While the overwhelming majority of city schools posted improved MSA scores over last year, several showed declines, including Falstaff Elementary in Northwest Baltimore, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Elementary in Upton and Harriet Tubman Elementary in Harlem Park.
The generally large gains in Baltimore and Prince George's County, which have large populations of poor and black students, contributed to a significant narrowing of the so-called "achievement gap" across the state. Maryland scores on the MSA, a test given in grades three through eight, improved statewide for the fifth year in a row.
City elementary schools have been making incremental progress for the past several years, but the scores released this week, particularly for middle schools, left many wondering how an urban system long associated with dysfunction managed to post such dramatic gains in a single year.
"I've been asked a hundred times already," a beaming Alonso said. "Why? Why? What do you attribute this to?"
The answer, according to the schools chief and his principals and teachers, is complex and not subject to any silver-bullet theory. Alonso attributed the academic improvement partly to investments in early childhood education that preceded his arrival in Baltimore last year but also to "the extraordinary sense of urgency that we have exhibited in the district this year, with a great focus on accountability and expectations."
School principals said adherence to a statewide instructional curriculum - coupled with intensive monitoring of individual students and engagement with their parents - probably were behind the test score gains.
At the Crossroads School, where 90 percent of students are poor enough to receive free or subsidized lunches, the percentage of eighth-graders scoring "proficient" or "advanced" on the math MSA rose from 32 percent in 2007 to 67 percent in 2008.
Citywide, only 28 percent of eighth-graders were proficient or better on the math test, up from 24 percent last year.
"We just got smarter about making sure that our students could demonstrate mastery on any measure," said Crossroads Principal Marc Martin. In addition to assessing his roughly 150 students every day, Martin expanded hourlong "acceleration" classes in which students were grouped every day according to their particular needs and drilled on those subjects.
