It might already be familiar to many of you reading, but... it's a pretty big deal that more than 20 advocacy groups are joining forces on behalf of Baltimore schools. I don't know that the city has ever had this kind of organization before.

The first fight for the Baltimore Education Coalition is, of course, school funding. As you'll see in my story today, the stimulus will put a lot of money into city schools. But for now at least, Gov. O'Malley isn't backing down from his proposed changes to education funding formulas that would disproportionately hurt Baltimore and Prince George's County. Coalition members have vowed to bring out up to 3,000 people for a rally in Annapolis March 3.

Posted by Sara Neufeld at 6:05 AM in Baltimore City, School Rankings (aka, Real Estate Prices) | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
                       

The latest Newsweek rankings of the top 1,000 schools in the nation are out, and, predictably, county school districts are sending out news releases announcing how many of their high schools are in the top 5 percent of schools nationwide. Maryland has 77 high schools on the list. The top seven are in the Washington suburbs. Then come Broadneck, Towson, Centennial and River Hill high schools in that order. Baltimore County has 10 high schools on the list, and Montgomery County has 23.

But perhaps the real question is not who is No. 1 or No. 352, but whether the rankings are relevant to parents whose children attend those schools. The list seems one way to consider the quality of a high school, but it is not the only measure of how successful it is.

The list is put together by Jay Matthews, a Washington Post reporter who developed the system for the rankings a number of years ago. He develops a number for each high school by taking the total number of Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests given at a school in May, and dividing by the number of seniors graduating in May or June.

About 5 percent of 27,000 high schools make the list.

What the list doesn't calculate is how the students do on the exams. So at times schools appear on the list that don't have very high pass rates but give a lot of the tests. A number of people have argued with Matthews about this over the years, saying that the quality of the classes may be poor but that the school could get a high rating.

On the other hand, Matthews argues back, giving schools credit for high test scores would only encourage them from weeding out less strong students from the courses or the exams.

"The Challenge Index honors schools that have done the best job in persuading average students to take college level courses and tests. It does not work with schools that have no, or almost no, average students. The idea is to create a list that measures how good schools are in challenging all students, and not just how high their students' test scores are," Matthews writes on the Newsweek Web site.

For a list of the Maryland schools and how they rank, go here. 

Posted by Liz Bowie at 2:36 PM in School Rankings (aka, Real Estate Prices) | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
                       

Gina’s post, which generated an insane number of comments last week, got me questioning whether teachers should be paid in relation to their students' academic performance.

Pay for performance is not a new concept nationally. Several states have flirted with the idea for years. Utah and Florida immediately come to mind.

But is it fair?

Do teachers in Howard County have the right to argue that they should be paid in relation to the standardized test scores that their students earn? Howard County students continually rank among the top in the state for standardized test scores even though Howard County ranks fourth in the state for starting teacher pay.

(Let me play devil’s advocate for a second.)

Should teachers in less affluent areas be paid more because they typically have to confront some of the problems that face many of our urban school systems: crime, poverty, a breakdown in the traditional family structure, less resources, etc.?

Should suburban teachers simply shut up because their students come to school with less baggage? Is that their payoff? In the ranking game, someone has to occupy slots one through 24… 

Posted by John-John Williams IV at 10:15 AM in Around the Nation, School Rankings (aka, Real Estate Prices), Teaching | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)
                       

Maryland schools rank third in the nation, behind New York and Massachusetts, according to a report released this week by Education Week.

Ed Week has been putting out its annual Quality Counts report for the past decade, but it has recently revamped the analysis to include more issues. It looked at a variety of categories from how well a child's chance of success in different states, as well as kindergarten to 12th grade achievement. In achievement the state ranked second.

The well-regarded education weekly particularly highlighted the teaching profession this year. An in-depth study compared teacher pay to 16 other similar occupations. The median income in the other occupations was $50,784 while the median income for teachers around the country is $44,690. What that means is that teachers earn about 88 cents for every dollar that those in comparable jobs earn. Maryland teachers are even farther from parity, earning 87 cents on the dollar.

Although it did well in other catagories, the state's schools didn't rank so well in several categories of teaching. For instance, Maryland is one of only three states that doesn't assign teachers an identification number. The number would allow a state to link student test scores to specific teachers. Some school districts are now rewarding teachers for their students' performance.

Maryland scored first on Education Alignment Policies. Say what? That means that Maryland has good policies in place that try to make sure that a student is prepared at every step of the way. So the standards for what students should learn in pre-school make sense in terms of what they will need to know when they reach first grade and so on as far as getting to college or into the workforce.

There is much more of interest on the report at Education Week.

Posted by Liz Bowie at 8:00 AM in School Rankings (aka, Real Estate Prices) | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
                       

With the holiday rush and cold season upon us, I didn't have a chance to comment last week on the appointment of East Baltimore's Cecil Elementary as a Maryland Blue Ribbon school. But here's something that struck me about the award:  

At the city school board meeting earlier this month, the board named a new principal of the school, Roxanne Forr. Forr is only the fifth principal that Cecil has had in 42 years of existence, according to a school system press release. That means each of the school leaders has lasted an average of nearly a decade.

Ninety percent of the students at Cecil receive free or reduced-price lunch. Ninety-one percent of the students passed the state reading test last spring. Ninety-six percent passed in math.

People ask how a school serving such an impoverished population can get those kind of results. Judging by the track record at Cecil and at George Washington Elementary (the national Blue Ribbon school in Pigtown), the answer seems pretty simple: a great principal who sticks around for a long time.

