State seizure of local schools is an attempt by the governor and his appointed State Board of Education to centralize power while decentralizing responsibility.

It's the final step of the Maryland School Performance Program, a blame-shifting scheme that holds the individual school responsible for low student test scores, as if the school were an independent enterprise controlled by its faculty.

Nothing, of course, is further from the truth. Take, for example, the first two high schools the State Board of Education has marked for seizure. Both are Baltimore "zoned" schools that must take whatever students show up at the door. But their students are not a cross section of the high-school-age population in their attendance zone or the city at large. They are what's left over after "creaming."

Denied authority to set any entrance requirements, these two high schools -- Frederick Douglass and Patterson -- must take children who cannot make it into the "citywide" academic and trade schools, which admit students according to rank by test scores and attendance records.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out, then, why the zoned schools score low on state tests. The school board has a policy of assigning them lower-ranked kids. So, these schools will, by design, have more problems than the schools the board doesn't send problem kids to.

Douglass High, for example, could instantly get off the seizure list by a simple shift in the way the school board assigns students to schools. High-scoring City College high school could end up on the bottom, and low-scoring Douglass shoot to the top. Test scores are measures of student, not faculty, performance -- as anyone who has attended school knows.

By threatening the local school with state seizure and privatization, the governor and his business buddies on the state board cast the blame on the institution least able to deliver the extra taxation, resources and services needed to offset the disadvantages that poor, low-scoring kids bring to school. It's a strategy to avert the blame at the top. After refusing to set, fund and enforce opportunity-to-learn standards for kids of the underclass, they demand that these kids meet the same performance standards as more advantaged children -- or else.

The higher concentration of truant, disruptive, and learning-disabled children at zoned high schools is the downside of a school choice policy that begins in middle school. It is really a seven-year citywide tracking system that performs triage for an urban school system that otherwise would lose many more of its able middle-class students to suburban and private schools. From the sixth grade, parents are given a choice of sending children to their neighborhood school or to citywide magnet schools.

By high school, 48 percent (10,525) of Baltimore students are skimmed off to citywide magnet schools with entrance requirements. The leftover 52 percent attend 10 zoned schools with no entrance requirements.

A comparison of student data reveals dramatic differences between student bodies at a citywide and a zoned high school:

School .. ..% .. Chronic .. .. Dropout.. .. College.. ..11th Gr.. .. Avg

. .. .. ..Poor..Absentees.. .. Rate.. .. .. Ready .. .. Funct. ..Attend.

.. .. .. .. .. .. ..(%)... .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..Math

City College ..29.5 .. 25.3 .. .. ..2.6 .. .. ..92.5 .. .. 98.9 .. .. ..90.8

Douglass High .62.5 .. 74.3 .. .. 38.7 .. .. ..10.2 .. .. 62.5 .. .. ..71.9 The figures do not show the numbers of tardy students at zoned schools,who interrupt classes in session or mill in the hallways outside. Patterson recently required first-period latecomers to register in the cafeteria and remain until the next period. On any given day, some 150 students will be found there during first period.

The attendance figures themselves are misleading, for they do not reflect students who are marked present in one class -- only to mill in the hallways the rest of the day, daring faculty to ask them to move to their next class. Others simply leave campus before the end of the school day.

Nor do the figures show the high number of students whom judges have paroled to the school. More than 10 percent of Patterson students have done "serious jail time," according to faculty members. "The judge can make me come here, but he can't make me listen to you," snarled one student recently to a teacher.

The absurdity of the MSPP program is that it blames the school faculty for being assigned a low-scoring student body. Instead of saying to the faculty, "You've got a tough job. How can we help?" the state bureaucrats threaten to hand the school over to a private contractor.

It's not that faculties haven't requested help, especially for the majority of students who are motivated or might become motivated in a safe and stable environment. But downtown politicians and bureaucrats ignore faculty requests while demanding "accountability."

The superintendent has designated Patterson High an "Enterprise School," which supposedly means the school faculty runs the show under "site-based decision making." But, in reality, downtown makes all the decisions even in the simplest matters.

