Calvert Curriculum

Four years ago, parents, teachers and leaders in the community around Baltimore's public Barclay Elementary School took a look at the curriculum of the private Calvert School, liked what they saw and approached the North Avenue administration about entering into a partnership with Calvert.The reaction was hostile. True, the Calvert curriculum had stood the test of nearly a century, but it hadn't been worked over by curriculum committees, passed through the bureaucratic hoops and approved by then-Superintendent Richard Hunter.

Three years ago, Barclay School in Charles Village entered a partnership with Baltimore's private Calvert School. The world-famous Calvert curriculum, first developed for home study during a turn-of-the-century whooping cough epidemic, was instituted grade-by-grade starting with kindergarten and first grade.The Abell Foundation financed the partnership over the strenuous objections of School Superintendent Richard Hunter, who lost his job (with a huge assist from Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke) in large part because he played the narrow-minded bureaucrat in the Barclay-Calvert affair.

YOU HAVE to understand, there is no school system. At best, what you have in Baltimore is a loose confederation of schools."So said Richard C. Hunter, former city school superintendent, a few months after his arrival here amid great anticipation that he might lead a dramatic turnaround in Baltimore schools.Hunter was right, of course. But his feeble response to that loose confederation in large part contributed to his downfall. He tried to tame that undisciplined conglomeration by "reorganizing" the bureaucracy and forcing the schools to fit into a neatly aligned structure.