Tag: Maryland

When Accountability Isn’t

There is little evidence that states will do a better job of holding districts and other school operators accountable under the Every Student Succeeds Act than they did under the…

There is little evidence that states will do a better job of holding districts and other school operators accountable under the Every Student Succeeds Act than they did under the Adequate Yearly Progress provision of the No Child Left Behind Act. If anything, based on what we are learning so far, states are more-likely than ever to let districts perpetuate harm to poor and minority children. And despite what some reformers want to say, there is way to sugar-coat this reality.

No one can blame you for thinking otherwise if you only pay attention to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s analysis of state rating systems proposed in ESSA implementation plans released this week. From where it sits, seven states (Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Oklahoma, and Washington) will implement rating systems that clearly label how well districts and schools are performing, requires a “focus on all students” by looking at test score growth data instead of proficiency levels, and, through growth measures, fairly assess how districts and schools are improving achievement regardless of the children they serve.

Two-thirds of the states reviewed all clearly label district and school performance to Fordham’s satisfaction, and 37 states focus on student growth instead of just on improvements in student proficiency, ensuring to the think tank’s satisfaction that the “high-achieving students” it cares most about are being served. Declares Fordham: “states, by and large, seized the ESSA opportunity to make their school accountability systems clearer and fairer.”

Your editor isn’t exactly shocked about Fordham’s happy talk. After all, the conservative think tank long opposed Adequately Yearly Progress because it focused states on improving achievement for the 64 percent of children (many of them poor and minority) who are poorly-served by American public education. This despite ample evidence that focusing on achievement gaps helps all children — including high performers — succeed academically. So it isn’t a shock that Fordham favors accountability systems that focus less on how well school operators are helping the most-vulnerable. Put simply, Fordham continues to embrace neo-eugenicist thinking long proven fallacious (as well as immoral) that fails to acknowledge that American public education’s legacy practices are not worth preserving.

The flawed thinking is more than enough to render Fordham’s analysis suspect. But there are other problems with the analysis that render it all but useless.

For poor and minority children, strong accountability tied to consequences and clear, high-quality data, matters a lot.

There’s the fact that the rating systems may not actually be as “clear” in identifying school and district performance as Fordham wants to think. This is because the think tank didn’t fully look at how the underlying formulas for measuring achievement will actually play out.

Consider Maryland, the home state of Dropout Nation (as well as that of Fordham President Michael Petrilli, his predecessor, Chester Finn, Jr., who now sits on the state board of education there, and former colleague Andy Smarick, who is president of that body). Fordham rates the Old Line State’s proposed rating system “strong” for being simple and clear with a five-star system that “model immediately conveys to all observers how well a given school is performing”.

But as Daria Hall of the Education Trust noted at a conference last month, a district or school in the state can still receive a five-star rating under the state’s ESSA plan despite doing poorly in improving achievement for Black or Latino children under its care. One reason: Because neither proficiency nor test score growth count towards more than 25 percent of a district’s rating, effectively hiding how districts are actually improving student achievement. Another lies in the fact that while the state will measure all subgroups, it doesn’t explain how it will account for each within the ratings.

Then there’s Maryland’s Plessy v. Ferguson-like proficiency and growth targets, which essentially allow districts to not work toward 100 percent proficiency for all children. The state only expects districts to improve Black student achievement from 23.9 percent in 2015-2016 to 61.9 percent by 2029-2030 (versus 52.9 percent to 76.5 percent over that period for White peers). This means that districts are allowed to subject Black and other minority children to the soft bigotry of low expectations. Add in the fact that the Maryland’s ratings don’t account for how districts and schools are preparing kids for success in traditional colleges, technical schools and apprenticeships that make up American higher education, and the rating system is not nearly as clear as Fordham declares.

This lack of clarity isn’t just a Maryland problem. As Bellwether Education Partners notes in its review of state ESSA plans, the addition of multiple measures of district and school performance (including chronic absenteeism indexes that aren’t broken down by subgroup) means that the rating systems will likely be a muddle that ends up hiding how well or poorly school operators are serving children. This muddle is likely the reason why only Tennessee and Louisiana were able to provide data showing how their ratings would identify failure mills, as well as improvements in student achievement for poor and minority children, in real time.

