School Choice

You all notice that basketball recruit Lance Stephenson says he will announce his school choice next Wednesday at the McDonald's All-American game in Miami? Unless, of course, it's all just an April Fool's joke. (For more, go to baltimoresun.com/ terpsblog)

WHEN A GROUP of researchers reported last week that two or more significant blows to the head can harm a teen-ager's thinking abilities, I didn't hear a peep of protest over the quality of the research or its conclusions.Nor did any organization with a political or ideological agenda yell from the rooftops, "We told you so!"Had the research been about reading, however, it probably would have been a different story. Opinions are so deeply and emotionally rooted that the same research finding can be used to support both sides of a major dispute.

ONLY A MIRACLE will cause Maryland schools to reach the modest performance goals set early in the decade for 2000.And it's too late for a miracle to rescue Goals 2000, a set of targets established a decade ago by President George Bush and endorsed by all 50 U.S. governors.None of Maryland's 24 systems is likely to achieve the goal of scoring 70 percent on the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program tests by 2000. Similarly, none of the eight national standards of Goals 2000 has been met, and in the cases of teacher quality and school safety, the movement is in the wrong direction.

WASHINGTON -- In its potential for social amelioration, the largest domestic event this autumn was nothing done by voters or elected officials. It was the Supreme Court's refusal to review the Wisconsin Supreme Court's ruling that Milwaukee's school-choice program is constitutional. By such steps, liberals are losing their protracted war against poor children.It takes a village of vigilant liberals to keep poor children chained on the plantation of public education. Poor parents are rebellious about their children's assigned role as fodder for one of the Democratic Party's most muscular sources of money, the teachers unions.

WITH CONGRESS debating whether to initiate a federal voucher program for Washington schoolchildren, Baltimoreans have to ask themselves whether that discussion should recur here.When a settlement of a lawsuit demanding better schools appeared remote two years ago, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke preached the virtues of school choice. He said it might be better to give parents that option than sentence their children to Baltimore's poorly performing schools.Mr. Schmoke appointed a task force that issued a report paving the way for a possible voucher experiment.

An article about school choice on yesterday's Opinion Commentary page incorrectly reported some details about school choice legislation. The General Assembly recently passed a bill that calls for a task force to draft legislation to enable Maryland to compete for federal start-up money for public charter schools. Del. John R. Leopold, R-Anne Arundel County, sponsored the measure.Pub Date: 4/30/98

NEW YORK - Twenty-four years after a school district in East Harlem began one of the nation's most extensive experiments in educational competition, a recently released study found that the district's program of allowing students to choose what schools to attend had lifted achievement in all schools and had not created a system of have and have-not schools.The program, which has been used as a model throughout the country, nearly doubled the overall number of schools and created many small schools as alternatives to the customary neighborhood school.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION is taking its licks these days, but a new report shows public colleges in Southern states are losing ground in providing access and opportunity to African-Americans.The report, issued yesterday by the Southern Education Foundation in Atlanta, says that by virtually all measures, efforts to desegregate higher education are lagging in the 19 states, including Maryland, that once operated dual higher education systems.Among highlights of the report, titled "Miles to Go":* Public higher education continues to be segregated in practice, if not by law. While in 1996 blacks accounted for 20 percent of the 18- to-24-year-old population, they made up only 8.6 percent of first-year students at flagship universities.

WILMINGTON, Dela. -- The recent Wisconsin Supreme Court decision upholding a state-funded voucher program for poor schoolchildren that included religious schools accomplishes at least three good things:It gives 15,000 children from low-income families in Milwaukee an opportunity to escape terrible public schools and a chance to get a decent education.It establishes a legal precedent that can help encourage tax-funded school voucher scholarships elsewhere.It will force Milwaukee public schools to compete for students, and thus improve.

An article about school choice on yesterday's Opinion Commentary page incorrectly reported some details about school choice legislation. The General Assembly recently passed a bill that calls for a task force to draft legislation to enable Maryland to compete for federal start-up money for public charter schools. Del. John R. Leopold, R-Anne Arundel County, sponsored the measure.BALTIMORE public schools' $11 million deficit and accompanying budget cuts underscore the system's failure to educate the city's children.

