Maryland:
Marching Forward

by Jessica Portner

The state school board voted in December 1997 to phase in, rather than implement immediately, challenging end-of-course tests.

That move aimed to appease teachers and parents concerned that students would not have enough time to prepare.

Maryland sets schedule for graduation exams; changes begin in Baltimore.

graduate. They will have to pass tests in algebra, geometry, U.S. history, world history, government, English 1, 2, and 3, and two science tests, choosing from among earth and space science, physics, chemistry, and biology.

The state board will field-test those exams with 9th graders this month and expects to decide by August of next year whether to adjust the testing schedule.

In the Baltimore school district, where students routinely have ranked at the bottom on statewide performance tests, state and city leaders joined forces in a partnership in 1997 designed to raise student achievement.

State and local leaders are now watching closely in the hope that extra financial aid coupled with the management overhaul of the 106,000-student system will translate into improved academic performance among students.

The controversial deal forged by the district, Gov. Parris N. Glendening, and Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke is funneling an additional $254 million in state aid to the city school system over five years in exchange for unprecedented state and municipal control over the schools.

Under the new arrangement, Glendening and Schmoke in 1998 jointly appointed a board of directors, which in turn selected a chief executive officer to run the system.

Robert Booker, who became the chief executive officer last July, says he recognizes the challenge ahead.

"I have a difficult task in front of me, but by surrounding myself with an excellent managerial team, we will accomplish our goals," says Booker, a former fiscal officer with the Los Angeles school district.

Even before Booker arrived, the district's new management team already had started to put changes into effect.

Last year, the newly configured school board expanded the number of deputy superintendents from six to nine to improve oversight of the system and provide more hands-on help for principals and staff members. Beginning this year, Booker says, the deputies will require all schools to submit financial reports to show that the schools are managing their budgets well.

The Baltimore board also established an intensive training program to improve teachers' classroom performance and started new performance evaluations to gauge teachers' accomplishments on a quarterly basis. Teachers who don't perform adequately may be reassigned to different schools or to different duties.

Booker says he hopes the changes will help shrink the number of city schools that the state has deemed eligible for "reconstitution," a management restructuring overseen by the state.

Currently, 79 of the city's 180 schools are on the reconstitution list, far more than any other district in the state.

"We have an awful lot of work to do to bring the program where it should be," Booker says.

But some state education leaders say restructuring the management of a low-performing school system won't necessarily improve student performance.

"It's a terrible conceit to imagine that you can manage your way out of the problems that keep children from learning effectively," says Karl Pence, the president of the 48,000-member Maryland State Teachers Association, a National Education Association affiliate.

"They aren't just central-office problems," Pence says. Many of the state's low-performing districts suffer from insufficient funding, he contends.

After the Baltimore aid was enacted, ruraland suburban districts that have substantial numbers of low-income students criticized state leaders for failing to provide extra funding for all needy students. But in 1998, those school systems won some of the money they previously asked for when the legislature approved the governor's School Accountability Funding for Excellence program, or safe.

This year, the SAFE program will provide $61 million in state aid to school programs that serve at-risk youths.

The state's 24 districts are eligible for the grants, which will be dispensed according to the percentage of poor students in the district.

The extra money can be used for teacher professional-development programs, to refurbish aging schools, or to add English-as-a-second-language programs, among other purposes.

Each district must submit a plan that documents how the money is being used to improve student performance.

"Those dollars ought to have an impact at the school level, and shouldn't be shunted over to some central office for an administrative purpose," says Ronald Peiffer, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of Education.

Besides dispensing dollars, the state also instituted some strict new accountability measures for teachers last year.

Faced with mediocre student-test results in reading over the past several years, the state board voted last summer to require all new teachers and those seeking recertification to take up to 12 semester hours of reading instruction.

Teachers' union leaders had balked at the proposal; they argued that requiring courses would not guarantee improved teacher performance in the classroom.

In a further effort to raise teacher quality, the state board passed a measure to cap the number of teachers with provisional certification that a school system could carry on its staff. And the Prince George's County district, where 1,200 of the 8,800 teachers are uncertified, won a $7 million state grant last year to help certify more instructors.

The state board is also considering a plan that would release the results of students' scores on the existing Maryland State Performance Assessment Program. Officials have suggested that sending the marks to parents might spur students to work harder to boost their scores.

The prominence of education issues in last fall's gubernatorial campaign is a good barometer that education will be high on Maryland leaders' agenda this year.

"The best economic plan, the best family plan, the best welfare plan we can possibly implement for our future is to invest in creating the best education system in America," Glendening said in his campaign last fall near the end of a tight race with Republican contender Ellen R. Sauerbrey. "I will accept nothing less."

Glendening won re-election by a margin of more than 10 percentage points, even though pre-election polls had indicated a much closer race.

Sauerbrey had criticized the governor for putting tax dollars into the construction of sports stadiums rather than public schools. Glendening responded by pointing out that state education aid had increased 30 percent in the four years he had been in office.

© 1999 Editorial Projects in Education

Vol. 18, number 17, page 150