POVERTY IS a hindrance to school achievement.
"Thanks," you say cynically. "Tell me something else I didn't know."
Clarence N. Stone, however, thinks it's necessary to repeat the truism for the benefit of Montgomery County.
Again this year, the wealthiest school district this side of the Bay Bridge is playing Blame That Victim in the General Assembly. The victim is Baltimore.
Stone knows what he's talking about. A professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, he heads an 11-city study, "Civic Capacity and Urban Education," financed by the National Science Foundation.
Drawing on the findings of that study, Stone has written an essay titled "No County Is an Island."
"Almost totally missing in the public debate is any serious analysis of the special problem of urban education: concentrated poverty," Stone writes. "There is a strong possibility, then, that the central education problem will go largely unexamined."
Stone is talking about "concentrated" poverty, which he says affects student performance "above and beyond what would be predicted by simply aggregating the number of students below the poverty level."
In other words, poor kids are pulled down by their poverty -- and further by the poverty around them.
Stone, who lives in Montgomery, says he wrote the essay because "I wanted to bring the focus back to where it belongs, on the greater challenges facing urban districts like Baltimore."
The professor uses the sport of diving as an analogy.
In diving, performance is judged by the quality of execution and by the degree of difficulty.
If Montgomery and Baltimore are compared by degree of difficulty, Stone argues, Montgomery loses much of its shine.
Indeed, students in the relatively few pockets of poverty in Montgomery aren't setting the world afire in the Maryland School Performance tests.
(The same is true, by the way, in other suburban districts in Maryland.)
Montgomery partisans -- in what has become an annual scramble for special attention from the General Assembly -- used to argue that Baltimore didn't deserve extra money until it got its managerial house in order. But then last year's General Assembly ordered a housecleaning.
The new city-state partnership, though it has a long way to go before test scores begin improving, has restored a measure of accountability to city school operations.
In Plato's "Republic," says Stone, Socrates asks about the nature of justice, and Thrasymachus replies that it is nothing more than the interest of the stronger. Montgomery has more people and a larger school enrollment than Baltimore, and it's beginning to flex its political muscles.
In the debate over school funding, says Stone, Blair Lee IV, former lobbyist for Montgomery, "appears to have assumed Thrasymachus' role. Everything comes down to electoral clout."
But the cynical argument that justice is simply the interest of the stronger does not sit well with some smaller districts, Stone says, and in the long run Montgomery might regret posing it. The county is feeling urban stress.
Early next decade, he asks, "Is it possible down-county Montgomery [bordering Washington] will have large areas of concentrated poverty, for which state-targeted funds will be much needed?"
Baltimore is far from unique among urban districts, Stone says, stating, "Everywhere you look around the country, suburbanites are saying, 'Look at those problems in the city. What's wrong with those people?' "
As for reform, Stone places Baltimore roughly in the middle of the 11 urban districts he and his colleagues have been studying since 1993.
"Teachers unions in some cities have been part of the solution, not the problem, and that doesn't seem to have happened in Baltimore," he says.
"But," he adds, "there are a lot of people and organizations -- BUILD [Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development], the Greater Baltimore Committee, the Abell Foundation, Mayor [Kurt L.] Schmoke and [Del. Howard P.] Pete Rawlings -- who have made education a high priority."
Pub Date: 2/18/98