Another problem: Many states are using super-subgroups (now called supergroups under ESSA), a legacy of the Obama Administration’s shoddy No Child waiver gambit, that essentially lumps all poor and minority children into one category. Because super-subgroups lump children of different backgrounds into one category, the measure hides a district’s failure to help the worst-served children succeed and thus, allows it to not address its failures. Put simply, a state rating system can be simple and clear and yet still not tell the truth about how districts and schools are serving every child in their classrooms.

Accountability is more than just a school rating system. Consequences must be tied together with data and standards for children, families, and taxpayers to be served properly. [Image courtesy of the Education Trust.]

One state using super-subgroups is Florida, whose school rating system uses super-subgroups instead of thoroughly accounting for Black, Latino and other poor and minority children. Essentially, without accounting for either proficiency or growth for each group, the ratings will not fully inform anyone about how well districts are serving children.

The deliberate decision to ignore how districts and schools serve the most-vulnerable (along with the Sunshine State’s request to not use test data from its exams for English Language Learners in accountability) has led Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights, along with a group that includes EdTrust, NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, and UnidosUS, to ask U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to reject the entire proposal. By the way: Fordham ranked Florida’s school rating system as “strong” in two out of three categories it analyzed.

But the biggest problem with Fordham’s analysis is that continues to embrace a flawed theory of action: That mere transparency suffices as a tool for accountability and, ultimately, holding school operators (and ultimately, states) responsible for fulfilling their obligation to help children succeed.

This approach, which Fordham first embraced during the implementation of Common Core reading and math standards, is based on the idea that only high-quality data on district, school, and even teacher performance is needed for policymakers and others within states to hold bad actors accountable. Essentially, there will be no need for the federal government to force states to fulfill their responsibilities to children, as it did through No Child’s AYP provision.

But as seen with the failed effort to implement Common Core-aligned tests produced by the PARC and Smarter Balanced coalitions, transparency-as-accountability only works if the mechanics are in place. School rating systems aren’t useful if the underlying data doesn’t actually reflect what is actually happening in schools. This will clearly be problems in Maryland and Florida, and will be just as problematic in other states. California, for example, was dinged by Bellwether in its recent round of reviews for failing to longitudinally measure student achievement, a better way to account for changes in school populations over time. [This, in turn, is a result of Gov. Jerry Brown’s moves over his tenure to sabotage the state’s school data system.]

School rating systems and other forms of transparency are also insufficient in spurring accountability if there aren’t consequences for continuous failures to meet the grade. Accountability as Sandy Kress, the mastermind behind No Child, points out, is a three-pronged approach that includes consequences as well as high-quality standards on which school ratings (and the measuring of improvements in student achievement) are to be based. Few states have explained in their ESSA plans how they would force districts and other school operators to overhaul their schools or shut them down altogether and let children go to high-quality charter and district options.

The high cost of the rollback of accountability will be felt by the next generation of children — and even harm the beneficiaries of No Child’s now-abolished Adequately Yearly Progress regime who are now in our high schools.

Few states are going beyond the federal requirement to identify the lowest-performing five percent of schools. Louisiana, for example, plans to go above and beyond by identifying (and forcing the overhaul) of the 17 percent of schools that are failure mills, while New Mexico requires districts to use an array of approaches to turn around low-performing schools. California, on the other hand, hasn’t even submitted a plan on how it will identify failure mills much less hold them accountable. [It supposedly plans to do so by January.]

It gets even worse when it comes to how states will ensure that districts provide poor and minority children with high-quality teachers. As the National Council on Teacher Quality details in a series of reports released Tuesday, just seven states offer timelines on how it will improve the quality of teaching for Black, Latino, English Language Learners and other vulnerable children, as well as the rates by which it will improve teacher quality for them. Given that teacher quality isn’t even a measure in any of the proposed school rating systems, states have missed an important opportunity to bring transparency and consequences to their public school systems.

Given that so few states are being concrete about how it will help kids stuck in failure mills succeed, the school ratings will be little more than some stars and letters on computer screens.