Here's hoping that Forr (who replaced James Drummond) can keep a good thing going...

Posted by Sara Neufeld at 8:05 AM in Administration, Baltimore City, School Rankings (aka, Real Estate Prices) | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
                       

The Baltimore-Towson area comes in at No. 4 on a recent Forbes.com list that ranks the Top 20 Places to Educate Your Children.

School support, private school options, library popularity, "college town," and college options were the five key factors used in drawing up the list. (Read the full article here). The Washington, D.C.-Arlington, Va., area topped the list. Durham, N.C. was No. 20.

The top 10 include:

1. Washington, D.C.-Arlington, Va.
2. Madison, Wis.
3. Cambridge-Newton-Framingham, Mass.
4. Baltimore-Towson
5. Akron, Ohio
6. Columbus, Ohio
7. Albany-Schenectady-Troy, N.Y.
8. Syracuse, N.Y.
9. St. Louis, Mo.
10. Ann Arbor, Mich.

Posted by Gina Davis at 12:28 PM in Around the Nation, Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Parents, School Choice, School Rankings (aka, Real Estate Prices) | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
                       

Last month, we told you in The Sun and on this blog about the high schools labeled "dropout factories" by Johns Hopkins University and the Associated Press. One of them was Baltimore's Edmondson-Westside High School.

Now, U.S. News and World Report has issued a list of what it calls the nation's "best high schools." And guess what? Edmondson-Westside is on that one, too.

The newsmagazine named 1,600 high schools either gold, silver or bronze medalists based on whether they "exceed statistical expectations" on tests given their level of student poverty, their test scores for disadvantaged student groups, and their students' participation in, and performance on, A.P. exams. Edmondson-Westside won a bronze medal. Another school in that category also raised my eyebrows: Laurence G. Paquin Middle/High, the city's school for pregnant girls and teenage moms. Don't get me wrong: Paquin is providing some wonderful services for a vulnerable population. But many of its students aren't even there long enough to take the annual standardized tests, and those who are tested have posted extremely low scores.

This, from the source that brings us the annual college rankings over which the nation obsesses.

Not that the "dropout factory" rankings are necessarily any more credible. One school on that list, which looked at the number of ninth graders who graduated four years later, was Ft. Meade High. Apparently the people doing the rankings didn't take into account the fact that the school serves a lot of military families who move frequently.

Still wondering which Maryland high schools U.S. News calls the nation's best? Keep reading.

Continue reading "A dropout factory or one of the nation's best?" »

Posted by Sara Neufeld at 6:00 AM in Around the Region, Baltimore City, School Rankings (aka, Real Estate Prices) | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
                       

Congratulations to this year's National Blue Ribbon schools from Maryland, just announced by the U.S. Department of Education. They are: George Washington Elementary in Baltimore, Burleigh Manor Middle and River Hill High in Howard County, Hereford Middle and Red House Run Elementary in Baltimore County, and St. Andrew Apostle School and Winston Churchill High in Montgomery County.

Posted by Sara Neufeld at 10:19 AM in School Rankings (aka, Real Estate Prices) | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
                       

   Want to see where Maryland's best-performing students hang out? Want to see how your neighborhood schools stack up? We have ranked all the elementary and middle schools in the state based on the number of students who performed at Advanced levels in the Maryland School Assessment. Go to baltimoresun.com/msa and you can look up a series of reports on line. You will be able to search for schools in the databases or click on to the PDF files that give you listings already sorted.

   Some of the reports were also printed in yesterday's paper with a story that looks at what the highest performing schools in the state have in common: a stable workforce of well trained teachers who feel they have a say in finding new strategies to improve the school, a variety of after school activities and programs for gifted students.

 We spend a lot of time focusing on whether schools have enough students passing the MSAs, but in fact, many schools are doing so well that they are now looking at how to get more students score at the advanced levels.

The schools in this catagory are those that parents seek out when they are deciding which house to buy.

Posted by Liz Bowie at 12:25 PM in School Rankings (aka, Real Estate Prices) | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
                       

The current issue of Newsweek includes the magazine's annual list of "America's best high schools." And the schools that are on that list have been quick to tout themselves as, well, America's best.

But, as even the study's authors acknowledge, the methodology behind the rankings can be a bit precarious. The rankings measure how many students at a school are taking college-level exams from Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge, presumably indicating the number of students who can handle college-level material. But taking exams doesn't mean passing exams. If a school had all its kids taking A.P. tests, and none of its kids passing, it could still be ranked number one.

Also curious: The magazine, which published the top 100 schools in its print issue and the top 1,200 online, lists whether the schools have made "adequate yearly progress" on the annual standardized tests required under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. And some 20 percent of the top 100 did not. So a school could make the list while simultaneously facing government sanctions for low performance. I know, many schools fail to make AYP based on the scores of a handful of special education students. But the point is, which ranking system is the public to believe? If any at all?

Baltimore City College -- which administers lots of I.B. exams as part of an I.B. program -- was ranked the nation's 246th best high school. Rival Polytechnic Institute, which routinely outscores City on standardized tests, was No. 1,100.

The only Maryland jurisdiction with schools in the top 100 was Montgomery County, where five schools made the grade, and every eligible school in the district made the bigger list. The press release is on the school system's Web site.

In Baltimore County, there was great fanfare two years ago when Pikesville High made the top 100. (It was No. 99.) This year, officials didn't dwell on the fact that Pikesville had fallen to No. 274: Ten county schools have made it in the top 1,200, up from seven in 2005.

Posted by Sara Neufeld at 9:05 AM in School Rankings (aka, Real Estate Prices) | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)