Today, MSDE released the annual list of elementary and middle schools that did not meet adequate yearly progress, based on their Maryland School Assessment test results. Seven school systems - including Carroll - had all of their elementary and middle schools meet AYP.
Check out the list for the entire state. You'll notice the new labeling system that's being used this year.
The Schott Foundation for Public Education today released a report on the state of education as it pertains to African-American males. It also launched an interactive Web site with all sorts of interesting information about the achievement gap for black boys. Check it out here.
The report contains data not only for the 50 states, but also for their largest school districts. According to Schott's calculations, Maryland's graduation rate for black boys in 2005-2006 was slightly higher than the national average: 55 percent, compared with 47 percent nationally. That's due in part to the fact that Baltimore County reported one of the nation's highest graduation rates for African-American males, 72 percent. Montgomery County's rate was 69 percent and Prince George's was 59 percent. And then there was Baltimore City: 31 percent.
Using data from 2004-2005, the report said white, non-Hispanic boys were admitted to gifted and talented programs in Baltimore at twice the rate of black boys. Four times as many white boys as black participated in math Advanced Placement courses. Nine times as many white boys took science A.P. courses. Although this information is nearly four years old, it highlights the opportunities that have long existed for the small number of white students (less than 10 percent of total enrollment) in the city school system.
The report's release and the Web site launch coincided with this week's UNITY convention of 10,000 journalists of color, who gathered in Chicago.
The Center on Education Policy, a Washington think tank that's become the leading non-partisan analyst on all matters No Child Left Behind, issued a report yesterday that's bound to make Bush administration officials smile. Called "Has Student Achievement Increased Since 2002?: State Test Score Trends Through 2006-07," the report analyzed state test data as well as the results of the only standardized test administered nationwide, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (called NAEP). And it concluded that, yes, for the nation as a whole, test scores are up and achievement gaps have narrowed since the federal law was enacted, though there's still a long way to go.
In Maryland, the report found that the percentage of students passing the standardized tests grew at a "moderate to large rate" in reading and math in nearly every grade level analyzed. The exception was high school math, where -- the report says -- too few years of data were available to determine a trend.
The gap between the performance of Maryland's African-American and white students narrowed in every grade analyzed in reading. In math, that gap narrowed in elementary school but widened in middle school.
A variety of interest groups quickly issued statements reacting to the study's findings. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, criticized the study for not taking into account the results of the international tests known as PISA and PIRLS, which show the performance of American students declining in every grade and subject since the passage of No Child Left Behind. Meanwhile, the nation's largest teachers union, the National Education Association, said the study was proof that American educators are making an impact in spite of NCLB.
I attended a powerful ceremony last Tuesday night in honor of the first three graduates of My Sister's Circle, a program that pairs Baltimore girls leaving elementary school with mentors to see them through their middle and high school years. As you'll see in my story today, the graduates -- Shaniqua Warfield, Antoinella Peterkin and Rickell Sheppard Briggs -- overcame incredible obstacles to finish high school, and now they're all off to college.
For Shaniqua and Rickell, beating the odds involved getting scholarships to boarding school. And Rickell was adopted by the parents of Heather Harvison, founder and executive director of My Sister's Circle. Harvison started the program at the request of Irma Johnson, former principal of Dallas Nicholas Elementary (now the city school system's executive director of elementary schools), who was tired of seeing her female students get pregnant and drop out after they left her at the end of fifth-grade.
I went to Tuesday's ceremony after a day reporting on the uproar over the new middle/high school coming to the Canton Middle School building, a controversy that is, at its core, about some residents' belief that the behavior of a group of students will never change. So it was particularly inspiring that night to meet girls who were not dealt a fair hand in life, but turned themselves around as a result of adults believing in them.
It seemed like everyone in the audience around me was tearing up as Shaniqua, Antoinella and Rickell spoke about their journeys through childhood and adolescence. (I admit I was no exception.) Rickell, who is graduating from Garrison Forest School and will attend college at University of Baltimore, has given me permission to publish her speech (as she typed it before the event) below. The photo above shows her with Harvison as she left the podium.
This month marks the 25th anniversary of "A Nation At Risk," a major report issued by the Reagan administration charging that a failing educational system in the United States was causing the country to lose its competitive edge in the global marketplace.
The Cato Institute, a non-profit research foundation with a libertarian bent, is hosting an online debate about the legacy of the report. Former New York Times columnist Richard Rothstein wrote an essay charging that A Nation At Risk was misleading and "set the nation on a school reform crusade that has done more harm than good." In the next few days, other leading education commentators will be posting responses to Rothstein. On April 16, the site will open for public debate.
I came back from a long vacation to some devastating news.
Natalie Wise Woodson, the education chair for the Maryland chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a retired Baltimore City principal, died Tuesday after a near two-year battle with pancreatic cancer. She was 79.
She was a great advocate for children and was a proponent for closing the achievement gap long before No Child Left Behind mandates. She will be missed.
Mrs. Woodson came from a long line of educators.
At one point during her employment as a principal in Baltimore City, five of her cousins were also principals; four more worked as teachers.
"We were all instilled with the importance of education," she said in an interview I had with her for a profile I wrote about her in June. Mrs. Woodson was also featured on this blog’s Educator Spotlight June 26.
Mrs. Woodson was instrumental in leading several initiatives to help improve student achievement for African-American students.
