December 07, 1998|By Nettie Legters
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.
This system fosters a depressed, survivalist attitude that defeats constructive reform. It also punishes schools whose reform efforts have succeeded in retaining and promoting unexpectedly high numbers of ninth-graders as some schools have. Also, it creates an incentive for schools to keep chronic truants on the rolls, making the schools' attendance numbers look worse than they should. Solutions may simply lie in changing the timing of the enrollment leveling process or in providing more information to central office employees who produce the projections.
* A two-tier system. Baltimore has a two-tiered high school system. The magnet schools have a carefully monitored selection process; the remaining students attend the nine zoned high schools. This leaves the zoned schools with the challenge of educating the city's most troubled and least academically motivated students. It also creates a career ladder of sorts, where many teachers and administrators are eager to move to the citywide schools once they've "done their time" at a zoned school. Thankfully, some talented teachers and administrators choose to remain in the zoned schools. But this constant change and brain drain in the two-tiered system wreaks havoc on reform efforts in the zoned schools and deprives the neediest students of access to some of the city's best teaching resources.
The two-tiered system also leaves the students and adults in zoned high schools feeling, at best, like second-class citizens. And, at times, the system treats them that way. For example, a plan to transform Walbrook High School into a citywide magnet school will likely double enrollment at Southwestern High School -- a plan that was crafted with virtually no input from Southwestern administrators or staff and that will put great pressure on its own emerging reform initiative.
If this has been planned out of mere ignorance of the positive changes occurring at Southwestern, then I recommend that Mr. Booker and school board members visit the school. While I do not view eliminating citywide magnet schools as a viable, or even desirable, solution, the disastrous consequences of this two-tiered system for the zoned schools must be named and ameliorated.
