimore students’ struggles with math: The low test scores reflect what we — our nation — put some children through outside of school.

Outside my classroom window in West Baltimore, there are far more boarded-up, vacant rowhouses than occupied ones. Remnants of better days, these ghostly shells — some now tagged with RIP memorials — haunt much of West Baltimore. Liquor stores and carry-outs thrive here — the proprietors cocooned in plexiglass bulwarks.

Generations of disinvestment and economic abandonment have hollowed this place out. And in this environment, just figuring out how to safely get back and forth to school eats up bandwidth for some students.

In “Between the World and Me,” an epistolary memoir written to his teenage son, Ta-Nehisi Coates describes the pressures of growing up in Baltimore in the 1980s: “When I was about your age, each day, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not — all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.”

In this regard, Baltimore hasn’t changed. The city is still a pressure-cooker that puts kids at a disadvantage for learning. And who, after all these years, should we blame for that? Surely not the children themselves.

In fact, I’ve known many students who had ambitious goals and plans for reaching them. Sometimes, it didn’t matter. Staying off the streets isn’t always enough to keep kids safe. One student, an avid reader who liked to borrow books from my class library, resisted a stick-up boy, and in an instant was gone. Another — a budding cartoonist — fought a man outside his house, won, and then died on his own front steps when the rival returned that same night with a gun. Another student — a good writer, eager for feedback, eager to improve — fled his neighborhood after a rumor spread that he’d talked to the police about an ongoing investigation. He hadn’t, but to those who meant him harm, his denials meant little. Reluctantly, an aunt took him in. I brought him an old air mattress that he propped upright in his aunt’s living room each morning. But he worried he could be found by the people who’d threatened him, and it showed in his school attendance.

The problems of poverty — food insecurity, substandard housing, evictions, addiction, unemployment, exposure to violence — impact how kids learn. Some kids are scarred by trauma. Other kids are merely worried — about loved ones, about their own safety. And they carry these anxieties with them, including into classrooms.

Despite the challenges this city puts on students, many excel academically. Moreover, many students possess next-level resilience, but we don’t have standardized tests to measure that.

Increasing students’ math skills is vitally important. But if we really cared about students’ academic progress, we would do more to stabilize neighborhoods and improve the lives of people living in them.

Recognizing that is as simple as two plus two.

Adam Schwartz’s (http://adamschwartzwriter.org) debut collection of stories, “The Rest of the World,” won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House 2020 prize for fiction. He is a literacy coach with Baltimore City Schools and has taught high school for 26 years.