MARYLAND IS RANKED #1 IN EDUCATION SAYS EDUCATION WEEK!
EDUCATION WEEK IS CONTROLLED BY BILL GATES AND THE STATISTICS THEY CREATE ARE WEIGHTED IN WAYS THAT DO NOT GIVE AN ACCURATE PICTURE OF PUBLIC EDUCATION AS A WHOLE IN THE STATE. FAIRNESS AND POVERTY ARE WEIGHTED DOWN IN THE EQUATION.
We are seeing income levels above $100,000 thinking education is OK .....and most people do not reach that threshold of first world quality of life.
As schools open we are receiving all kinds of excuses as to why policies and data we have been given just do not seem to be really happening. It is almost like we are being duped into thinking Maryland neo-liberals are working to make schools better and not just to make them corporate in this restructuring. We have a Youth Works that places students into summer jobs at hotels, restaurants, or health services all mirrored in the tracking of this school restructuring and all leading to poverty work. There are positions higher up in these industries that pay well we are told....well, these are few and PhD grads are taking them.
This is what we know about Maryland education reform. We know that Maryland has been one of the lowest in the nation in rigor regarding education testing and therefor has an artificially high rank in scores. WE KNOW THAT IS WHY MARYLAND HAS RANKED HIGH IN SCORING AND NOW THAT COMMON CORE IS IMPLEMENTED WE SEE ALL THE DATA DROP DRAMATICALLY.
What Maryland has is great wealth inequity and tiered funding of education that far exceeds what is allowed by Equal Protection clauses for Education. So, we do have some of the best performing schools in the country because those schools are artificially funded and resourced giving a few schools what all schools should have. MANY OF THESE SCHOOLS ARE ALLOWED TO BE CATEGORIZED AS PUBLIC. We have Johns Hopkins and University of Maryland now corporations soaking much public funding taking away from K-12 creating a pipeline where only those students able to attend these schools will get jobs that aren't povertY. We will see U of M becoming more an more expensive as the goal set by O'Malley is recruiting the rich foreign students not getting Maryland citizens into these schools. O'Malley has worked hard and sent all of education money to building these cheap online and career campus businesses for most students in Maryland. K-12 have had to beg to get less than what was given years ago and classes reflect this lack of funding. I told you last year that we had three school principals donating thousands of dollars to their own schools, teachers taking more out of their pockets, AND THIS IS DELIBERATE POLICY MEANT TO LOWER EDUCATORS WAGES.
THERE IS NO SHORTFALL. IT IS DELIBERATE POLICY THAT HAS NEO-LIBERALS WORKING HARD TO MOVE ALL WAGES TO POVERTY.
“The CTU has shifted the agenda in Chicago,” she says.
“People who previously didn’t see themselves as possible candidates for public office are now viable candidates.
August 28, 2013
BY Joel Bleifuss
Chicago Teachers Lead the Way The CTU plans to change the political landscape in Chicago.
People who previously didn't see themselves as possible candidates for public office are now viable candidates. The CTU has given people in the city an ability to see that their circumstances could be different than they are currently.
Politics in Chicago is about to get exciting. Not since 1983, when a coalition of Lakefront liberals, Latinos, Blacks and progressive union activists elected Harold Washington mayor, have the prospects for progressive change looked better.
A year ago, the radically democratic Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) made history. With its members galvanized and the community behind them, the union went on strike and forced Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s hand-picked school board to back down.
The CTU has now upped the ante. In April, as the union waged an unsuccessful fight against school closures, CTU President Karen Lewis declared: “If the mayor and his hand-picked corporate school board will not listen to us, we must find those who will.”
The day the closings were announced, Lewis hosted a voter-registration training session in the Bronzeville neighborhood. The union’s goal: The registration of at least 100,000 new voters. As Lewis told the assembled volunteers, “We must change the political landscape in Chicago.”