For example, the faculty had to ask a regional superintendent for permission to let students who had already passed a state test go home early to create a more businesslike atmosphere for those who were to take the test. Permission denied. Downtown has also refused to stop assigning students to Patterson's ninth grade who have never attended seventh or eighth grade or have been absent most of the time in middle school. As a result, ninth-grade repeaters cause much of the disorder at school.

The faculty asks for common-sense changes to make the school safe, attractive and productive for both faculty and students. Here's a list of some of their suggestions:

* Saturday school, Saturday study hall, after-school sessions and study hall, mentoring, peer tutoring, summer school.

* Sufficient staffing and non-class assignment time (and telephones) for faculty to contact parents, follow up on students, and collaborate with each other throughout the school day.

* Minimum entrance and retention standards for student conduct, attendance and academics, so that students who are able and willing to contribute to a safe and productive school environment can be helped to succeed and motivated to attend.

* Off-campus adjustment learning centers -- small settings for rehabilitation of students on parole and violent and seriously disruptive youth.

* Smaller classes with intense instruction and counseling for those below grade level but who meet acceptable conduct standards.

* A job-related magnet program to focus student interest and motivation.

* Transition to a four-period day with longer periods and cross-disciplinary teaching and cooperative learning -- a product lengthy planning that has had to be shelved until the school board stabilizes the student body and makes the school safe for students and teachers.

That's the kind of help the state should be offering instead of threatening the faculty with "reconstitution" because politicians have made the school a dumping ground for children unwanted at other schools.

Meanwhile, the MSPP system grinds on. Elementary and middle schools pass on their failing or absentee students; that's how schools make sure they get a higher report card and keep off the state seizure list.

The farce ends at the zoned high schools. Ninth graders who haven't a prayer of success are tossed -- sink or swim -- into a school without the resources to give them the intense personal attention that might save them. The superintendent aggravates the violence and disruption wrought by these lost children in grown-up bodies, by barring suspensions of perpetrators. In such an atmosphere, teachers and students who want to succeed work behind a closed classroom door and try their best with little hope and less faith in the system.

How did Maryland end up with such an inhumane assessment program? It's really a "top-down accountability" system that lets the politicians and bureaucrats off the hook while punishing the local school at the bottom of the power stack. How did test scores and absentee rates come to be used against the very teachers who have complained about them for decades?

The governor and his state board have adopted a blame-shift strategy the Reagan administration created in 1983 to counter charges by Democrats and teacher associations that it was under-funding public education. The administration turned the tables on its accusers by using the "Nation at Risk" report -- which it had tried to suppress -- as a call for the nation's schools and their teachers to do more. The success of the blame shift taught Democratic politicians also how to get off the hook when school folk accuse them of shortchanging education: Blame them for low student scores.

The seizure regulation adopted last year by the governor's board is the heart of the Maryland School Performance Program. The new regulation ("Public School Standards," COMAR 13A.01.04) repudiates local control of schools and authorizes state bureaucrats to seize neighborhood schools and transfer them to private contractors under pain of embargoing all state funds for the local school system:

"If the State Board of Education rejects the proposal, the State Board of Education shall determine the program and management reconstitution of the school. . . . The State Board of Education may order the school to be operated under contract with a third party. . . . The local school system shall pay to the third party contractor . . . the total actual current cost of operating the school. . . . If a local school system fails to comply with any of the provisions of this chapter, the State Superintendent of Schools may require the State Comptroller to withhold from that school system . . . all or any part of an appropriation made by the General Assembly or any other payment from funds budgeted by the State."

Now, that's quite a concentration of power and a decentralization of accountability. The governor and his board have pulled off a blame shift to beat even Reagan's.

L Meanwhile, back at school, teachers and students soldier on.

Roger Kuhn is editor of "Action Line," a publication of the Maryland State Teachers Association. This article is reprinted, with permission, from the March issue of "Action Line."