OVER the past four years, I have worked with a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers to support school reform in several of Baltimore's most troubled zoned high schools. I have witnessed the courage, spirit and dedication of school-based administrators and teachers who are working hard to create more effective learning environments for their students.
The reforms many of these schools are implementing have the potential to place them at the forefront of a national movement in urban high school restructuring. Political and administrative choices made within the school system, however, are now limiting and, in some cases, undermining these efforts. These choices must be examined and their consequences addressed if Baltimore's high schools are going to realize the potential of the reforms they have started.
Attention Baltimore schools chief Robert Booker, school board members and state reconstitution monitors. At least four areas call for re-evaluation:
Better planning. Uncertainty about enrollment and funding occurs every year in Baltimore's schools. A projected enrollment generated in the spring determines the school budget for the next school year. By the middle of October, however, schools are to calculate their actual enrollment and then either receive additional money if they have more students than expected or refund money if they have fewer students.
This is not a major problem for citywide magnet high schools whose selection process makes enrollment rather predictable. But it is a nightmare for the neighborhood zoned schools, which contend with high levels of student mobility. For these schools to improve, they must be able to plan, and effective planning requires a level of certainty and stability. Losing tens of thousands of dollars halfway through the first term in a school year forces principals to eliminate teaching positions (and thereby disrupt student learning at midterm) or, alternatively, gut budgets for building improvements, technology or even basic supplies. An equally bad situation occurs in high schools that receive too little funding for the first two months of school (as Southern did this year). Such schools find themselves understaffed, overwhelmed by students and often unable to recover from a chaotic school opening.
