After four years of experimenting with an alternative curriculum, the Barclay School has its children performing better than kids at other city public elementary schools, according to an assessment by the Johns Hopkins University.
This is no surprise to Principal Gertrude S. Williams. She risked her career by fighting former Supt. Richard Hunter to get the experiment. Dr. Hunter stubbornly said "no". He refused even after Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke said "yes", which is one reason Dr. Hunter is no longer in Baltimore.
What Barclay wanted -- and ultimately got -- was the right to use a curriculum developed by the private Calvert School. The strength of that curriculum was that it was "teacher-proof"; it had been developed primarily for home study and gave detailed and exact teaching instructions.
Unlike many faddish innovations, Calvert relies on a distinctly old-fashioned program. It emphasizes penmanship and it keeps repeating exercises until the student gets the spelling and syntax right. The reading program is a mixture of children's classics and phonics. As for history, it uses a text that has been revised but was first published more than seven decades ago.
At the Barclay School, this "old-fashioned" approach has produced students who consistely score at or above the national average in reading and comprehension. Math scores glow, too.
We think the Calvert/Barclay approach -- which has also been adopted at the Carter G. Woodson Elementary in Cherry Hill -- is a program more public schools ought to use. The problem is that it is costly -- and that Calvert is not enthusiastic about over-extending its resources.
Yet if Baltimore's newly acquired empowerment zone is to succeed in its housing and job training components, a quick improvement in zone public schools is a must.
It is telling that in Sandtown-Winchester, which is one of the empowerment zone neighborhoods, a small church found the Harlem Park Middle School so inadequate that it recently began a one-room tutoring program of its own for 12 children.
The church, too, selected the Calvert curriculum. But when the children, who were in grades six through eight at Harlem Park, were initially tested by Calvert, they were deemed to be at fourth and fifth grade levels. The church school is now involved in a frantic remedial effort to get its pupils quickly to the level where they ought to be.
Tried and true methods may be what public schools also need. We strongly urge the mayor and Superintendent Walter Amprey to expand the Calvert curriculum to other Baltimore public schools. The experiment is working. It's time to broaden this old-fashioned approach so more city kids can succeed in school.