Anne Arundel County is planning to build an elementary school in the western part of the county to help ease overcrowding. The Board of Education gave the school system authority last week to proceed with plans for the county's first "contract" school, which is similar to a charter school but is not bound by state charter school laws and allows the school system to define the attendance parameters of the school. The county's charter schools are open to any student in the county. The Imagine Global Village Academy Public Contract School, planned as a K-8 school in Laurel to open in 2011, will help alleviate crowding at Brockbridge, Maryland City and Jessup elementary schools and anticipated future attendance increases because of the BRAC resettlement.

The Chesapeake Science Point Public Charter School, a four-year-old Anne Arundel County middle school that has emerged as an academic jewel even as it has struggled to adhere to school system policies, hosted a ribbon-cutting Tuesday for its new $1.3 million facility. "It was always our plan to move into a bigger building," said Fatih Kandil, principal of the school in Hanover. "And we did have some ups and downs, but our outcome today is telling us we are on the right track. We are accomplishing our goals."

As many of you know, Sunday was the 55th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Fifty-five years later, with some notable exceptions (City Neighbors Charter comes immediately to mind), many of our schools in Baltimore and urban centers around the nation are still separate and unequal. Jonathan Kozol used the word "apartheid" when he came to Baltimore not long ago. This is no longer because of legal segregation, but because of the housing choices that we make - choices that evolved partly to avoid the Brown mandate.

You all notice that basketball recruit Lance Stephenson says he will announce his school choice next Wednesday at the McDonald's All-American game in Miami? Unless, of course, it's all just an April Fool's joke. (For more, go to baltimoresun.com/ terpsblog)

Glad to see demise of wall-free schools The Baltimore Sun's article on the demise of open-space schools struck me as anti-climactic ("Across Md., a call for classrooms with walls," Nov. 2). Open-space schools, or classrooms without walls, were thought to be a panacea for many of the environmental and other headaches facing schools in the 1970s. I vividly remember visiting an open-space Baltimore County school in the early 1970s with several of my colleagues, and those in my group unanimously agreed that the place was chaotic and badly managed.

ARLINGTON, Va. -- The death last week of Milton Friedman, "the grandmaster of free-market economic theory," as The New York Times accurately labeled him, ended a great life. But there was another Milton Friedman many obituary writers overlooked, or mentioned only in passing, that may offer him an even greater legacy than his economic theories about limited government. In the last 10 of his 94 years, Mr. Friedman and his wife, Rose, dedicated themselves to school choice. They viewed it as a companion to economic freedom.

WASHINGTON -- What if you took junior high school-age boys, rated as "high risk" in their low-income, high-crime, urban neighborhood, and plopped them down in a low-enrollment, high-quality school in rural Africa? That's the premise behind the Baraka School, a project put together in Kenya by American volunteers and foundations for early teen boys from Baltimore. A year in the lives of one group from Baltimore is chronicled in The Boys of Baraka, a critically acclaimed documentary by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady that played briefly in theaters last year.

New charter schools help few students The column "Road map to better schools" (Opinion * Commentary, Dec. 27) correctly expresses frustration with the efficacy of education reform efforts in Baltimore and elsewhere. Unfortunately, the antidote the writers offer to the piecemeal efforts that have been tried to date is equally disjointed. One reform the column mentions as a key to success is charter schools. Charter schools can offer some individual successes. Unfortunately, many students and families cannot or will not participate in school choice options such as charter schools.

School choice is working for city families Contrary to the suggestion of the new Governor's Commission on Quality Education, Maryland's largest school district already has a school choice process ("Charter schools on panel's agenda," Sept. 28). While legislators and educators argue over vouchers and charter schools, many middle-class families in Baltimore move to the counties. The more affluent often send their children to private schools. But a small number of disadvantaged Baltimore children (about 600)

More than two years after the federal No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law, states are having problems implementing the initiative designed to raise student achievement, particularly a provision that allows pupils to transfer from struggling schools. "To be very frank, the law was not written by people who understand the way a school system operates," said Rae Ellen Levene, a Howard County schools administrator. Levene and her counterparts in other school districts across Maryland are wrestling with the "public school choice" provision of the law, which allows pupils in failing elementary and middle schools that receive certain federal funds to transfer to better-performing schools.