To that end, the CTU’s Political Action Committee is mapping out an electoral strategy for the Democratic primary on April 15, 2014. The union intends to replace members of the Illinois legislature whose votes in Springfield have failed to serve the educational, employment, housing and transportation needs of Chicago citizens. To that end, the PAC is drawing up a list of Chicago lawmakers to target. The CTU, working with allied community organizations, will then recruit, train and field candidates.
In February 2015, when the primary elections for Chicago’s 50 aldermanic seats roll around, the CTU plans to be well enough organized to radically alter the makeup of the city council.
According to Stacy Davis Gates, the union’s political and legislative director, the groundwork is already laid.
“The CTU has shifted the agenda in Chicago,” she says. “People who previously didn’t see themselves as possible candidates for public office are now viable candidates. The CTU has given people in the city an ability to see that their circumstances could be different than they are currently. That is step one. Step two is organizing. But by working on elections, it does not mean that we are going to abandon our grassroots strategy or direct action. These components complement each other, and all three are necessary for a complete movement.”
In 2011, a transformation of city politics like the one the CTU is now fomenting occurred in New Haven, Conn., where UNITE HERE, which represents Yale University workers, led a political coalition to capture a veto-proof majority in the city council.
UNITE HERE and the CTU are both blazing a trail for what is known as “social movement unionism.” Writing in the Monthly Review, Rico Gutstein and Pauline Lipman observe that the CTU has made “it possible to imagine a counterhegemonic formation that could push forward an agenda for education justice that might spill beyond schools to a claim for the right to the city itself.”
As for Lewis’ own aspirations for office, the plainspoken and charismatic former chemistry teacher maintains she will not challenge Rahm Emanuel in 2015. When asked again in April if she would consider a run for mayor, Lewis said, “No, thank you.” She then added, “Not yet.”
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Philadelphia is just like Baltimore in the level of fraud and corruption emptying their government coffers. Did you know that Pennsylvania has allowed the Fracking industry to operate with little taxation? They are making billions of dollars as are the businesses in Baltimore as schools are starved of revenue.
What we see in this article is what will happen with all school districts. Charter schools are being forced on Philly because of the desire to gentrify and even as this governor forces the expansion of these charters, he is defunding them. There is no intent to make education better, this is only a restructuring of the education system to install an autocratic cheap and captured system to train people for work.
Parents United statement on teacher concessions
Posted on August 28, 2013 by parentsunitedphila
This morning, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) made the tough decision to agree to a wage freeze and health care contributions. Parents United for Public Education stands with Philadelphia teachers across the city who are making a difference everyday in our classrooms. We also want to make clear that this means the District’s average 19% below pay average in the region makes our teachers that much less competitive. This is not a point of celebration.
We will hold Superintendent William Hite and the School Reform Commission to their word that the union concessions mean essential staff will be immediately restored to schools. We expect the full restoration of guidance counselors, and the appropriate number of teachers to eliminate overcrowding, split grades, and to maintain lower class size in the primary years. These have been long-standing policies of the School District and well-recognized pedagogical imperatives. We also must work to restore administrative staff as well as nurses and librarians to all schools.
We demand that the Mayor and all city and civic leaders stop the rhetoric around teacher bashing. Philadelphia teachers earn on average in the mid-$40,000 – well below their suburban counterparts – face enormously challenging teaching conditions, have an average level of experience of five years and an average age of 34 years. Nationally, the average teacher experience is 14 years. As parents, we want to see our teachers as decently paid, respected professionals who see teaching as a sustainable profession. We oppose language and policies that promote a high turnover, low-wage, deprofessionalized workforce.
We expect the Mayor and City Council to put aside their differences and recognize that the $50 million they promised to open schools is simply not enough. We are not sending our children to school to go to a shell of a building. We send our children to go to school for the education they deserve. The Mayor and City Council must agree to a compromise that will give us more than the $50 million, whether that is both the sales tax and the properties plan or whether it is a combination along with a $50 million appropriation from the general fund. Any city plan must be crafted with an express goal to restore ALL counselors to our schools and eliminate split grades and overcrowding.