Two decades of research have proven that accountability works best when there are real, hard consequences for districts and schools failing to improve student achievement. No Child’s Adequate Yearly Progress provision, which worked alongside accountability systems states either already developed or had put in place after the provision was enacted, spurred improvements in student achievement that have led to 172,078 fewer fourth-graders being illiterate in 2015 than in 2002, the year No Child became law.

Yet what ESSA has wrought so far are school rating systems that are likely to do little on behalf of children who deserve better. The benefits of clear data tied with real consequences have now been lost. If accountability is only toothless transparency, then it is neither sufficient nor necessary to help all of our children succeed in school and in life. There is no good news to be had. None at all.

Featured illustration courtesy of St. Louis Public Radio.

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Are Reformers Ready?

Certainly there is plenty of reason to celebrate the results of last Tuesday’s general elections. But the time for that is over. There’s an election coming next year, one that…

Certainly there is plenty of reason to celebrate the results of last Tuesday’s general elections. But the time for that is over. There’s an election coming next year, one that will have impact on the efforts of school reformers to build better lives for all children.

But will the movement be ready?

If you live in Maryland, as your editor does, the gubernatorial race could shape up to be a battle between two reform-minded candidates. One one hand, there’s incumbent Gov. Larry Hogan who, despite some high-profile setbacks courtesy of the Democrat-controlled legislature and White reformers unwilling to work with Black counterparts, has proven to be slightly better than your editor thought he would be three years ago. On the other side, there’s the equally reform-minded Prince George’s County Executive Rushern Baker, who took partial control of the traditional district and has made overhauling it a key priority. If reformers come out to support Baker (and rally others to do the same), it can work out for Maryland’s children.

But only if the movement is ready.

If you are in California, there’s the chance to end outgoing Gov. Jerry Brown’s deliberate rollback of systemic reform by backing former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to replace him. Unlike rival Gavin Newsom (who just gained the backing of the National Education Association’s California Teachers Association) Villaraigosa has proven effective in advancing systemic reform (and battling traditionalists) on behalf of children during his years as Los Angeles Mayor despite having no control over the traditional district there. Reformers also have a chance to put Marshall Tuck into the state superintendent’s office, effectively ending the state education department’s fealty to CTA and the AFT’s state affiliate there.

It can be done only if the movement is ready.

Marshall Tuck, who unsuccessfully ran for California Superintendent three years ago, is one of many reformers the movement must help put into office next year.

There are opportunities to continue systemic reform. There’s Georgia, where Nathan Deal’s successful expansion of school choice can be continued with the right candidate. There is also Colorado, where reformers can work with others to put Teach For America alum-turned-state senator Mike Johnston into the governor’s office. Meanwhile Florida has an opportunity to build on the reforms began under Jeb Bush that have continued in fits and starts under Rick Scott. This is all before you look at the other gubernatorial, chief state school officer, and state board races that will be on the ballot next year.

All of this can happen. But only if the movement is ready.

These days, the school reform movement can use all the political victories it can muster. On the national level, centrist Democrat, progressive, and civil rights-oriented reformers bet badly on Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign,while the hopes conservative reformers had for Betsy DeVos as U.S. Secretary of Education have proven to be as illusory as your editor said they would be. That the Trump Administration is effectively engaged in a war on the futures of poor and minority children (including the 760,000 covered under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and the native-born children of undocumented emigres) essentially proves beyond a doubt that the federal government is abandoning three decades of advancing reform.

Meanwhile the failures to win voter support expansion of charter schools and overhaul of traditional districts in Massachusetts and Georgia have only been slightly blunted with legislative victories for expanding choice in Colorado, Texas and Illinois. But as seen on Tuesday in Douglas County, Colo., and Denver, the success reformers make in working policymakers isn’t translating into political victories that can sustain those solutions for the long run. Even on the policy front, the evisceration of accountability in Maryland and California (where Gov. Brown signed legislation eliminating the state’s graduation exam), along with the weak plans submitted by most states for implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act, serve as reminders that past successes don’t last forever without eternal vigilance.

