National Standards

Baltimore County school leaders disregarded advice from state officials and forged ahead to overhaul the teaching of English, spending more than $5 million over the past few years to buy textbooks that mostly sit unused and to rewrite a curriculum that has been shelved. The system spent about $2.2 million on a 27-year-old grammar textbook with outdated references to encyclopedias and almanacs, both barely used by today's students, according to school system documents. The textbook and accompanying workbooks remained in a warehouse for nearly a year, and school officials acknowledged they are just now being delivered.

Baltimore Fire Chief James S. Clack announced Friday that he will step down, ending a five-year tenure in which he oversaw historic lows in fire deaths but implemented budget cuts that critics said compromised safety. Clack, 52, the first chief hired from outside the department's ranks, said in an interview that he is resigning in July to be closer to family in Minnesota. He said this year's budget is the first he's had without substantial cuts, and he wants to leave on a high note.

For generations, music students have been getting gold stars, certificates and other pats on the back from their teachers. But a budding musician with high marks in one state is not necessarily on the same level, judged by the same criteria, as a budding musician in another. Such positive reinforcement may soon carry a lot more weight countrywide. Launched by Carnegie Hall in New York and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, the Achievement Program seeks to establish the first national standard in the United States for measuring musical aptitude in students of all ages.

Brad Herling received a surprisingly warm reaction several years ago when he banned cupcakes and candy during holiday parties in the name of health at Clarksville Elementary School in Howard County. He's being welcomed with equally open arms this school year as he prepares to lead Centennial Lane Elementary School in the same direction. Parents at his new school have been waging their own war on childhood obesity with a campaign to limit the number of sweet and high-fat snacks served during lunch.

Imagine an America without standards -- no weights and measures, anyone who likes drives a car, airline pilots who are long on enthusiasm but short on skills, self-declared brain surgeons, basketball players who can dribble but not shoot. It's a hair-raising vision, but exactly the situation we face in our nation's schools.Alone among the industrialized nations, America has no national education standards. The product of our frontier past, "local control" is a venerated, even mythical tradition.

Our view: What Ronald Peiffer, the deputy state superintendent, said he could not conceive of just nine years ago has happened. Forty-six states, D.C., Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands all agreed, at least conceptually, that classrooms ought to be teaching toward the same set of high standards. For nearly the past decade, the country has been trying to ensure that every child got a minimum education. Now it appears we are moving to recognize that the minimum is not enough and that we have to raise our expectations if we are going to compete with foreign countries.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed standard definitions for the terms recycled and recyclable, marketing claims increasingly used on retail items.Complaints from consumer groups, businesses and state officials generals across the country prompted the EPA to move a little closer to creating national standards for using language that claim products are environmentally safe.The announcement came yesterday at a EPA-sponsored conference in Baltimore on environmental labeling which ends today.

Students in Maryland and the rest of the nation perform slightly better on the second "R" than they do on the first one, but their writing and reading skills are far below national standards, according to results released yesterday of the latest national writing assessment.Twenty-three percent of Maryland eighth-graders showed they have a complete mastery of necessary writing skills on the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress, and 1 percent scored at an advanced level -- about the national average in both categories.

The first comprehensive study of the nation's charter schools was published recently by the Center for Research and Educational Outcomes at Stanford University. The findings make it clear that students in traditional public schools do as well academically or surpass their charter school counterparts. According to the study of charter school students, 37 percent scored significantly lower in reading and math than similar students in traditional public schools; 46 percent were comparable to the local public schools; and 17 percent showed better results than students in the traditional schools.

National experts say the Columbia Association's (CA) purchasing practices often fall short of the accepted standards of government and private business in five key ways:Phone bidsIn the fiscal year that ended in May, the CA took phone bids for 68 capital projects worth approximately $120,000, its records show. In every case, CA staff members didn't record with whom they spoke. In about 30 cases, they didn't record the dates of the bids.The Sun examined 22 of those phone bids. Of 44 purported runners-up, 16 said they had not bid for the project, four said they were almost certain they had not bid, and 14 said they couldn't recall whether they had bid. (Seven said they had bid, and three could not be reached)