Tag Archives: Maryland

Knowing that teacher quality is so essential to successful student learning, Colorado’s lawmakers and education officials should be doing more to enact policies that promote teacher autonomy, excellence, and accountability. The Maryland Public Policy Institute does just that with its new report calling for “Teachers as Entrepreneurs” (PDF). The idea? Instead of placing all instructors under the terms of a centralized bargaining contract, allow for some individual teachers or teams of teachers to contract with a school district to perform instructional services. Either union or non-union, they could agree on setting terms regarding class size, basic working conditions, performance and differential pay, and retirement plans. This approach would give individual teachers greater freedom to determine whether they want to support and subsidize political activities. It would require state law to take a neutral position on the issue of unionization and exclusive representation.

Alexander Russo at This Week in Education reports that the city of Baltimore threw a party to celebrate some dramatic improvements in student achievement: No doubt, the city has pulled things together in recent years. The number of students exceeding the state reading standard increased by 92 percent over the last two years, and the number of students exceeding the state math standard increased by 107 percent. All this apparently without any of the standards-lowering that other states have engaged in. The district still ranks near the bottom of Maryland’s 24 districts. But it’s worth celebrating. Academic performance in Charm City must have been pretty bleak before, if after such improvements the district still ranks last in the state. But then you see what’s happening to a charter school that’s been the shining light in Baltimore, and you wonder about the level of commitment to continuing the improvement process they’ve started to celebrate:

Over at the catchy Flypaper blog, education guru Mike Petrilli talks about his local Maryland teachers union’s get-out-the-vote strategy for Election Day: Montgomery County schools are not only closed today (purportedly to protect students from intruders, as most schools are used as polling places) but were also closed yesterday. Which means that MCEA’s 12,000 members could spend a long weekend campaigning for Democratic candidates (most likely, across the Potomac in Virginia), and then volunteer at polling places today, all without taking a single hour off of work. That’s pretty smart politically, but what’s the justification for students to miss two days of school in the middle of the fall semester? A good question. I am pleased to report that there seems to be no evidence of this sort of thing going on along Colorado’s Front Range. A quick search of the eight largest school districts in the Denver metro area – Jefferson County, Denver, Douglas County, Cherry Creek, Aurora, Adams 12, Boulder Valley, and Littleton – show they are all in regular session today on Election Day (as well as yesterday). That’s good news, though I’m already wondering if I should be careful about giving out unsolicited ideas here. While […]

There’s a great story in the Washington Post today about the positive impacts of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability on poor and needy students in and around our nation’s capital (H/T Joanne Jacobs): Since enactment of the No Child Left Behind law, students from poor families in the Washington area have made major gains on reading and math tests and are starting to catch up with those from middle-class and affluent backgrounds, a Washington Post analysis shows. The achievement gap between economic groups, long a major frustration for educators, has narrowed in the region’s suburban schools since President Bush signed the law in 2002, according to Maryland and Virginia test data. In Montgomery County, for instance, students in poverty have earned better scores on Maryland’s reading test in each of the past five years, slicing in half the 28 percentage-point gulf that separated their pass rate from the county average. They also have made a major dent in the math gap. In Fairfax County, another suburban academic powerhouse, such students have slashed the achievement gaps on Virginia tests. Now, my friends in the Education Policy Center tell me that NCLB has some problems and flaws that need to be […]