Imagine a group of teachers eager to get to work every morning, and a principal eager to see them because he chose them and enjoys working with them.
Imagine students showing up enthusiastically because it's the school that they and their parents chose -- not one that some distant bureaucrat assigned.
Imagine an elementary school in which the lights of curiosity don't flicker out in kids' eyes by the fifth grade. A school whose teachers believe passionately that even children from the most disadvantaged families can learn.
Imagine a group of new, smaller high schools in which every teacher knows every student. Perhaps one high school devoted to the new career front of biotechnology or communications. Or a school that prizes a traditional curriculum of Latin, English, literature. Or a school devoted to exploring African-American culture and producing the most talented young black leaders it can.
Imagine schools like these -- in Baltimore!
We propose giving permission to any qualified group -- teachers, administrators, a university or social service or neighborhood organization -- to form a public charter school.
Baltimore and its surrounding counties already offer lots of ways for people affluent or mobile enough to find the school they'd like best. With enough money, choice is all yours. The public charter school is designed to bring choice and quality to students where they live -- even students from the poorest families.
Charter schools would operate 100 percent with public funding. We suggest they be financed by the state government and permitted in Baltimore or any county of the state. For each child they enroll, they should be paid the average total cost of educating a public school child in Maryland. The state and district of residence ought to share the cost.
If Baltimoreans would like a model for charter schools, a rather good one is already here: the Baltimore School for the Arts. Though it's officially under the school bureaucracy, it doesn't operate that way. The principal can hire and fire teachers as he deems best. Part-time teachers can be brought on board. The school is a place of warmth and color, perhaps the best integrated in the area. Not surprisingly, its motivated students do well in school and well afterward.
Public charter schools would be free of the mountain of pedagogical micromanagement that's usually imposed on public schools. Nobody would tell them how to get their results. But they would be measured, through state-ordered testing, for the results -- the achievement of their students. The results would be public knowledge. If they didn't show achievement, they couldn't expect to survive. Fail to offer a truly excellent, competitive school, and in time their student base would drift away.
Of course it's true that an effort to win approval of charter schools would be a tough political battle. It's safe to predict monumental resistance from defenders of the educational status quo.
Would the struggle be worth it? We think so. We encountered, in our interviews, an avalanche of bitter complaint and damning criticism of Baltimore's school system. A good part, but not all, of the complaint centered on the school system's 600-person administrative staff on North Avenue. (See accompanying article.)
Remember, the city's children lag a year and a half or more behind the rest of Maryland's youngsters. Their absentee rates are double the statewide average. Half drop out before graduation.
When public confidence in a public institution sinks so low, incremental reforms and improvements just won't do. Promises of improvements by political leaders won't do. A new school superintendent won't suffice. Basic structural change becomes imperative.
The Baltimore public schools do have some defenders. They acknowledge the problems with Baltimore's schools are severe, but then they offer up a whole range of explanations.
The first relates to money. Baltimore's a poor city, with half the tax base, per child, that the surrounding counties enjoy. The city is home to nearly half the disadvantaged children in the entire state.
When J. Edward Andrews came from Montgomery County to become the city's deputy superintendent, he decided to do something dramatic to illustrate how the city kids get shortchanged. He persuaded a bank to lend him $40,000 for a few hours. Then he went to a state hearing and threw the money on the table to show how much more, per classroom, other Maryland districts have, and Baltimore doesn't, to run its schools.
Maryland has three programs to "equalize" school spending between rich and poor areas. They help Baltimore, but not
enough. Other state programs -- state subsidies for teachers' retirement and Social Security payments, for example -- actually benefit the wealthiest districts the most. A big new Maryland-wide equalization program, scheduled to be phased in during the early '90s, may now be postponed for years due to the state's fiscal woes.
The state of Maryland appears guilty of serious negligence in regard to Baltimore's schools. Legislators from such areas as Montgomery County, despite years of support for equalization formulas to help the city, claim their own taxpayers are so hard-pressed in a recession year that more aid is out of the question.
We heard the arguments -- that more money channeled to the Baltimore schools simply hasn't produced results, that the city gets lots of special state aid for every need from police to the Peabody Conservatory to the new stadium. That still doesn't explain how Baltimore schools, even if they were brilliantly run, could produce the same results as affluent county school systems with an extra $1,000 or more to spend on each child each year.