Finally, we expect the Mayor and City Council and our Philadelphia delegation to now go to Harrisburg and present a united front on behalf of our schools. To date, the state has given exactly $2 million of a requested $120 million state rescue package. Governor Corbett and the General Assembly are holding hostage $45 million in funds specifically designated for the School District of Philadelphia. The Corbett administration demands reckless charter expansion in Philadelphia but has eliminated $220 million in charter reimbursements statewide. (This is the face of charters....they do not intend to finance them) We ask our Philadelphia elected officials to stop low-balling Philadelphia’s children. Demand charter reimbursements and the release of our $45 million immediately. In addition, the state must deliver its share of the $120 million rescue package. And finally, the passage of legislation mandating a generous and equitable education funding formula must be the top legislative, political and lobbying priority of every official in the City of Philadelphia.
We have less than two weeks before school begins. Our schools are running on fumes, with principals saying their schools are not even functional. As parents, we have been both appalled and exasperated with the embarrassing displays of the last few weeks from our elected officials, who at times seemed more concerned with posturing than with the actual condition and realities of our schools. The time for talk is over. The time for action is now.
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Steven Conn Author/Professor, Ohio State
GET UPDATES FROM Steven Conn
The Public in Public Education Posted: 08/18/2013 6:22 pm
This summer I've spent some of my time in the 19th century. It is one of the pleasures of being a historian that I get to immerse myself in the thoughts and emotions of an earlier time. But my excursion into the past has also helped me think about the current crisis in public education.
The mid-nineteenth century saw the beginnings of what evolved into our public school system. One by one, states began to establish public schools -- or what they often called "common schools" -- funded by public money and open to all children (with caveats: racial segregation in northern states made schooling decidedly separate and unequal while slavery in the south made it impossible and/or illegal for black children to get any formal education).
Even at the moment of their creation, however, the public schools came under attack. Back then the threat came from Catholic clergy who found the common schools suspiciously Protestant. Some demanded that public money be spent to support a parallel system of Catholic schools while others urged Catholic parents to boycott the public schools altogether and keep their children home.
All of this sounds remarkably familiar. Plenty of legislators, goaded by their constituents, continue to scheme to use public money to pay for religiously-based education, and who knows how many parents now keep their kids at home rather than send them to the local schools.
But what struck me was the defense of the public schools offered by those deeply committed to them back then. It was not couched in the language of standardized test scores or personal learning outcomes, but rather in the language of the public good and civic virtue. In a country of immigrants, speaking different languages and carrying different cultural baggage, advocates believed that the public schools could create social and national unity.
Here's how one orator put it to a crowd in an 1853 address: "We are made up of strange, and, as yet, unaffiliated elements ... Now what we need is some powerful and rapid process of amalgamation ... Now, the common school, more nearly than anything else, meets this very necessity. It is framed for the masses. Jews, Greeks, Pagans, Europeans, Africans, Asiatics and Americans, all meet here; and meet in childhood and youth; just when in the formation period."
He wasn't alone. The idea that the public schools served a crucial civic function was widespread. That helps explain why public education is specifically included in so many state constitutions. In the 19th century common schools were seen as central to giving a disparate and far-flung nation something in common, and Americans took considerable pride in them. After all, those common schools, with their free access to all (or mostly all), distinguished America from hide-bound Europe.
We don't talk much about education in these terms anymore. Instead, we talk about whether or not education succeeds for individual students, rather than for larger groups of them. We talk more and more in terms of "me" and rarely in terms of "us." Schools themselves, once a source of tremendous civic pride and seen as part of the glue that held communities together, are increasingly viewed as something to opt out of, at least to judge by the grudging and resentful way people fund them these days.
Part of this shift from the civic to the self simply reflects a larger shift in our culture. Over the last generation we have come to see ourselves as customers in virtually all our relationships and interactions: customers of medical care, rather than patients; customers of government rather than citizens; and customers of education rather than students.
And if you don't like the customer service you are receiving, our economic culture demands that you shop around for a better value. Which might be appropriate if you're shopping for new furniture or consumer electronics, but is proving a lousy way to run an educational system.