As you would expect, there are reformers who hope that the U.S. Supreme Court’s likely ruling against compulsory dues collections in Janus v. AFSCME will weaken NEA, AFT and their traditionalist allies and rally more progressive Democrats to their side. This is short-sighted thinking. Even if both unions lose as much as 30 percent of revenue, they still have the bodies and relationships on the ground necessary to oppose reformers at the ballot box. Just as importantly, because some of the nation’s foremost reformers (especially Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights and Center for American Progress) are dependent on funding from other public sector unions and even collect some cash from NEA and AFT, those groups will be weakened financially, hampering the school reform movement’s efforts to help all children succeed.

The school reform movement won’t sustain its solutions if it doesn’t win at the ballot box. This means changing how it does politics.

School reformers can’t simply count on legislative victories or on the weakening of traditionalist opponents. They must do more than simply stand still. As your editor has kept arguing for the better part of this decade, reformers must become politically savvier in order to sustain the systemic overhaul of American public education.

This begins by learning one of the most-important lessons of Tuesday’s success by Democrats in wining the Virginia gubernatorial campaign and other victories at the legislative and municipal levels throughout the nation: Rally support from poor and minority communities, including  immigrant households. As Center for American Progress noted last week in its post-mortem on the 2016 election, just increasing turnout among those communities would have made the difference between a Clinton victory and her ultimate defeat.

Considering that poor and minority households are the ones most-affected by the failures of American public education, reformers can make strong inroads by embracing the approaches used successfully by progressive groups this year (as well as by Green Dot Public Schools Founder Steve Barr and Parent Revolution over the past decade). This includes addressing the issues outside of education policy and practice that are of immediate concern to those communities, as well as taking a page from NEA and AFT locals by working with the churches and community organizations connected to the people who live in them. It also means recruiting those from Black, Latino, and other minority communities to run in school board races and other political campaigns, a point made by Democrats in their success this week.

The second step can also be gleaned from Tuesday’s election results: Build strong support for reform among suburban families, especially those from poor and minority households who make up an increasingly large share of the populations there as well as those that are White and college-educated. The lack of support from suburbia is one reason why the effort to expand charters in Massachusetts went down to defeat last year.

Particularly on expanding school choice, reformers can focus on how opening charter schools can help families gain new educational settings that suburban districts deliberately limit for their use in satisfying key constituencies. This includes explaining how families can launch language immersion charters that are now popular with upper middle class households (and are also needed for children from immigrant homes). It also includes helping Black and Latino families challenge Zip Code Education policies that lead to their children not receiving the high-quality teaching and curricula they need and deserve.

The third step lies in embracing tactics used by politicians and challengers in their campaigns. Holding voter registration drives, for example, will help bring new voters to the polls and even help reformers prove their value to the politicians they need to help pass legislation. Running political ads that bring attention to education issues in a simple-yet-comprehensive way is also important to do.

While reform groups have launched 501(c)4 political advocacy operations alongside traditional nonprofits, they must do more. This means starting independent expenditure groups similar to those run by NEA and AFT (as well as other political players) who can finance ads on behalf of (and against) candidates on the ballot.

Finally, and most-importantly, reformers must work together with activists outside of education, including those in the Black Lives Matter and criminal justice reform movements (whose leading lights include alumni of Teach For America) as well as those working against the Trump Administration’s war on undocumented emigres and their families. After all, you can only galvanize people to your side when you show that you care about the lives and futures of their communities as well as their children. More importantly, reformers can’t call themselves champions for children if they are not defending them at all times, addressing the issues outside of schools that affect how they learn within them, and dealing with the reality that American public education at the nexus of the ills that plague the nation today.

As Patrick Riccards noted last week, conservative and many centrist Democrat reformers erred when they criticized Teach For America (as well as other outfits) when it became more-explicit in its efforts to build brighter futures for poor and minority children inside and outside of schoolhouse doors. These reformers should correct the error of their ways. This doesn’t mean that reformers have to join protest rallies. But they can sign letters of support for legislation such as a path for DACA recipients gaining citizenship, as well as support political campaigns of those who want to reform law enforcement agencies that end up patrolling traditional district schools. Such support for those efforts, in turn, help reformers gain advocates on their behalf for transforming American public education.

Reformers can even take stands in elections that are far outside of these issues. The movement’s leading lights, for example, can call out former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice-turned-Republican Senatorial Nominee Roy Moore over allegations revealed this week that he conditioned and engaged in sexual misconduct with underage women. As champions for children, we cannot stand by anyone taking public office who has engaged in the kind of evil for which we would condemn rogue teachers and police officers. It doesn’t take much — and this can even be tied to the issues of protecting our children and youth inside and out of schools.

