With school districts in Maryland and across the nation facing sharp-edged mandates to bring academic performance of all students up to state and federal standards, educators are wrestling with how to meet that daunting goal.
Hundreds of teachers, administrators and researchers huddled last week at the University of Maryland and pledged to work together to eliminate growing achievement gaps between those standards and the many groups of students who are not meeting them - particularly poor and minority children.
"It has become an extremely important societal issue," said Martin L. Johnson, director of the Maryland Institute for Minority Achievement and Urban Education, a year-old think tank of the University of Maryland's College of Education. It's becoming an economic issue, a security issue, and it's become a civil rights issue."
Educators have their work cut out for them, battling long-standing biases and deeply entrenched patterns of inequity in almost every school system in the nation, many speakers at the conference said.
"What matters most is [that] we take the youngsters who need the most help in the first place, and we give them the least challenging curriculum, we give them the least qualified teachers," said Paul Ruiz, principal partner of the District of Columbia's Education Trust, "and we don't give them what matters most: the belief that they can actually achieve."
Such inequality has been going on for decades, he said.
"The profession defines you as a good teacher based on how white your audience is and how rich your audience is," Ruiz said. "Well, you do that for 40 years and the low-income schools become the boot camp for teachers."
One of the goals of the summit was to examine ways to change perceptions and prejudices, using answers that may be hiding in plain sight - locally successful classroom strategies that, until now, had not been shared.
Baltimore officials detailed how they plan to improve on recent progress on standardized test scores, by reducing class sizes and adding more preschool and early intervention programs.
Howard County Superintendent John R. O'Rourke talked about the need to eradicate the disease of "denial," that can keep school districts stagnant - even wealthy, successful systems such as his own.
"Quite frankly, that Howard County is No. 1 is simply not good enough," O'Rourke said. "In fact, we are greatly behind where we need to be."
Montgomery County Superintendent Jerry D. Weast described how administrators have to create ideal conditions for struggling students to thrive.
"One of the best ways I know to do that is to have a good teacher in every classroom," Weast said. "You're not going to get a good teacher in every classroom unless you have a good principal in every building."
In Charles County, students' scores on the SAT have gone up 80 points in the past three years. Participation in Advanced Placement classes has doubled, as has the number of college scholarships.
Last week's discussion about ways to close those gaps was timely, most educators agreed.
President George W. Bush's recent No Child Left Behind legislation pushes a national educational system that is color- and class-blind.
Jacqueline Jackson, assistant director of the U.S. Department of Education's Compensatory Education Program, detailed for school leaders how serious the law is, particularly with regard to raised standards and heightened accountability.
Starting this school year, No Child Left Behind dictates that school systems have 12 years to bring all their children up to a proficient level in reading and math.
While doing so, not only are districts required to demonstrate that their curricula are founded on scientifically valid principles, they also must rid their schools of noncertified or provisional teachers by 2006. Sanctions for noncompliance include voluntary transfer of students to higher-performing schools, state takeover and staff firings.
"When I look at it from the perspective of a student or parent that doesn't have a choice, then it doesn't seem that harsh to me anymore," Jackson said.
Johnson's minority achievement institute, the state's Higher Education Commission and the Department of Education were the hosts of the two-day summit packed with figures such as Harvard University's Ronald F. Ferguson and Clifford B. Janey, chairman-elect of the Council of Great City Schools, a national group for urban educators.
Over the past decade, conversations about under-performing schools - and in particular, the minority and poor children who generally populate them - have become increasingly common.
As communities looked more closely at achievement data and realized certain groups' performance was well below average, efforts to understand and reverse the trend have multiplied.
"That was not the case years ago," Johnson said. "Now we're starting to see the real story. Everybody's becoming aware of it."
But last week's meeting at the University of Maryland was unusual.
"All the players are here," said Edna Mora Szymanski, dean of the university's College of Education. "This is a set of commitment that you don't normally get. What this institute has done is it has brought together all of the forces that are critical. We have come together and said, 'This cannot go on. This will not go on on our watch.'"
State Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick said Maryland's minority achievement institute will help the state's effort to improve performance sustainability.