OVER the past four years, I have worked with a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers to support school reform in several of Baltimore's most troubled zoned high schools. I have witnessed the courage, spirit and dedication of school-based administrators and teachers who are working hard to create more effective learning environments for their students.

The reforms many of these schools are implementing have the potential to place them at the forefront of a national movement in urban high school restructuring. Political and administrative choices made within the school system, however, are now limiting and, in some cases, undermining these efforts. These choices must be examined and their consequences addressed if Baltimore's high schools are going to realize the potential of the reforms they have started.

Attention Baltimore schools chief Robert Booker, school board members and state reconstitution monitors. At least four areas call for re-evaluation:

Better planning. Uncertainty about enrollment and funding occurs every year in Baltimore's schools. A projected enrollment generated in the spring determines the school budget for the next school year. By the middle of October, however, schools are to calculate their actual enrollment and then either receive additional money if they have more students than expected or refund money if they have fewer students.

This is not a major problem for citywide magnet high schools whose selection process makes enrollment rather predictable. But it is a nightmare for the neighborhood zoned schools, which contend with high levels of student mobility. For these schools to improve, they must be able to plan, and effective planning requires a level of certainty and stability. Losing tens of thousands of dollars halfway through the first term in a school year forces principals to eliminate teaching positions (and thereby disrupt student learning at midterm) or, alternatively, gut budgets for building improvements, technology or even basic supplies. An equally bad situation occurs in high schools that receive too little funding for the first two months of school (as Southern did this year). Such schools find themselves understaffed, overwhelmed by students and often unable to recover from a chaotic school opening.

This system fosters a depressed, survivalist attitude that defeats constructive reform. It also punishes schools whose reform efforts have succeeded in retaining and promoting unexpectedly high numbers of ninth-graders as some schools have. Also, it creates an incentive for schools to keep chronic truants on the rolls, making the schools' attendance numbers look worse than they should. Solutions may simply lie in changing the timing of the enrollment leveling process or in providing more information to central office employees who produce the projections.

* A two-tier system. Baltimore has a two-tiered high school system. The magnet schools have a carefully monitored selection process; the remaining students attend the nine zoned high schools. This leaves the zoned schools with the challenge of educating the city's most troubled and least academically motivated students. It also creates a career ladder of sorts, where many teachers and administrators are eager to move to the citywide schools once they've "done their time" at a zoned school. Thankfully, some talented teachers and administrators choose to remain in the zoned schools. But this constant change and brain drain in the two-tiered system wreaks havoc on reform efforts in the zoned schools and deprives the neediest students of access to some of the city's best teaching resources.

The two-tiered system also leaves the students and adults in zoned high schools feeling, at best, like second-class citizens. And, at times, the system treats them that way. For example, a plan to transform Walbrook High School into a citywide magnet school will likely double enrollment at Southwestern High School -- a plan that was crafted with virtually no input from Southwestern administrators or staff and that will put great pressure on its own emerging reform initiative.

If this has been planned out of mere ignorance of the positive changes occurring at Southwestern, then I recommend that Mr. Booker and school board members visit the school. While I do not view eliminating citywide magnet schools as a viable, or even desirable, solution, the disastrous consequences of this two-tiered system for the zoned schools must be named and ameliorated.

* Special education problems. The large and cumbersome special-education system ties the hands of zoned high school administrators and eats up a tremendous amount of time, energy and resources. Up to one-quarter of the student population in these schools receives special-education services. In many zoned schools, special education is the largest department and has a full-time administrator. The many rules and laws are ever-changing, require small class sizes, prohibit administrators from suspending or expelling unruly students and lead to much confusion, anxiety, paperwork and meetings.

The system's complexity makes it difficult for schools to include special-education students in the reforms that schools want to implement and eats up resources, making it more difficult for schools to implement those reforms. Full inclusion or provisions for students with special needs is directly in keeping with the reform efforts designed to make the high schools smaller, career-focused academies. However, without adequate training and resources to make inclusion a reality, schools will continue to experience unresolved tension between their desire to reform and the special-education system.

* Professional development doldrums. The school system has an outdated professional development program that provides generic, one-shot workshops and coursework aimed primarily at individual teachers and administrators. Though some sessions are geared to school-improvement teams, these too are generic, lack follow-up and often are unrelated to a school's reforms. Teachers and administrators may learn from these sessions, but they are unlikely to apply what they've learned unless they receive substantial and sustained support while practicing the new techniques in the school.

With professional development time and resources tied up in workshop activities, it is difficult for school leaders to find the time for the continuous planning, reflection, communication and learning that school improvement requires. For reforms to work well, teachers and administrators need to meet with each other, with their peers at other schools and with district, community and industry advisers.

In short, professional development must be tailored to the needs of each school, with follow-up assistance in the school.

Each of these areas represents systemic barriers to sustained improvement of Baltimore's most troubled high schools.

There are no easy solutions, but I hope that the school board and school leaders will not shy away from tackling these difficult but critical issues. The quality of our zoned high schools, and the futures of the students who attend them, depend on it.

Nettie Legters is an associate research scientist with the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University.

Pub Date: 12/07/98