Firm tapped to aid schools

The Baltimore Sun

Baltimore County school officials plan to spend about $7.4 million for a national education firm's help in overhauling the system's curriculum - a move that has yielded mixed reviews in other states, ranging from teachers complaining that the materials were difficult to use to districts boasting of increased test scores.

The New York-based Kaplan K12 Learning Services Division was awarded a three-year deal last week to help school officials "develop and execute" the curriculum, the system's documentation of what children need to learn and how that material should be taught, according to school district documents.

The company also is expected to help create curriculum guides that direct teachers on how to teach a course so that it meets established expectations and to provide professional development. An independent audit this year found the school system lacking in all of these areas.

"We hope that this will have a huge impact on student performance," said Sonia Diaz, the system's chief academic officer. Diaz was hired in March after the audit concluded that a major problem was that no one person was overseeing the curriculum.

She said Kaplan was chosen for its ability to "customize" the curriculum to the county's needs.

Kaplan's knowledge is a key part of the overhaul, Diaz said. The system's curriculum and instruction office - with an operating budget of $109 million for fiscal year 2008 that started July 1 - focuses on training teachers and honing classroom instruction, not writing curriculum, she said.

In addition to hiring Diaz, the Kaplan deal is the system's most significant response so far to the audit that found that teachers are inundated with new programs but given little guidance on how to use them.

As Kaplan prepares to start work in the county in about a month, its other projects around the country are illustrations of what Baltimore County schools might expect.

In Philadelphia, where school officials formed a partnership in 2003 with the company, Kaplan has been credited with creating a uniform curriculum that has contributed to rising test scores on the state's standardized exams for the district's more than 190,000 students.

The overall percentage of students passing the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment rose from 23.9 percent passing the state reading exam in 2002 to 38 percent of students passing it last year.

School officials in Manatee County, Fla., are hoping for similar progress.

Harry Kinnan, chairman of the Manatee County school board, said the 43,000-student district has languished academically and needed a boost when the system recently signed a $4.6 million, five-year contract with Kaplan.

The county, which has a large number of migrant workers, has seen its Latino student populations increase from 10 percent to 18 percent during the past five years. Meanwhile, about 40 percent of the district's students receive free or reduced-price meals, an indicator of poverty.

Kinnan said that during the past two years, most of the district's 53 schools have failed to make sufficient progress toward specified benchmarks, known as adequate yearly progress, a standard tied to the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

"We felt we were at a point where we really needed to get some support," Kinnan said.

Kaplan, he said, will work with the district's teachers and administrators to help develop a standardized curriculum.

But at least one school system recently curtailed its partnership with Kaplan. Last week, the Pittsburgh public school system cut $2.4 million from its Kaplan contract to pay teachers to help write the curriculum after months of complaints about the company's strategies, according to news reports.

Pittsburgh teachers said Kaplan's design forced them to cover material too quickly, training was inadequate and some lessons weren't rigorous enough. Meanwhile, a RAND Corp. review of Kaplan's work in Pittsburgh concluded that the district's partnership with the firm needed "considerable improvement," according to a June 6 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

In March 2006, Pittsburgh school officials agreed to pay Kaplan $8.4 million to write nearly 30 middle school and high school courses and an algebra lab by the end of the 2008-2009 academic year.

Matthew Given, vice president of Kaplan's school improvement programs, said problems in Pittsburgh were related to a tight time frame. Hired in April 2006, Kaplan was expected to provide curriculum materials for the start of the 2006-2007 school year.

Given said Baltimore County shouldn't expect similar issues because Kaplan has a year before it is expected to roll out new curriculum in classrooms.

Teachers are expected to start training next spring for the first phase - which will include third-, sixth- and ninth-grade math, English, science and social studies - and start teaching from the materials that fall.

During the three-year contract, Kaplan will work with teams of teachers and administrators to develop curriculum for grades three through 12 in math, English, science and social studies as well as some noncore subjects such as art and music.

Baltimore County school board members initially questioned how to pay for such a large expense. But board President JoAnn C. Murphy said the panel has been convinced that no programs will suffer.

"To pay for this, we didn't take anything away from any area that had a priority," she said. "This kind of money sounds like a lot of money, but when you spread it out across 107,000 students, it's not a whole lot of money per child. The benefits per kid are going to be unbelievable."

Murphy said the board's decision to hire Kaplan - which will station three full-time staffers in the county during the contract - wasn't meant to convey a lack of confidence in the curriculum department.

"We just don't have the [staff] to deal with the needs of the children who will be coming in this September and deal with this huge [overhaul]," she said. "They can't be expected to do both."

Murphy used an analogy to illustrate her contention that the benefits of bringing Kaplan on board outweigh any compromises that might be made to accommodate the contract.

"If we took 10 hamburgers out of the cafeteria line, down the road with Kaplan, we're getting 15 hamburgers back," she said. "Everybody's getting fed, but differently and more richly fed, because we've added options to the mix that weren't there before."

gina.davis@baltsun.com

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