Riding high on recent improvements in student test scores, Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso says special education in the city should be subject to less court oversight under a decades-old lawsuit.
State Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick also says there's been improvement, and she'd like to see the court begin transferring responsibilities back to the state, which monitors special education in Maryland's other 23 school districts. "If we were talking about the Cold War, we would normalize the operation," she said.
The city school system and the state education department are defendants in a 1984 federal class action suit filed on behalf of students with disabilities.
In a required update to U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis filed this month, the school system does not officially ask for relief but says it is turning around under the leadership of Alonso, who became CEO in July 2007. The filing, which Alonso described as "aggressive," goes beyond the specifics of the case to describe scores of new initiatives, from reorganizing the central office to giving principals more autonomy to revising curriculum. As evidence that reform is beginning to take hold, it cites the improved test scores.
Though their academic performance still lags, the city's special education students improved more than the student body as a whole on this year's standardized tests for children in third through eighth grades. And city students improved more than their peers across the state.
"The dramatic gains in achievement and other outcomes for students overall, and for special education students in particular, are expected to continue or accelerate due to a series of bold new reforms under the direction of Dr. Alonso," the court papers say.
But the tests do not measure the performance of high school students, and the system's secondary schools have had more problems in special education than have elementary schools. To get out from under the consent decree that's been in place since 1988, the system must show it can sustain improvement. It's too soon to know whether many of Alonso's initiatives will work; nearly a third of city schools have new principals this year.
The parties in the suit seem to agree there's been progress, but they disagree about how much. A state monitoring report issued last month found improvement, but not the same extent as the system claims.
