Parents, teachers and principals in Baltimore County are raising questions about whether a top school administrator should have been involved in decisions about the widespread use of a contentious grading system she owns and whether she should be allowed to profit if the program is sold to other districts.
Barbara Dezmon, an assistant to the superintendent, has met with top administrators deciding when and how to implement the Articulated Instruction Module, or AIM, a program she developed to help ensure that minority students were receiving a quality education.
Dezmon holds a copyright to the grading plan that she created with pencil and paper more than a decade ago, but which was enhanced by school system employees who turned it into a detailed computer program.
She has offered the program to superintendents across Maryland at no cost but has said that she intends to market it outside the state when she retires.
"It seems like a highly unusual arrangement to give her the copyright and she trades that off for letting the district use it for free. That doesn't seem like a good idea. ... I think there are real ethical issues here," said C. Fred Alford, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park who teaches ethics.
Having the program used throughout Baltimore County, the 26th-largest district in the nation, could make it easier to market to other states, education experts say.
The county school district issued a directive to all teachers in mid-December to begin using AIM immediately and to produce reports with the program at the end of the second marking period, in late January.
Dezmon, a longtime advocate of the plan, gave a presentation on the program at a meeting that resulted in the order and was among the high-ranking administrators present.
Teachers criticized the decision to implement the program, calling it time-consuming and cumbersome.
Although Baltimore County schools Superintendent Joe A. Hairston has delayed the roll-out, opposition to the program continues.
Dozens who attended a school system budget hearing Tuesday night spoke out against the program.
"My issue is, how can you copyright something and make a profit on it when you are doing it on Baltimore County time?" said Robin Radcliff, parent of a pupil at Johnnycake Elementary School, in an interview.
The county teachers union is discussing the possibility of legal action that would raise conflict-of-interest questions and could help evaluate whether Dezmon should hold a copyright to the materials, according to Cheryl Bost, president of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County.
George Hohl, executive director of the Association of Elementary School Administrators in the county, said the group wrote Hairston a letter requesting that the implementation of AIM be delayed. Principals "raised a number of questions, including whether it was an ethical way to develop curriculum materials," he said.
Laurie Taylor-Mitchell, parent of a county high school student, questioned the propriety of Dezmon's having been involved in meetings at which AIM was discussed.
"She is assistant to the superintendent. She has a lot of power in deciding what is going to happen. The people under her have to accept it. I think that is ethically compromising," Taylor-Mitchell said.
The teachers union wants to examine whether Dezmon, who is the assistant to the superintendent for equity and assurance, should be involved in making decisions about the program's implementation, according to Bost.
"Because we have no chief academic officer, she has been taking on that role and crafting this program in its implementation stage," Bost said. "To us, that is clearly conflict of interest."
Hairston did not respond to Sun requests for comment.
Dezmon said she met with top administrators Dec. 16 to discuss the implementation of the system. She said she told them that AIM was being used sporadically in schools and that not all students were included. She said she suggested that AIM should be done well or not at all.
"I have nothing to do with your decision," she said she told the administrators.
Hairston, she said, was well aware that the system was not being used uniformly and had ordered the staff to fix the problem. She said the administrators then made the decision to go ahead with mandatory use in county schools.
Alford said the apparent conflict of interest bothers him less than the issues of copyright. It should be logical, he said, for a school system to consult the employee who created the program about its implementation.
Two weeks ago, Hairston backed away from the decision to implement AIM and said he plans to streamline the program before it is used.
Teachers say they would have to produce hundreds of pages of data to complete evaluations, which grade the progress of their students on dozens of skills. AIM has a separate component that makes the county curriculum accessible to teachers online.
Hairston has created a task force to study the issue, which met last week.
Other Maryland educators have faced similar issues.
In Baltimore City, Linda Eberhart, a math teacher, balked when asked to become a math administrator because of an education program she was working on.
The Maryland Teacher of the Year had helped develop a program called MathWorks that was being used widely by city teachers for professional development on weekends and at night.
Baltimore schools CEO Andr?s Alonso wanted to place her in charge of math curriculum, but she said she told him that there could be a conflict of interest.
After consulting an attorney, she decided to make the program free to any teacher who wanted to use it, she said.
"I didn't want to be in any ethical problem. It belongs to teachers. That's what I wanted," Eberhart said. Teachers from across the state and country are now using it.
Dezmon was a Baltimore County teacher in the 1980s, she said, when she began developing the idea for AIM. She offered the program to the county, but officials declined to use it until Woodlawn Middle School was identified as a failing school under the No Child Left Behind guidelines about five years ago.
Principals in the southwest area elementary, middle and high schools agreed to try out the program then as part of a plan to improve Woodlawn.
Dezmon said teachers said they liked the program but suggested that a computerized version would be more efficient.
Dezmon said she didn't have any way of doing that until Hairston came to her in 2007 and suggested that the county might use AIM as a way to ensure that the county's curriculum was being taught by classroom teachers.
The superintendent, she said, suggested that she hire an attorney, who helped draft a legal agreement between her and the county. The county agreed to develop the program further by creating a computer program for it. Dezmon said she gave the county the right to use AIM for free and in return she maintains the copyright on any changes the county makes to it.
"It was a fair exchange," she said. "The county wanted my product. It benefited the county and it was very economical to them."
The school system would not immediately supply The Baltimore Sun with a copy of the agreement, and did not respond to questions about whether the board reviewed or voted on the document in 2007.
Baltimore County school board President JoAnn C. Murphy said no board members have asked recently that ethics questions be discussed. "Right now, is that high on the radar screen? Not really," she said.
The Sun reported in 2007 that at least one board member wanted the panel to vote on the use of AIM , even though school administrators said such approval was not necessary.
Rodger Janssen wanted to add AIM to the board agenda but needed a unanimous vote of the board. He got six of 10 votes.
In a written statement added to the minutes, Janssen said that the "significant" investment of staff time in development and training related to the program made such a vote necessary.
The union said it took the issue to the county school system's ethics review panel, which issued an advisory opinion in May 2008.
The opinion says that it would be a violation for an employee to obtain a copyright on materials developed using the county's personnel resources or time. But it said that it is not a violation for employees to compile data to use for copyrighted materials.
Bost said the union dropped the issue at the time because AIM was not mandatory. Today, she said, the union hopes to challenge that opinion or to appeal it.