The coming year is an opportunity for the school reform movement to gain the political support needed to help all children succeed. The steps needed to be taken can be done. It can happen.

But are reformers ready? For the sake of our children, they need to be.

Featured photo: Prince George’s County, Md., Executive Rushern Baker, who is looking to challenge incumbent Larry Hogan, is one of many reform-minded politicians who may end up on the ballot next year.

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The Legacies of Education’s Past Before Us

The Rosenwald School Next Door: The legacies of America’s Original Sin run through American public education — and often leave their marks on the nation’s physical landscape even in plain sight….

The Rosenwald School Next Door: The legacies of America’s Original Sin run through American public education — and often leave their marks on the nation’s physical landscape even in plain sight. Your editor and his family sees one each day, as we drive from our home in Bowie to church, passing a humble building on Church and Old Stage Roads surrounded by an old Masonic lodge and trees on what is left of an old farm.

These days, the building is a duplex, a home for those who live in it. But from 1927 to 1952, it was one of many schools funded by the Rosenwald Fund which helped fund schools for Black children in rural communities where Jim Crow-controlled districts were unwilling to serve them with adequate classrooms.

There’s a long history of education on this site. The first school for Black children on this acre of what was then called Collington was built in 1875, a decade after the end of the Civil War. As with so many schools of the time, it was a simple one-room building that often served as many Black children as possible in spite of opposition from White men and women still upset by the end of slavery and the loss of the Confederacy during the civil war.

The first Collington Colored School did its job as well as its could as did the teachers who worked within it. But by 1927, the building was no longer adequate for the job. Even with a declining population of Black people in Maryland and Prince George’s County, many of whom fled to New York City and Philadelphia to escape from Jim Crow, there were still plenty of children in the area who needed to go to school. So the local parents-teachers organization (which, like many of those serving Black people, was separate from a National PTA that tolerated segregation), began agitating for a new schoolhouse.

Photo courtesy of Fisk University.

Being a Jim Crow district in a Jim Crow state, Prince George’s County Public Schools was of no mood to build a new schoolhouse for the Black kids in its care. So the Rosenwald Fund, established a decade earlier by the president of Sears, Roebuck & Co., at the behest of Booker T. Washington to build schools for Black children, stepped in to help. In 1927, thanks to Rosenwald and the Black families in the community, this building was constructed, west of the old school (which has since disappeared into history). For the next 25 years, Black children in the are attended the school, getting as much of an education as allowed by a district uninterested in doing anything for them.

The Collington school would be one of the 5,000 school buildings the Rosenwald Fund would help construct between 1917 and 1931. It would do a lot of good. As Daniel Aaronson and Bhashkar Mazumder  of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago determined in a 2011 study, the construction of the schools contributed to Black children gaining an additional year of education compared to peers who had no access to school. Along with programs such as the Jeannes Fund, which recruited Black men and women to teach in those schools, the Rosenwald Fund reduced achievement gaps between Black and White children and help more African American attain high school diplomas and even college degrees. All of this despite the obstacles erected by White men and women who thought Black children didn’t deserve opportunities for better lives.

As for the Collington Colored School? It would operate until 1952, two years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that official segregation was illegal. that year, the Prince George’s County district shut down the school even though it wouldn’t desegregate its schools until two decades later, because it was too small to operate. This fate befell many of the other segregated Black schools built since the end of the Civil War. The old schoolhouse on Church and Old Stage was then sold to the Roman Catholic archdiocese and its Holy Family parish, which them used it to provide religious instruction to the Black children in its pews.

By the end of the 1960s, the building was sold again to Richard Spriggs, who converted the building into a duplex and whose family still owns it. Despite Bowie transforming from a place for the White landed gentry and their horses to a bedroom suburb of Washington, D.C., home to the wealthiest African Americans in the wealthiest Black county in America, the old schoolhouse still remains, one of many Rosenwald Schools still around, though without any historic medallion to signify its past.