We have developed a vast (and burdensome and expensive) apparatus to measure individual student achievement -- Scan-tron bubbles until your eyes fall out. It is, of course, much harder to measure the civic value of education, but I'm convinced that we neglect that at our collective peril.
Because in the end, public schools serve an important function not just for the students sitting in the classrooms. They provide an education for all of us in the importance of public institutions -- when we participate in their life, when we demand that they improve, when we are asked to pay for them. They teach citizenship to grown-ups perhaps even more than they do to the kids. This is what the current consumer-satisfaction model of education neglects.
After all, who volunteers for the PTO of an "on-line academy?" Does such a thing even exist? And what kind of civic lesson do we teach our children when we tell them that their education is entirely personal, divorced from a larger social context and done alone? Will we be surprised if they think of society primarily in terms of "me" rather than "we" when they grow up?
Steven Conn teaches history at Ohio State University. He is the editor most recently of the book To Promote the General Welfare: The Case for Big Government (Oxford University Press).
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THE MIDDLE-CLASS NEED TO CARE ABOUT THIS ISSUE:
PLEASE THINK ABOUT WHO IS POOR TODAY AND YOU WILL UNDERSTAND THAT THE NATION'S MIDDLE-CLASS JUST A FEW DECADES AGO ARE NOW THESE POOR AND THE NUMBERS ARE GROWING. HOW MANY $100,000 JOBS WILL THERE BE AND WILL YOU BE ABLE TO ACCESS THE PIPELINE THEY ARE TRYING TO BUILD?
If you look at the reasons given for concern you will see the same policies here in Maryland and especially Baltimore.
If you look at this article you will see what is happening across America. This article highlights a conservative governor but Maryland and Baltimore are doing the same thing.....these are neo-liberals implementing conservative policies. We have the transition to charters, the tiered funding that places the poor and special needs at the lowest funding levels, we have private funding of selected schools categorized as public throwing schools funding equity to the curb.
We keep looking at the income level of $100,000 as that at which families are able to live a first world life. The problem is those voices are the only ones heard and well over 75% of America earns no where near that. THIS ISN'T A TALE OF TWO SOCIETIES......THIS IS WHAT AN AUTOCRATIC SOCIETY LOOKS LIKE!
Why America Should Care About Philadelphia’s Children
Philadelphia, the place where the Declaration of Independence was signed and the Constitution was written, and the site of the oldest residential street in the United States, has become the site where the nation’s drift away from its founding ideals is most acutely obvious.
A recent op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer described the situation of the city’s public schools as a “slow train wreck.” The district faced “a $304 million hole in the amount of money that’s needed to open safe schools.” A “rescue package” offered by the state was woefully inadequate. Recently, the city borrowed $50 million just to open the schools on time. And a big showdown between teachers and school administrators is expected later this month.
“This should be a big national story,” the op-ed writer concluded, “arguably as big as what happened in Detroit. At the end of the day, Detroit’s bankruptcy was something that happened on a piece of paper. What’s happening here is real kids and real schools.”
Indeed, what’s happening in the City of Brotherly Love should be a national story, which is why it is important to get the narrative straight.
“A Public School System From Hell”
Writing at Salon.com, Aaron Kase explained how the state of Pennsylvania, led by its conservative governor Tom Corbett, has been intent on turning the city’s school district into “a public school system from hell.”
Three factors – budget cuts to the city’s neighborhood schools, the city’s efforts to raise property taxes to offset what schools weren’t getting from the state, and the transfer of public resources to new charter schools and online academies – have forced more well-off people to move to the suburbs and made Philadelphia “one of the poorest and most highly taxed cities in the nation.”
The teachers – “who already make disproportionately less money than their suburban counterparts while teaching in much more challenging environments” – are being accused of not solving a problem they never caused. So the district administration – which was appointed by the very state that accuses the district of incompetence – has suspended automatic pay raises and told the teachers that more sacrifice is needed on their part.
Parents and students have poured into the streets to protest the situation. Kase quoted one of the parent leaders, Helen Gym, who said, “it’s indescribably insane” that a school where she sends her children has been turned into “a shell of a building” because of the willful neglect inflicted on her community.
