STANDING at water's edge under a broiling South Baltimore sun yesterday, Mayor Martin O'Malley wiped Patapsco rivulets of perspiration from his face while championing clean air and clean water. But his speech came the day after the state school board hammered the city's public schools. This means O'Malley will now sweat to clear the air about principals and teachers who have not done their job.
Thus does summer vacation commence with another vote of dreary no-confidence in the beleaguered schools. Thus does the city get another reminder, in the midst of so much encouraging news about suburbanites falling in love with renaissance Baltimore, blossoming neighborhoods and booming downtown construction, that the city's enduring Achilles heel goes unhealed. And thus does the Ehrlich administration, lying in wait for O'Malley's gubernatorial challenge, find itself with a switchblade to plunge into O'Malley's hide.
Unless voters can recall the slight history of, say, the last 40 years in those schools.
The day before O'Malley's environmental speech, the state school board lowered the boom. They approved a plan to replace teachers at three city schools that have persistently dismal reading and math test scores, and OK'd restructuring plans for 22 more schools that keep stumbling over those yearly standardized tests.
This, only three weeks after O'Malley called his public school system "one of the biggest turnaround stories of any urban school system in the United States of America."
You can almost hear the Ehrlich political thinkers licking their chops over this one - particularly with political rumors across the state linking Ehrlich and State School Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick. Three years ago, Grasmick turned down Ehrlich overtures to be his running mate. This time around, with Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele pondering a run for the U.S. Senate, Grasmick's name has again surfaced as a possible Ehrlich running mate. Who better to state the case about continuing troubles in Baltimore's schools?
Yesterday, after his speech introducing a so-called Environmental Bill of Rights for Maryland Families - an environment, says O'Malley, made worse by Ehrlich indifference - the mayor took several minutes of questions from reporters. None concerned the environment. A bunch were about the schools.