As we fight to transform American public education as well as end the policies and practices that damage far too many Black and other minority children, we have to also remember that the dark past isn’t so long ago. In fact, the problems of the past and the solutions for the future can be seen right in front of us, often on little roads that we pass by on the way to fighting the present and shaping the future.

Another Way to Help Improve Civics Education: These pages have devoted part of the past few months to addressing how reformers and others can transform history and civics education so that all of our children gain comprehensive knowledge of the good, bad and ugly of our nation’s past as well as help build a better nation. One way can be seen in a high school in Fairfax County, where the Street Law program is teaching children about the workings of Congress and the nation’s municipal governments.

There in that school, a group of corporate lawyers take time with a class discussing how bills become laws and how celebrities such as talk show host Stephen Colbert participate in shaping how the nation addresses issues such as immigration reform. The high schoolers, in turn, bring up their own experiences in learning the consequences of laws. This includes a move by officials in Falls Church to end a special meal tax that was used to finance the traditional district’s sports activities.

Few in the school reform movement know about organizations such as Street Law and ThinkLaw, which use real-life examples to help kids think through issues in society. Even fewer realize their value. Street Law, in particular, runs annual professional development seminars that help teachers understand the inner workings of the federal judiciary as well as providing mock court sessions and other lessons for children from poor and minority backgrounds. Between 1995 and 2015, Street Law has given high-quality civics education to 300,000 of our youth, while ThinkLaw, run by Teach For America Colin Seale, works in charter and district schools in Nevada, Texas, and Washington, D.C.

But it takes money and bodies to provide more lessons to more children. Street Law, in particular, does this with the help of corporations and law firms donating pro bono time as well as cash. It will take even more money and bodies to expand what these organizations do. This is something the school reform movement and the organizations within it can do if those complaining about the quality of civics and history education wanted to help.

They can start by calling up Street Law and ThinkLaw to learn how they can help out. If they want to know more, they can call up one of Street Law’s past honorees, former New York City Chancellor Joel Klein, or chat up Seale himself. And since some of the leading lights in the movement are Yale Law School graduates and have experience crafting and filing civil torts, they can also take some time out and reach out to these groups to lend a hand. Take the opportunity and become part of the solution.

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Maryland’s Educational Shame

As Dropout Nation readers know by now, this publication has long taken the Old Line State’s political and educational leaders to task for continually and deliberately deceiving everyone about its…

As Dropout Nation readers know by now, this publication has long taken the Old Line State’s political and educational leaders to task for continually and deliberately deceiving everyone about its educational malpractice. This has including catching them excluding children with Limited English Proficiency and those condemned to special education ghettos from the National Assessment of Educational Progress in order to burnish the Old Line State’s Lake Woebegone reputation; as well as condemning the state legislature earlier this year for effectively eviscerating accountability in order to keep Gov. Larry Hogan and his appointees on the state board of education from actually holding districts and schools accountable for educational abuse.

But one of Maryland’s worst sins when it comes to educating children is one that is quite familiar in other parts of the nation: The rationing of college-preparatory learning, especially higher-level mathematics, that children need in order to succeed in higher education and in their adult lives. As an analysis of data reported by the state to the U.S. Department of Education reveals, the Land of Crab Cakes continuously shortchanges youth, especially those from poor and minority households.

Just 29.7 percent of Maryland’s high schoolers — a mere 75,126 children — took calculus, pre-calculus, trigonometry, geometry, statistics, and elementary analysis in 2013-2014, according to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights data collection. Put simply, only three in 10 high schoolers in the Old Line State were provided with the advanced mathematics necessary for graduation from the traditional colleges, technical schools and apprenticeship programs that make up American higher education.

The good news, in theory, is that the numbers are higher than the 23.8 percent of high schoolers taking advanced mathematics in 2011-2012. But as you would expect, those numbers get even worse — and the inequities more stark — once you break the numbers down by demographics.

Black children in high schools are shortchanged the worst. Just 17.9 percent of them — that’s little more than one in eight students — took calculus and other advanced mathematics in 2013-2014, far below the statewide average, though higher than the 15.3 percent of Black high schoolers taking such coursework two years earlier.  Latinos fared little better, with just 21.7 percent (or one out of every five) taking advanced math. This is still better than the 17.4 percent who took advanced math in the same period two years earlier.