But what’s attacking Philadelphia schools is not a form of “insanity,” and it is entirely “describable.”
A Strategy Instead Of a Solution
As at least one clever blogger has noted, Corbett’s deliberate effort to starve Philadelphia schools of necessary funds has been very coldly calculated. As was reported by the Philadelphia Citypaper back in June, a Republican firm conducting a “secret poll” found that Corbett and his education policies were deeply unpopular in the state, and his re-election prospects were in trouble.
The pollsters then argued for “an approach to the city’s schools that is more political than solutions-oriented.” Corbett, they maintained, should cast the current Philadelphia school crisis as “an opportunity for the governor to wedge the electorate” and “coalesce his base.” The “base” in this case are not the citizens of Philadelphia – who are, after all, the people who send their children to these schools – but Pennsylvanians outside of Philadelphia who may be apt to object to seeing their taxes going to educate other people’s children.
Fomenting and then tapping into people’s animosity toward spending money on other people’s children – especially when those children are impoverished and don’t have the same skin color – is not something exclusive to the Corbett campaign nor confined to Pennsylvania.
“Screwing” Our Schools
The strategy behind starving Philadelphia’s schools had been established some time ago.
As Rutgers University professor Bruce Baker explained on his blog, Pennsylvania is an exemplar of “how states harm local public school districts” with willful intention and impunity.
First, “the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has among the least equitable state school finance systems in the country,” giving less state and local revenue to the state’s highest needs schools – including Philadelphia and other “screwed,” in Baker’s wording, city districts such as Reading and Allentown.
Adding to the unfair base funding, the state also distributes special education funds to schools without regard to need and requires traditional public schools to pay “special education tuition to charter schools” in a manner that “is poorly conceived, creates perverse incentives for charter school operators, and inappropriately drains disproportionate resources from sending districts.”
This pattern of providing less money to schools that need it the most is “historic,” explained Michael D. Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, in the pages of Education Week.
“The state, for decades,” Casserly continued, “has not adequately supported Philadelphia or its schoolchildren.
“The crisis is not related just to an economy that’s gone sour in the last few years,” he said. “It’s related to a longer historical lack of support.”
Not Just A Philadelphia Story
What’s most troubling about this Philadelphia story is that the plot line is being repeated throughout the country.
In Chicago, another community with lots of minority school children from low-income families, unfair funding practices from the state of Illinois (another of Baker’s “least-fair states”) have systematically damaged the city’s schools. The state’s unwillingness to provide adequate money to pay for educating “other people’s children” is having profound effects on Chicago’s ability to provide students with opportunities to learn. Baltimore is Chicago in this regard.
Principals, straining for lack of funds, struggle with deciding how to fire teachers, while doing the least amount of damage, and how to choose between hiring a music teacher, a drama teacher, or a teacher of visual arts because they have enough funds for just one of those.
According to the Chicago Teachers’ Union, the 19 percent workforce reduction forced onto the district translated into 1,700 lost teacher positions. Most hard-hit were teachers of visual or performing arts and music, gym teachers and librarians, teachers of foreign languages, computer teachers, and staffing for special education students and students who have trouble with the English language.
School libraries, few that there are, are being forced to share space with the general public. And just this week, the city demolished a prized community center to make way for a new athletic field to be used by a private high school.
Despite these cuts and the calls for budget constraint, the city continues to find money to open more charter schools that result in transferring even more public funds to private coffers. Chicago blogger Mike Klonsky couldn’t help but note, “Even while some 30,000 students, most in African-American communities, were being targeted for ejection from their so-called ‘underutilized’ schools, and even while neighborhood schools were facing draconian budget cuts, the plans were already being laid to open dozens of new privately-run, non-union schools… many will be put in the very same neighborhood as closed schools.”
The Problem Of Educating Other People’s Children
One would think an education crisis in Philadelphia – a city so central to the founding of our country – would awaken Americans’ devotion to public education that has long been so central to the American Dream. Indeed, many of the signatories to those famous documents drafted in Philadelphia spoke passionately of the need to educate Americans in a system that is open and free to all the public.
