A New Era of School Reform

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According to a National Assessment of Education Progress statistic, 63 percent of the students who were ninth-graders in 1991 did not graduate in 1994. The data suggested that most children in Baltimore were not graduating from high school. However, the problem was far more serious when you consider what was happening to average children.

If you did not count the students who went to the city’s best high schools, such as City College or the School of the Arts, and looked at the zoned or neighborhood high schools, the dropout rate was enormous. Freshman classes ran about 1,000 students and the number who graduated was 190 or 200. In some city high schools, 80 percent were not graduating. That was the stunning number.

How was Baltimore compared to other places across the nation?

In a national standardized test given, in 1997, to eighth-graders in 32 states, 9 percent of Baltimore students passed the math test and 12 percent passed the science test. The scores were the worst among the 32 states that administered the test. In reading, 28 percent of students passed, third-lowest in the nation.

In addition, the same National Assessment of Educational Progress report pointed out that, in Maryland, the gap between scores of children in city and county schools was the widest in the nation in two categories.

The new school board’s mantra was: “Focus, focus, focus.”

The board began by hiring teachers to reduce class-size and opening after-school academies. Then, it moved on to a more ambitious program to improve the worst schools. Forty-four percent of city schools had been given a failing grade by Maryland education officials.

Using a combination of Maryland and national test scores and other factors, the school system did an analysis to identify which schools were in the “greatest need.” The list included 26 elementary schools, seven middle schools, and three high schools, or twenty percent of the system.

While school leaders in the past had pointed to factors beyond their control–such as poverty–the new school board was no longer accepting excuses. Thus, it did a statistical analysis that tried to factor out such things as attendance, poverty, and the large number of students who came to a school and left during the year. They wanted to see how successful each school was, given all of those factors. Forty of the systems 120 elementary schools were performing below expectations.

“The statistics do not lie. No matter how we want to interpret them, they give us a fairly in-depth picture,” declared Dr. Schiller

While the school board was rethinking some of the initiatives it was proposing, the question that remained in many of the members’ minds was whether they would be able to take drastic enough steps and whether they would have enough money.

The new year came and went, and Schiller got another extension, and another. In the spring 1998, the state legislature passed a bill allowing Schiller to stay until the end of the school year. While leading the school system through its first year under the new rules, Schiller had a strong hand in determining the shape and size of the reforms slated to unfold over the next four years by helping the board write its Transition Plan, a blueprint for first-year reforms, and the Master Plan, a formal, long-term reform agenda the legislature will use in coming years to gauge Baltimore’s success.

Schiller also made headway with the leaders of the teachers’ union. After much wrangling, the teachers agreed to a plan that tied their performance evaluations to student achievement. Such a provision was required by the state reform law, but it had been a bone of great contention, since city students’ progress was often hampered by factors outside the classroom–including their high rate of moving from school-to-school.

With that evaluation agreement in place, Schiller set out to negotiate the teachers contract, a negotiation that had been in limbo for two years, in part because of teacher resistance to the proposed evaluation plan. In order for school reform to work, experts said, the teachers contract must be ratified–unless there is commitment on the part of principals and staff at the school level, the implementation doesn’t always make it to the classroom.

For more than eight months, Baltimore’s biggest teacher’s union and the school board battled over the terms of a new contract, pulling 12 and 14-hour bartering sessions week after week, only to leave the negotiation table empty-handed.

However, unlike many labor fights, in the case of the Baltimore Teachers Union (BTU) vs. the New Board of School Commissioners, there was more behind the posturing than issues of work and money. At stake too was the success of the school system’s state-mandated reforms. The contracts themselves would stipulate the relationship between the teachers and the school district–the contract would be a vital component of making reforms happen.

Another issue considered: the political sway of Baltimore’s African-American middle class. Baltimore’s public school system is the city’s third-largest employer, with more than 11,400 people, a number surpassed only by Johns Hopkins University and Helix Health. About 60 percent of those employees are African-American, and many are among the so-called middle class. The school district plays a vital social and economic role in the African-American community, and when considering reform ideas and proposals, this economic connection could not be dismissed.