Asian children fared the best in getting college-preparatory math, with 54.7 percent (one out of every two) students taking advanced math; that’s far better than the 47 percent who took advanced math in 2011-2012. One out of every three White children — 37.5 percent — took advanced math that year; that’s better than 30.7 percent two years past.

The problem extends beyond those classes to participation in Advanced Placement courses which have proven to be crucial in helping children, especially those from poor and minority households, prepare for success in higher education and beyond.

Twenty seven-point-two percent of Maryland’s high school students — one out of every four — took AP courses in 2013-2014. That’s just 69,085 students that year. The good news is that this is slightly more than the 25 percent of high schoolers taking AP in 2011-2012.

The shortchanging also looms large when you break things down by race and ethnicity. Just 16 percent of the state’s Black high-schoolers (one in eight) took AP courses that year; this is a nine-tenths of one percent drop over levels two years earlier. A mere 21.1 percent of Latino peers took AP; that’s an eight-tenths of one percent increase over the previous period. Both numbers are abysmally low compared to other peers. Some 51.7 percent of Asian students took AP courses in 2013-2014, a five-tenths of one percent increase over 2011-2012; while 34.4 percent of White students taking AP coursework, a four percentage point increase in the same period.

What about Algebra 1 course-taking at the middle school level, a key way of helping children get ready for the rigors of higher education down the road? As you already expect, Maryland’s public education systems are also falling behind on that front.

Just 22.7 percent of the state’s seventh- and eighth-graders took Algebra 1 in 2013-2014. That’s a seven percentage point drop from levels two years earlier. Sixteen-point-four of Black middle-schoolers took Algebra 1 that year, a 10 percentage point drop from levels two years before; while only 19 percent of Latino peers took the coursework, a six percentage point drop over that period. Black and Latino children aren’t the only ones being shortchanged. Some 37 percent of Asian middle-school students took Algebra 1, a 15 percentage point increase, while 26.5 percent of White peers took the math course, a 1.3 percentage point decline over levels two years ago.

The Maryland General Assembly has continuously proven to be opposed to any kind of systemic reform on behalf of poor and minority children.

No wonder why a mere 13 percent of Black and 32 percent of Latino children in the state’s Class of 2017 met ACT’s benchmarks for college-readiness versus 64 percent of Asian and 58 percent of White peers.

What we have in Maryland is what Contributing Editor Michael Holzman calls an educational caste system, one that reflects the legacies of slavery, nativism, and Jim Crow segregation that is at the heart of America’s Original Sin. But it isn’t simply about the past. The Old Line State’s political and educational leaders are making decisions in real time that essentially deny opportunities for all children to gain the knowledge they need to succeed once they reach adulthood.

Nothing in the state’s proposed plan for meeting federal requirements under the Every Student Succeeds Act mentions how it will work to increase access to advanced math and AP courses, especially to Black and Latino children. The state is also silent on how it will require districts and other school operators to help children gain entry into those courses through high-quality curricula and teaching in the elementary grades or how it will end the gatekeeping of gifted-and-talented programs that often keep out poor and minority children.

That the Democrat-controlled state legislature has weakened the ability of the state education department to hold districts accountable for how they serve children, a move done as much to please the National Education Association’s Old Line State affiliate as to weaken the Republican Hogan’s control over education policy, now means that another generation of Black and Brown kids will end up on the path to poverty and prison. That the legislature’s Black caucus was complicit in this move (as were state board leaders through their unwillingness to call up Black reformers in the state who could have helped them out) is especially shameful.

Meanwhile the continued opposition to expanding public charter schools and other forms of choice, which could open up high-quality opportunities for Black and Latino children served poorly by traditional districts, remains the norm. While Maryland has made some progress on that front two years ago by passing a law creating the Broadening Options and Opportunities for Students (which now serves 1,900 children from poor households), the state has all but stifled the expansion of charters.

Another way to expand opportunity for poor-and-minority kids also remains untapped: Providing them with free access to AP courses. Particularly for poor families, the $15 cost for each AP course taken is a roadblock to the opportunities their children can access to move out of economic destitution. But neither the legislature nor Gov. Hogan have addressed this problem when they can clearly do so. Districts could also find ways to provide AP to the children in its care — as well as use advice from the Education Trust on how to support them (as well as teachers and school leaders) in achieving success. There is little interest in doing so.