But here’s what’s preventing America from doing what’s right for Philadelphia’s children and all children around the country. As a recent survey of public attitudes about public schools found, public education in America is diverging into a tale of two systems.
An article in The Huffington Post looked into the survey results and found, “Minority and low-income parents are more likely to see serious problems in their schools – from low expectations to bullying to out-of-date technology and textbooks – than those who are affluent or white.”
The “overall impressions” parents have about their local schools may be positive, but “deep demographic differences” characterized by income, education, and race influence whether parents see “per-student spending, the quality of school buildings and the availability of support resources as important drivers of school quality.”
According to the survey, parents from households making more than $100,000 are less worried about their schools than are the parents of households earning less than $50,000 a year.
And why wouldn’t they be? Their schools are doing fine! But what wily politicians in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and elsewhere are doing is transforming this willful ignorance of the conditions of other people’s children into resentment over addressing those conditions.
The actions of these politicians – Pennsylvania’s governor Corbett, Chicago’s mayor Rahm Emanuel, and others – are about as un-American as you can get.
Over the next two weeks, our nation will be commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, that transcendent moment when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. As we approach that day – August 28 – Americans everywhere should pause to remember that King called the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence “a promissory note” that our country has all too often “defaulted on,” especially as it applies to the rights of poor, minority children.
Kings dream was for “little black boys and black girls” to be able to “join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.” Look into the faces of school children in Philadelphia, Chicago, and elsewhere, and promise them the nation will not default on our promise again. And the dream King wanted will stay alive.
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We have seen much of the education claims in MD under O'Malley pale when the light of day fall upon them. Below we see a change in AP exams that gives some insight into higher scores and numbers achieving these scores. As we know here in Balt City schools are teaching to the test. Parents hate the routine and it is a huge disservice to public education but it will bring a few more people into an achievement window. So, if an underserved school hits hard on one subject it will have students with a passing score in that subject, but as this article shows most of these schools designated as AP in underserved communities have students with failing grades taking these AP tests. A well-rounded education is being sacrificed for performance in one area and that performance does not translate across the student's academic portfolio. 'All they do is math and reading' I hear over and over. No doubt these are important but what we are seeing is that students are not developing the critical thinking and problem-solving skills that come from time spent on material.
'The College Board announced Aug. 16 that beginning this May, AP exams will be scored with no point deductions for incorrect answers. Essentially, students will not be penalized for wrong answers'.
The Churchill Observer 2010
We see in this article from Churchill that O'Malley subsidized the fees for taking the tests while he was defunding underserved classrooms with tiered per-pupil spending. Students that are already positioned to succeed are getting lots more money as private funding is now allowed in some schools creating an imbalance that has nothing to do with 'public' education.
What we see are schools in city centers being designated AP that are filled with students who are not AP as this Sun article alludes. What will happen is that these schools will get progressively harder to meet AP standards forcing the children that are there now out.....which is the point. So, instead of finally benefiting from better city schools, underserved families will be forced to leave the schools as children fail. Maryland simply front-loads schools in wealthy areas with tons of resources while the city selects which schools will fail from lack of resources and calling all of this 'public' schools.
We like the idea of access that subsidized funding for AP tests gives, but do these students need more money in regular classes? OF COURSE! Remember, Maryland now has a tiered funding system that values underserved and special needs students less than AP children so are they really looking for success for the student or a ranking that does not hold water?
AP test scoring changes, Md. to waive future fees
By Becky Price, Arts Editor
September 30, 2010
Filed under News
Every year, ambitious high school students enroll in numerous Advanced Placement (AP) courses with hopes of gaining college credit by passing the exam. Starting this year, however, the highly coveted college exams will be graded differently due to impending modifications in the AP program.
The College Board announced Aug. 16 that beginning this May, AP exams will be scored with no point deductions for incorrect answers. Essentially, students will not be penalized for wrong answers.