The money is, in fact, there to be had. Maryland is a wealthy state, seventh among the 50 states in per capita income. But it ranks an appallingly low 43rd, related to personal income, on spending for schools.
Critics of higher spending on the city schools are on somewhat firmer ground when they ask whether extra school subsidies wouldn't simply be soaked up by Baltimore's school bureaucracy, resulting in little if any gain at the classroom level.
And what's the point, it's fair to ask, of pumping more money into classrooms where student peer pressure telegraphs the insane message that it's stupid to study too hard? Not far from Baltimore, there's the unhappy example of the District of Columbia public schools, which fail thousands of hard-to-teach children despite far more generous funding.
No one we talked to, in fact, believed extra money should flow to Baltimore's schools without some dramatic quid pro quos designed to effect fundamental system reform.
There's a related excuse for the Baltimore schools' subpar performance. Call it the social overburden argument -- the case that no school officials and teachers, however brilliant, can educate well in a culture where teen-age pregnancies, poverty and crime abound. We heard that the average age of the parents of one city kindergarten class is 20.
Said one administrator: "Kids run the streets. They come to school and only know the nickname people call them. It's terrible what these little children have to deal with. Kids talk in show-and-tell about seeing some kid get shot down in the street."
A Johns Hopkins University program to help students at Dunbar High School prepare for health careers and get into college worked well -- but only for girls. Few boys even make it to Dunbar; most have already dropped out.
Yet there are individual schools, scattered from inner city New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, in which skilled principals and dedicated teaching staffs have found ways to fend off the downtown bureaucracies, establish order and stability, and give children a sense of excitement about learning. The evidence shows that creative teachers can succeed.
Nationally, there's growing impatience with the educators' social environment excuse. And in Baltimore, too. As one parent told us: "I know, dear teacher, the school is overcrowded; you have a tough job. But please, if you could find time to teach my kid to read, I'd appreciate it."
Over the years, reform experiments in Baltimore have been kicked off with great fanfare but then snuffed out by the school board or the central bureaucracy on the grounds there wasn't enough money in the system.
Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke appears to care deeply about Baltimore's system of public education, about school-based management and holding principals accountable. Those concerns led him, after much agonizing, to dismiss School Superintendent Richard C. Hunter, who clearly wasn't in sympathy.
But the results are sure to be disappointing unless Mr. Schmoke determines to employ every legal, every persuasive tool at his command to force the total revolution in public education he's promised -- but so far not delivered. Delivery on the promise would mean a far more focused, tenacious, even ferocious Schmoke presence than has yet been seen. It may mean, on occasion, offending the black adults who work in the public schools in favor of the black schoolchildren whose lives today hang in the balance because of the system's incompetence and indifference.
One test will be the school-based management pilot program begun in 1990. Starting in 15 schools, basic management decision are to be turned over to the principals, teachers and parents. Decisions on staff assignments and curriculum, for example, are to be made at the schools with minimal interference from the central bureaucracy.
It helps that the Baltimore Teachers Union supports the pilot project. The Baltimore business community, too, is hopeful and would like to help.
But there are reasons to worry. Mr. Schmoke's own appointed school board dragged its feet and given its druthers wouldn't have approved the plan at all. And support for school-based management is an institutionally unnatural act for the central bureaucracy. Taken seriously, the very idea imperils North Avenue's reason for existing.
The first and predictable argument against charter schools will likely be that they'll be fine for smart kids from aware families, but that the less motivated, poorer, uninformed kids will be mired in the worst schools.
No! That criticism describes the situation we have today. Poor kids are already congregated in terribly deficient schools -- schools so bad the children could hardly do any worse. We view it as intolerably patronizing to claim (as some educators do) that inner city parents are so ill-educated, so callous, that they don't care about their children, and that given the opportunity to switch their child to a new charter school, they wouldn't jump at the opportunity.
The market opportunities for charter schools would likely be the most compelling in depressed neighborhoods. That's where we see them first springing up. By contrast, where the public schools are of high quality, charter schools will be of less immediate appeal.
There are lots of questions about how to set up charter schools. What's critical are the underlying premises -- the introduction of competition. Terminating school boards' monopoly on starting schools. Letting teachers teach in the kinds of schools they've always dreamed of. And giving poor kids and their families a chance to opt, for a change, for schools of caring and quality.