Academic Progress

Baltimore City Community College - which has the lowest graduation and transfer rates of any community college in the state - has made little academic progress over the past two years and failed to carry out recommendations that might have helped it improve, according to a new report. The report, from the nonprofit Abell Foundation, outlines a litany of failure: Only 341 students graduated last year, 94 percent of entering students need remedial courses and nearly $700,000 has been spent on a computer program with no assessment of its effectiveness.

For Anne Arundel County public schools, this was supposed to have been a year of expansion and team-building. But budget constraints, internal politics and public controversies have slowed the progress of the 76,000-student school system headed by Eric J. Smith, a nationally recognized schools chief from Charlotte, N.C., in his second year as Anne Arundel's superintendent. Last fall, school officials rolled out several initiatives to shake up the system, which ranks average in academic performance in the state and suffers from a persistent achievement gap between white and minority students.

Of the 2,200 pupils eligible to transfer from six struggling Howard County schools, fewer than 2 percent exercised the option this year, Board of Education members learned during their meeting last night. "Most of the parents do not want to [transfer]," said move coordinator Rae Ellen Levene, adding that the school system does not try to sell the option. "We don't discourage, and we don't encourage," Levene said. "We just trust our parents to do what's best for their children." This is the second year such switches have been allowed under the Public School Choice section of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which states that parents may pull their children from certain schools with low test scores.

ASK VETERAN Baltimore principal Edna Greer about budget cuts that affect class and staff size: Some of her primary-grade classrooms at Leith Walk Elementary held 25, 26, 27 children this year. With about 970 students sardine-packed into a Northeast Baltimore building designed for 600, the staff made do; it hung a homemade curtain to divide a room into two class areas. Yet reading and math test scores leaped at every grade level. "We had to spin the straw into gold," she says, knowing she'll be expected to repeat that feat with fewer resources and potentially larger classes in the fall.

TODAY MARKS MY first Neighbors column for Northwest Carroll. As a Uniontown resident, I have always made it a point to read Judy Reilly's weekly column. We will all miss Judy, and I have big shoes to fill. Many of you who kept in touch with Judy will receive calls and visits from me. One of the first things I wanted to do was to introduce myself to the principals of the six schools in this area. My visits yielded so many good stories I felt as if I were back in Florida covering the school beat for the newspaper I used to work for. The day I called Mary Stong, principal of Elmer A. Wolfe Elementary School in Union Bridge, she was very happy.

The NCAA yesterday announced dozens of proposed reforms designed to clean up college basketball. Linking scholarship allotments to graduation rates and lessening the importance of AAU tournaments in the recruiting process were among the recommendations of a 27-person committee, which spent 10 months studying the game and its ills.Some of the committee's recommendations could become NCAA rules as early as the 2000-2001 school year."We asked these folks to be `practical idealists,' " said Kenneth Shaw, the Syracuse chancellor who chaired the Division I Working Group to Study Basketball Issues.

Impressed with the first-semester progress of 18 Baltimore boys at a new private boarding school in Kenya, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke has pledged about $68,000 this year to their continuing education.The money will be shifted from the public school budget to support the nonprofit Baraka School, which opened in September on ranch land more than three hours north of Nairobi.All 18 students -- ages 11, 12 and 13 -- were recruited by Baraka from Baltimore middle schools. Schmoke has agreed to send to the private school the city allocation that would have funded their public education.

Education Alternatives, the Minneapolis company that manages public schools for profit, says it has overstated the academic progress of students attending the schools it manages in Baltimore.In an admission that is sure to fuel the debate over the privatization of public schools, Education Alternatives said yesterday its error in reporting the Baltimore test scores had been "completely unintentional." It corrected the error yesterday; the mistake was reported last weekend by the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The college basketball season that ends Monday night began in November under the cloud of a possible boycott by members of the Black Coaches Association.The BCA was able to make its point regarding minority opportunities to the NCAA in meetings that were mediated by the U.S. Justice Department. The executive secretary of the NCAA isn't making any promises, but the feeling within the BCA and the larger National Association of Basketball Coaches is that the il,7p,14l higher standards for freshman eligibility scheduled for adoption in 1995 will be revised.