From Calvert County to Howard County, students in Maryland’s outlying towns and suburbs are outperforming those who attend the vaunted Montgomery County school system and those in neighboring Prince George’s County.
An analysis of recently released results from the 2009 Maryland Standardized Assessment, commonly called the MSA, shows that Howard County’s third and eighth graders more often scored in the highest category than Montgomery County students in both reading and math. The tests are given each year to students in grades three through eight and are scored “basic,” “proficient” or “advanced.”
Calvert County, with 17,000 students on a peninsula southeast of Prince George’s County, fared better than Montgomery among third graders, especially in math. Nearly 42 percent of Calvert’s youngest testers scored advanced, and only 7 percent scored basic. In Montgomery, 34 percent scored advanced while 13 percent scored basic.
According to the Maryland State Department of Education, third graders scoring basic in math likely cannot “write simple equations and simple inequalities,” or “determine value of mixed currency.”
Long-struggling Prince George’s County scored worst among school districts in Washington’s wider reaches. Barely one in 10 of its third graders read at an advanced level, while more than a quarter of them scored basic, meaning they likely had trouble determining main ideas and themes of grade-level texts.
Charles County, with about 27,000 students and directly south of Prince George’s, consistently scored better than its northern neighbor but worse than Anne Arundel to the east and Frederick to the far northwest.
The scoring disparities underscore the challenges brought on by rapidly changing demographics in Washington’s nearer suburbs, disrupting schools that were comfortable with a traditional formula for success.
Since 2000, the number of Hispanic students in Montgomery County schools has grown from 15 percent of the population to 22 percent. The number of black students has grown from 21 percent to 23 percent. At the same time, the number of students in need of English instruction and those labeled low-income have swelled.
In higher-performing Howard County, black students make up about 21 percent of the population while Hispanics make up about 6 percent. Among third and eighth graders, both groups perform better than their peers in Montgomery.
Bill Reinhard, a spokesman for the Maryland State Department of Education, said the tests are analyzed each year to ensure that scores represent learning, as opposed to a familiarity with the tests.
