Baltimore's search for a new superintendent for its (pick some: beleaguered, troubled, failing, under-funded, bureaucratized, rudderless) public schools has reportedly been narrowed to five finalists.
This process should be an enthusiastic search for excellence -- an opportunity to affirm that improved education really is the No. 1 priority of the numerous groups and powerful individuals who have said words to this effect in recent times.
Instead, past failures to meet higher expectations seem to have made nearly everyone involved in the process reluctant to set their sights very high this time around.
So, the city's latest effort to find a leader for its schools gives too many indications of being a defeatist effort -- a passionless repeat of past searches that seemed to please no one. The individuals and institutions involved simply seem to have lost a lot of heart and hope that either the financial resources or the political guts exist to turn around the schools.
Such pessimism is, sadly, well placed.
The state legislature has just turned down (once again) the city's plea for significant financial relief and turned aside the well thought-out plans for school reform articulated by the Sondheim Commission and given more precise form by State School Superintendent Joseph L. Schilling.
The city schools themselves, disheartened by years of promises and too many broken commitments, are struggling to deal with the apparent failure of outgoing Superintendent Richard Hunter to accomplish much of anything in his three contentious years here.
As a recently released history of the schools indicates, it hasn't seemed to matter much who ran the show or what types of reform they advocated. The only constant has been declining performance.
Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke has taken plenty of lumps for his wisdom in hiring Hunter (not to mention the heat he felt for hustling Hunter's predecessor, Alice G. Pinderhughes, out of office). Only a cynic would suggest that the mayor, facing re-election this year, might just decide to sit this one out as much as possible, letting his otherwise powerless school board take any public heat for hiring the next superintendent.
This regrettable chain of events is of more than passing interest to businesses.
Today's students (and dropouts) represent tomorrow's labor force, and declining adolescent performance has an eerie parallel to the decline of U.S. business performance and issues of global competitiveness.
If business clearly has a stake in the schools, it's less clear what it should do about it. The Greater Baltimore Committee, both institutionally and through many of its business members, has been active in school matters for many years.
The GBC has actively lobbied for more support for the schools and more quietly urged city leaders to make needed improvements in school management. It has linked with black organizations to adopt laudatory programs that reward school attendance and performance and, through job guarantees to qualifying graduates, has tried to make a diploma a meaningful attainment.
Has it worked? Such shifts take time, but initial reports aren't exactly glowing. No one seems to really know.
For all its partnerships and public-spiritedness, the GBC, and most other business groups here and elsewhere, have simply not been very aggressive in rocking the boat and demanding meaningful school reforms.
The GBC did recently strengthen its call for better schools, including a "down-the-road" state takeover of the city's schools if progress is not forthcoming. But such saber-rattling carries only a vague time frame and has not yet been accompanied by specific performance expectations.
Belatedly, more and more business people are coming around to the view that more drastic school reforms are needed and that business can play, indeed may be destined to play, a pivotal role in this process.
David W. Hornbeck, who was state school superintendent for a dozen years, worked closely with the Business Roundtable when that national group of 200 blue-chip corporations adopted last September a long-term (10 years) commitment to major changes in public education. The group's nine-point platform is summarized above, and is worth a few minutes' scrutiny.
Mr. Hornbeck also played an important consulting role in Kentucky's recent adoption of reforms that closely track the goals laid out by the Business Roundtable.
Having taken what he clearly feels is more than his fair share of lumps here during his years on the front lines of the fight over education reform, Mr. Hornbeck declined in a recent interview to weigh in with specific advice for Baltimore.
But he does feel the business community here, and elsewhere, can play crucial roles in improving schools.
"I think that there is among the traditional players on the education and political front a kind of equilibrium that has set in," he said, "and the teachers can't move it very far, and the school boards can't move it very far, and the state department [of education] can't move it very far, and even the legislature and the governor are in equilibrium.
"And it seems to me that what that means is that there needs to be a new, powerful player at the table. And in my own analysis, as I sort through potential new players sitting at the table, I keep coming back to the corporate community as the principal, potential breaker of the tie, to break up the paralysis, to break up the equilibrium. . . .
"The business community in Maryland has not now, and has not in the past to my knowledge, engaged in an aggressive, #F strategically designed, comprehensive, down-and-dirty, pull-no-punches exercise of political clout to accomplish these things," Mr. Hornbeck said. "And they're not unlike the business community in lots of other places."
So, Mr. Hornbeck's first order of business, to business, is to become politically involved.
"The real advice is to become involved politically in trying to get either that [Business Roundtable] agenda or an agenda that . . . has those pieces put together in a way that could move the system," he said. "That's the real story to business.
"Now, having said that, and I can't emphasize that too much, then it is perfectly appropriate for business to continue the kinds of things that business has been engaged in for the last 10 or 15 years, particularly."
Such programs as adopting schools, participating in career days, mentoring and providing release time for employees to help out in classrooms are all part of the pronounced trend toward greater employer involvement, he noted.
Such involvements may represent "a critically important role for a bunch of individual kids . . ., which for those individual kids may be the most important thing that's ever happened to them."
Still, Mr. Hornbeck stressed, it's vital for business people to understand that "none of that translates into changing the system in any structural way, and business ought not to fool itself into thinking that that kind of project-based activity will in fact alter the fundamental character of the system."
"The issue that we face in Baltimore and in Maryland, and in every other city and state in this union," he has concluded, "is not an education issue. The questions are not education questions. The issue is a political issue, and the questions are political questions.
"And so far, in Maryland, at neither the school district level nor at the state level has the political will been generated to decide that we're going to solve the problems. And when it is, I'm confident we'll solve the problems, and until it is, we won't."