From the Old Order to the New Order–Reasons and Results, 1957-1997

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Brain was also concerned about dropouts. He announced success in a program in which counselors at 23 schools were assigned to interview dropouts and “potential” dropouts. Of 2,000 high school students (and recent dropouts) interviewed, 324 returned to school and 210 “potentials” vowed they would stay in school. (Twenty-three years later, Baltimore was to launch a similar program, known as Project RAISE, among fifth-graders with a history of poor academic achievement.)

Superintendent Brain’s educational legacy was the report of the Citizens School Advisory Committee, a 25-member body that worked for two years and produced a document in 1964 with 303 recommendations–the most elaborate study in the modern history of the system. The committee said Baltimore schools were “geared to a rural society” and that much of what they were doing was “obsolete.” Curriculum, it said, “appears loosely knit, fragmented and uncoordinated.” It called for greater administrative flexibility in the schools; establishment of an advanced technical institute similar to Polytech, but more vocationally oriented; greater emphasis on “team-teaching;” elimination of teachers’ lunch duties; a longer school day; and for one or more schools for “chronic troublemakers.”

Brain did not stay to carry out his committee’s recommendations. Lured by an offer to head the education school at Washington State University and upset over the racial harassment he said his daughter was experiencing at Western High School, he “retired” in 1964. The year he left, Baltimore City was ranked seventh among Maryland districts in teacher pay and thirteenth among the nations fifteen largest cities. The city spent $375 per-pupil, $35 below the Maryland average and $68 below Baltimore County.

Most of the Citizens School Advisory Committee’s opus was subjugated by Laurence Paquin, Brain’s successor (after an interim period under Edwin Stein). It was a classic example of what happens when a superintendent proposes and leaves it to a successor to dispose.

Paquin was a reformer, a New Englander who came to Baltimore from superintendency in New Haven, Connecticut. There, he had established a reputation as a tough administrator. He had banned prayer in the schools and had begun busing students and “pairing” (combining two schools by grade) to end racial imbalance. In Baltimore, he seemed in a hurry to get things done, as though he had an inkling that cancer would end his life after only two years on the job.

City schools were reaching their apex in enrollment. Baltimore was the nation’s seventh largest system, with 190,000 students when Paquin arrived. (That is almost twice the 1998 census.) By 1965, 17,000 students were on “double shifts”–starting the day at two different times in order to relieve overcrowding. Moreover, they were in the schools that had deteriorated with age; 30 percent of them had been built in the late 1880’s. Baltimore needed a massive school renovation and building program, and Paquin laid the groundwork for that effort.

During Paquin’s first month on the job, he announced that the system “is in financial crisis. We’ve got to get help from federal and state governments. They have a broader tax base.”

To those who advocated trimming the education budget and cutting Baltimore’s property tax rate (almost twice that of the Maryland subdivisions), Paquin declared: “We’ve got to demonstrate to the political leadership of this...city that there’s a lot more political mileage to be gained from being for good schools than from being for a lower tax rate.”

De facto segregation in the neighborhoods produced racial segregation in the schools. In 1966, Paquin warned that “unless the movement of the white population from the city is halted, the question of integration will no longer have meaning for the city school system.” In March of that year, the Community Relations Commission reported that 75 percent of the city’s elementary pupils and more than half of secondary students were “virtually segregated” schools, while 90 percent of black teachers were in schools that were 90-to-95 percent black.

Moreover, segregation education was not helping blacks. Orlando F. Furno, research director of the system, conducted a study of IQ scores in the system for the six years between 1959 and 1965. Furno’s report for the United States Office of Education showed black IQ scores declining and white IQ’s increasing. “To reason that the chances are greater that Negro children probably did not receive the quality of teaching (over the years) that white children did appears to be a valid conclusion,” Furno wrote.

Paquin was responsible for establishing Baltimore’s first “community schools”–schools that served their communities days and evenings with a variety of programs, including health care, recreation, job counseling, and adult education. In principle, the first six community schools–Lombard, Pimlico, Clifton Park, Harlem Park, Garrison, and Southern, with four more added later–were not unlike the “restructured” school planners in 1990 envisioned for Baltimore, but Paquin’s community schools died in the early 1970’s.