In 1990 she launched Education Advocates for African Americans, an advocacy organization in which members accompanied African-American parents in Howard County to teacher conferences and meetings about individual education plans. She also worked with the Black Student Achievement Program, another Howard County school system initiative.
In 2000, Mrs. Woodson completed the first NAACP Education Report Card, a comprehensive look at attendance, graduation rate, drop-out rate, suspensions and assessment scores for African-
American students.
I saw Mrs. Woodson just before I went on vacation in December. She was at a Howard County school board meeting talking to board members about improving student achievement.
A viewing will be held Sunday from 3 p.m. – 7 p.m. at Vaughn C. Greene Funeral Home, 4101 Edmondson Avenue at Wildwood Parkway in Baltimore.
Services will be held at 11 a.m. Monday at Celebration Church, 6080 Foreland Garth, in Columbia.
In lieu of flowers, the Mrs. Woodson’s family requests that contributions be made to:
Natalie W. Woodson Scholarship Fund
c/o Mrs. JoAnn Branche
P.O. Box 8621
Elkridge, MD 21075
In my story today, I write about a new study that found middle schools with the greatest needs in Baltimore City and Baltimore and Prince George's counties had the least experienced principals and suffer from high turnover among principals.
The study was done by the Advocates for Children and Youth, a Baltimore-based nonprofit. It looked at middle schools with the highest poverty rates and lowest test scores in the three jurisdictions. It made several disturbing revelations:
In Baltimore City alone, nine of the 10 middle schools that the study examined had at least one change in principal --- and eight of them experienced two or more changes --- from 2003 to 2007. Half of the schools had three or more new principals during that time.
In Baltimore County, where 10 of the district's 27 middle schools were examined, half had at least one change in principal and 20 percent had two or more changes during the five-year period.
And nearly 80 percent of the middle schools evaluated in Prince George's County had at least one change in principal, and one school went through five principals, in the five years.
Booker T. Washington Middle School in Baltimore had four principals during the study's period, while Golden Ring Middle School in Baltimore County has had three.
While some may quibble with whether bonuses are the answer, most everyone agrees that turning around a failing school takes energy and time --- and commitment. The bottom line, it seems, is that school systems need to give the leaders of its most challenging schools a reason to stick around long enough to make a difference.
Or, as Terrylynn Tyrell, the ACY's education director, put it:
"Its a matter of paying now, or paying later. The cost is so much smaller if we pay now."
Click here to read the ACY's full report.
What are your thoughts on this issue?
Faced with planning an academic overhaul of Woodlawn High School, principal Edward D. Weglein acknowledged in a recent interview (in my story this week) that of the strategies being considered, "there's no real perfect answer."
Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, schools that fail to reach state standards after five consecutive years enter the restructuring planning stage. Failing schools must develop a plan to replace most or all of the staff, reopen as a charter school, contract with a private entity or bring in a "distinguished principal" from another district.
With little data on which of the options has proven most successful, Weglein and other school system officials are facing a difficult choice. Teachers are understandably concerned about what this means to their job security. Parents are worried about how this will affect their children.
Which option do you think is the best course of action?
Continue reading "Imperfect choices for overhauling school?" »
A story I wrote for Sunday's Idea section about the achievement gap between African Americans and whites has spurred a number of people to express their views on what is holding back minority and poor students. Do you have any questions about the story you would like answered? I will be happy to post answers today.
Read below to see some of the comments posted an earlier blog entry on the topic, or read these comments about the story posted on baltimoresun.com.
Why, decades after integration and years after a federal law was passed to raise achievement, is there still a persistent gap between African Americans and white students across the state and the nation?
I explore the reasons why the achievement gap persists in a story in the Ideas section of the Sunday newspaper. Some African Americans say families need to stress academics and push their children to succeed.
Do you have a view on what is causing this problem? Maybe you are a teacher who has seen this gap played out in the classrom, maybe you are a parent. What are your thoughts? On Monday I will respond to comments posted here.
As I conducted research for today's story, "Scores in suburbs divided racially," I came across a compelling state report that was published in 1998 and pointed to the very issues that are playing out today in classrooms across the region.
The report, called "Minority Achievement in Maryland: State of the State," was developed by the Maryland State Education That Is Multicultural Advisory Council. It was the state's first comprehensive study of this issue.
Click here to read it and see for yourself how many of the issues that we reported in today's story have been on educators' radars for years.
The Pew Hispanic Center has released a new analysis of public school enrollment data, concluding that black and Latino students became more segregated from white students over a dozen-year period. And Latino students in Maryland became more isolated from their white peers than in any other state.
In the 2005-2006 academic year, 21 percent of Latino students in Maryland attended public schools where the enrollment was virtually all minority. That compares with 7 percent in 1993-1994.
The state's black students became more isolated, too. Maryland's increase in the percentage of black students attending nearly all-minority schools was the fifth highest in the nation, jumping from 32 percent in 1993-1994 to 45 percent last year.
At the same time, in what would appear to be a contradictory finding, the report found that white students nationwide have become less isolated from minority students. That, the report says, is a result of a 55 percent increase in the percentage of the public school population that is Hispanic. Latinos accounted for 19.8 percent of all public school students in the 2005-2006 academic year, compared with 12.7 percent in 1993-1994.
The full report is available at http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=79.
