The cornerstone of Maryland's ambitious school reform effort is accountability. But accountability without consequences is a charade.
The consequences announced yesterday by state schools chief Nancy S. Grasmick brought no real surprises. Even so, the list of three Baltimore City schools earmarked for reconstitution and possible state intervention drew a loud protest from city officials. That protest does not ring true.
Five years after the State Board of Education adopted benchmarks for academic performance, four years after the first school performance reports were issued and more than a year after guidelines for reconstitution efforts were put out for public comment and approved by the state board, city school officials now cry foul. The reconstitution effort is discriminatory and flawed and ignores existing initiatives, they say. Moreover, they contend it punishes the system at a time when student achievement is steadily increasing.
Those protests ignore the central issue. Performance in the targeted schools is abysmal and, worse, it's declining, not improving. At West Baltimore's Furman Templeton Elementary School, not a single third-grader performed at a satisfactory level in reading, mathematics, social studies, writing or language arts. At the fifth-grade level, scores on the performance testing program declined in five out of six categories. Is it fair to the children in these classrooms to look the other way while progress in the rest of the system passes them by?
Reconstitution is not an effort to punish anyone, but an attempt to improve a bad situation that is getting worse. There are some schools in the city where scores are as dismal as the three target schools, but where scores are headed up, not down. That crucial element -- some progress toward the statewide goals -- makes the difference. It's also important to note there are also schools where poverty is just as pervasive as at Furman Templeton and the two middle schools on the list, Arnett J. Brown in Cherry Hill and Calverton in West Baltimore, but where students are achieving and scores are improving.
If proof were needed that reconstitution of failing schools is not punishment, look to the rays of hope now detectable in the hallways and classrooms of Douglass and Patterson, the two city high schools on last year's list. It's not enough to talk about accountability. The key test for any school reform effort is the ability to enforce consequences for failure. Letting any system off the hook, regardless of the problems it faces, would be an admission that school reform for poor children isn't worth the trouble. To its credit, Maryland's school reform effort refuses to accept that kind of thinking.