Maryland education bureaucrats in Annapolis — aided and abetted by their union masters in the Maryland State Teachers Association (MSTA) — are now in full cover-up mode. Instead of requiring teachers to focus on imparting essential skills like reading and math, the State Board of Education has gutted the Maryland high school graduation standard.
Students who fail one or more of the exit exams previously required for a diploma will now be allowed to substitute a “project.” In other words, more generations of Maryland public school students will be ill-prepared for college or to earn a living after graduating. This shameful flight from academic accountability starts at the top, and that’s why state School Superintendent Nancy Grasmick has to go.
Grasmick has been running the show and dictating curriculum in Maryland since 1991, which is before the class of 2009 entered kindergarten. During a meeting with The Examiner in March, Grasmick insisted that 2009 graduates would have to pass the high school exit exams — which, by the way, she selected — before getting a diploma. She brushed off warnings that thousands of ill-prepared students would slip through the system.
Now, eight months later, the State Board of Education has decreed it will accept projects designed by, guess who, Grasmick’s underlings at the Maryland Department of Education. This is nothing more than a cynical sleight of hand to boost Maryland’s graduation rate and divert public attention from the dumbed-down curriculum, particularly in areas with large numbers of minority and low-income children who can’t pass the exit exams because they weren’t taught the material.
State Board President Dunbar Brooks objected to the new, watered-down graduation requirements, pointing out that “for the past 50 years, no one has had to pay for the abysmal academic achievement of African-American and poor children.” He’s right.
Per-pupil expenditures in Prince George’s County increased from $7,701 in 2003 to $9,103 in 2007, but only 35 percent of black eighth-graders in the country’s wealthiest minority-majority county are proficient in math, and just 52.1 percent read at grade level. In Montgomery, black achievement scores for eighth-graders were higher but still significantly trailed the countywide average: 43 versus 86 percent in math; 61 versus 86 percent in reading.
The basic problem is that Maryland politicians lavish bigger budgets, power and perks on bureaucrats like Grasmick and unions like MSTA, even as generation after generation of children fall behind. Until Maryland stops rewarding adults who fail to educate the state’s children, academic mediocrity is guaranteed, no matter how much of the taxpayers’ money goes to the schools. It’s as simple as that.
