Md. focuses on ways to deal with schools that don't meet standards

Maryland and eight other states have set up new accountability systems under No Child Left Behind that have given more flexibility and focus to the efforts to resolve problems at schools that don't meet standards, according to a report released Thursday by the Center on Education Policy.

Maryland was given permission by the U.S. Department of Education a year ago to make up its own system of accountability within the confines of the act, which requires states to have a system for testing students and then giving schools consequences if enough students don't pass those tests. But around the country, thousands of schools were being labeled as failing even when the school might have only a handful of English-language learners who didn't pass the test.

"The Bush administration was under so much criticism that they allowed nine states to do something differently," said Jack Jennings, president of the center. In the four states that the nonpartisan group researched, including Maryland, New York, Georgia and Ohio, there had been a move away from the prescriptions for identifying schools that were considered failing under NCLB.

"They would label schools differently and they revised the way they brought help to schools," he said.

Maryland decided not to penalize the schools by labeling them if they had only a small percentage of students who had missed the mark or if they had only missed the standards for one year.

The state also spent more time and money focusing on the schools with the worst problems.

Before the changes in the system, Maryland had a group of schools that had been completely overhauled because their special-education students were not meeting standards, said Ron Peiffer, deputy state superintendent of schools. For instance, a district may have fired the principal and made all the staff reapply for their jobs although the vast majority of the student body was meeting the standard.

Peiffer said now the state can focus its attention. For example, a school that has 90 percent of its students passing state tests but special-education kids failing could bring in a reading teacher to assist a special-education teacher in the classroom.

"Strategies like that can have a significant effect on test scores rather than coming in and revamping the entire school," he said. "What it allows us to do is recognize that when a school fails, everybody doesn't fail."

Jennings said states like Maryland are doing what should have happened before the law passed: looking at innovations that could solve the problems of these schools.

But Maryland's relative freedom to help its failing schools might change in the next year, Jennings said.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said recently that he wants to fix the lowest 5 percent of schools in the country and will offer grants to those states that agree to four courses of action: closing the schools, turning them into charters, firing the principal and half the staff or making a combination of changes. Some $40 million would be available to Maryland schools that need help. But that leaves Maryland's new accountability system in question, Jennings said.

A spokesman for the department said that the issue of what would happen to the new accountability system in the nine states has not been resolved.