With the hope that private management will do a better job than bureaucrats, the Baltimore school board is expected to approve today plans from nonprofit groups to run nine public schools.
Chosen from 38 applicants, the winners include community groups that want to manage City Springs, Gilmor, Pinderhughes, Kelson and Thomas Jefferson elementaries in September.
In addition, one plan would convert a West Baltimore private school into a city public school. Three others would start new city schools that would draw enrollment from existing schools.
Getting a green light from the school board today would allow the venture to proceed, but there is much work to be done before city contracts can be awarded to the would-be school operators.
Set to open in September after less than a year of planning and development, these schools would be monitored as incubators of teaching experiments and as models that might be duplicated throughout the school system, said George Merrill, director of the program.
"Maybe this is a good way to manage schools in general, or maybe there will be specific practices or successes that we can learn from and expand to other schools," Merrill said of the New Schools program, which is backed by the school system and the Abell Foundation.
Originally conceived as a way to attract experts to schools that failed to comply with federal laws governing education for disabled students, the program was expanded to encourage other nonprofit-public partnerships.
This latest school management experiment would create hybrids, privately managed but publicly funded city schools tied to the central office by management contracts but independently choosing their staffs and curricula.
They will not quite be charter schools, the independent but publicly funded schools recently endorsed by President Clinton.
Maryland, unlike about 25 other states, has no legislation allowing public money to be spent to create independent schools. But the concept of public schools operating apart from central office control is similar.
Baltimore learned hard lessons about contracted management during the three years that for-profit Education Alternatives Inc. ran nine city schools. Separately, the school system allowed the Stadium School to open with parents and teachers at the helm.
This latest venture draws on lessons from both experiences: Only nonprofits were permitted to apply, and all the applicants were required to show that they would have strong ties to parents.
