State seizure of local schools is an attempt by the governor and his appointed State Board of Education to centralize power while decentralizing responsibility.
It's the final step of the Maryland School Performance Program, a blame-shifting scheme that holds the individual school responsible for low student test scores, as if the school were an independent enterprise controlled by its faculty.
Nothing, of course, is further from the truth. Take, for example, the first two high schools the State Board of Education has marked for seizure. Both are Baltimore "zoned" schools that must take whatever students show up at the door. But their students are not a cross section of the high-school-age population in their attendance zone or the city at large. They are what's left over after "creaming."
Denied authority to set any entrance requirements, these two high schools -- Frederick Douglass and Patterson -- must take children who cannot make it into the "citywide" academic and trade schools, which admit students according to rank by test scores and attendance records.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out, then, why the zoned schools score low on state tests. The school board has a policy of assigning them lower-ranked kids. So, these schools will, by design, have more problems than the schools the board doesn't send problem kids to.
Douglass High, for example, could instantly get off the seizure list by a simple shift in the way the school board assigns students to schools. High-scoring City College high school could end up on the bottom, and low-scoring Douglass shoot to the top. Test scores are measures of student, not faculty, performance -- as anyone who has attended school knows.
By threatening the local school with state seizure and privatization, the governor and his business buddies on the state board cast the blame on the institution least able to deliver the extra taxation, resources and services needed to offset the disadvantages that poor, low-scoring kids bring to school. It's a strategy to avert the blame at the top. After refusing to set, fund and enforce opportunity-to-learn standards for kids of the underclass, they demand that these kids meet the same performance standards as more advantaged children -- or else.