It is high time for Maryland’s political and educational leaders to stop shortchanging children of the college-preparatory education they need for their success as well as that of the state as a whole. There’s no reason why this is happening — and it must stop.

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Read: Jean Beliveau Edition


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While your editor makes a rare indulgence into his  fascination with all things hockey (and joins others in wishing a legendary rink rat a speedy recovery), read what’s going on…

Not the way to treat a Ranger. Photo courtesy of Sports Illustrated.

While your editor makes a rare indulgence into his  fascination with all things hockey (and joins others in wishing a legendary rink rat a speedy recovery), read what’s going on in the dropout nation:

  1. While Race to the Top has captured the headlines everywhere, it is especially becoming a point of discussion in the city of Blue Suede Shoes, where at least eight schools will likely be seized from the control of Memphis Public Schools and put into turnaround. Tennessee State Sen. Reginald Tates provides some insight on how the city’s school district (and its children) will benefit from this effort in the Tri-State Defender.
  2. Meanwhile there is more going on in Memphis, from battles over school funding to questions as to whether the school district will be allowed to form its own police force. All this, along with the Gates-funded teacher quality effort under way, may make Memphis an interesting place to watch among school reformers.
  3. At Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s black studies blog, Professor Howard Ramsby writes about the need to mold young black men into strong, learned role models. Ta-Nehisi Coates notes that parents have to often find themselves disliking their parents (in that selfish-child-way) as part of the process of becoming a moral adult who can stand on his own two feet.
  4. The headshaker of the week appeared earlier this month, but it’s still a headshaker: Some Harvard ed school grads wrote an “open letter” to its administrators. They are demanding that the ed school speak out “against the unprecedented attack on public education.” What, dare say, is this attack? Start with “the over-testing of students” to their contention that performance pay plans “deny and undermine the essentially collaborative nature of teaching.” As if teachers spend all that much time teaching joint classes with their colleagues. Sure, I understand what they mean by this. But honestly, the current system of rewarding all teachers, regardless of the quality of their work, with tenure and raises based on little more than seniority and number of degrees awarded does little to improve the quality of education for the children in their care. Dear letter-writers: The grade for this letter is an “incomplete.” Try again.
  5. Another headshaker: This time, it’s a Web site: Stop Homework. No comment.
  6. In his Centraljersey.com piece, Hank Kalet makes clear that he is apparently afraid that new New Jersey education chief Brett Schundler will make his advocacy for school vouchers a centerpiece of his reform. Given the low quality of so many of the Garden State’s urban and suburban districts, are vouchers and charters still such an anathema?
  7. Yes, according to a recent poll by Quinnipac University’s pollsters. Given that New Jersey is that rare instance of a mostly-suburban state with powerful unions and parents loyal to traditional public school districts, this isn’t so surprising.
  8. In South Carolina, a state where arguments over the state’s abysmal graduation rate is just beginning to reach the levels seen in Indiana four years ago, a school choice supporter is entering the race for the education superintendent’s post, according to WACH-TV. Meanwhile Palmetto State school districts are still struggling to make Adequate Yearly Progress, reports the Sun News.
  9. In Maryland, the state schools superintendent wants to actually subject teachers to performance management, according to WBAL-TV. By using student test scores no less. And, by the way, wants to make probationary teachers wait four years before gaining tenure. Sure, not all that radical compared to what Jason Kamras and Michelle Rhee are trying to do in D.C. But this is Maryland, not exactly friendly territory for school reform.
  10. Speaking of Kamras: Yesterday’s video report has garnered some strong responses. Feel free to read and join in.
  11. Meanwhile, in New York, the state education department has named 34 New York City schools that should either be overhauled, shut down or doe-see-doed, according to Gotham Schools. Joel Klein and company already has most of that handled. Of course.
  12. When she was Indiana’s state schools superintendent, Suellen Reed was, well, underwhelming. Or as I put it back in 2004, she needed to hand in her walking papers. So Reed must be a tad saddened that her successor, Tony Bennett, seems to have gotten more done in less than one year in office that she did in 16.

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