“Existing research confirms that both formula scoring, in which points are deducted for incorrect answers, and rights scoring, in which no points are deducted for incorrect answers, are valid scoring procedures,” Jennifer Topiel, a representative from College Board, said. “The AP program’s change [from formula] to rights scoring enables us to more efficiently make many changes to the AP program at once.”
According to Topiel, the “rights-only” system will make grading easier, and will make it easier to compare the tests collectively.
Additionally, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley announced his plan for the “AP Access and Success” program that will waive the $86 fee required to take an AP exam for all Maryland students and cut the $15 PSAT fee for high school juniors. The program is aimed to give those students who otherwise could not afford the $86 fee the opportunity to take the AP exams.
“[O’Malley] is proposing that the state direct $3 million of state education funds to cover the cost of AP exams,” Brain Feldman, a Maryland Delegate, said. “The money ultimately comes from Maryland taxpayers as do virtually all funds in Maryland’s general fund operating budget.”
O’Malley’s plan will be phased out over a two-year period, starting with the 2011-2012 school year. In the first year Biology, Calculus, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Science and Physics exams will be covered by the state’s budget, no matter what economic status the student is in. By the 2012-2013 year, all remaining AP exams will be covered by state expenses.
According to the College Board’s 2009 AP Report to the Nation, Maryland leads the nation in the number of public school students achieving success, with 23.4 percent scoring a three or higher on an AP exam. The number of Maryland students participating in AP coursework has increased by more than 50 percent since 2004.
The cut fee may lead to increased enrollment in AP exams and courses in less privileged areas of Maryland, but it might have only a minimal effect on the CHS cluster.
“I don’t think that students and parents look at the costs of the tests before they enroll in a class,” college and career center coordinator Luana Zimmerman said. “We assist students who can’t pay for the tests. Ninety-eight to 99 percent of our students enrolled in an AP take the exam.”
EDUCATION WEEK IS CONTROLLED BY BILL GATES AND THE STATISTICS THEY CREATE ARE WEIGHTED IN WAYS THAT DO NOT GIVE AN ACCURATE PICTURE OF PUBLIC EDUCATION AS A WHOLE IN THE STATE. FAIRNESS AND POVERTY ARE WEIGHTED DOWN IN THE EQUATION.
We are seeing income levels above $100,000 thinking education is OK .....and most people do not reach that threshold of first world quality of life.
As schools open we are receiving all kinds of excuses as to why policies and data we have been given just do not seem to be really happening. It is almost like we are being duped into thinking Maryland neo-liberals are working to make schools better and not just to make them corporate in this restructuring. We have a Youth Works that places students into summer jobs at hotels, restaurants, or health services all mirrored in the tracking of this school restructuring and all leading to poverty work. There are positions higher up in these industries that pay well we are told....well, these are few and PhD grads are taking them.
This is what we know about Maryland education reform. We know that Maryland has been one of the lowest in the nation in rigor regarding education testing and therefor has an artificially high rank in scores. WE KNOW THAT IS WHY MARYLAND HAS RANKED HIGH IN SCORING AND NOW THAT COMMON CORE IS IMPLEMENTED WE SEE ALL THE DATA DROP DRAMATICALLY.
What Maryland has is great wealth inequity and tiered funding of education that far exceeds what is allowed by Equal Protection clauses for Education. So, we do have some of the best performing schools in the country because those schools are artificially funded and resourced giving a few schools what all schools should have. MANY OF THESE SCHOOLS ARE ALLOWED TO BE CATEGORIZED AS PUBLIC. We have Johns Hopkins and University of Maryland now corporations soaking much public funding taking away from K-12 creating a pipeline where only those students able to attend these schools will get jobs that aren't povertY. We will see U of M becoming more an more expensive as the goal set by O'Malley is recruiting the rich foreign students not getting Maryland citizens into these schools. O'Malley has worked hard and sent all of education money to building these cheap online and career campus businesses for most students in Maryland. K-12 have had to beg to get less than what was given years ago and classes reflect this lack of funding. I told you last year that we had three school principals donating thousands of dollars to their own schools, teachers taking more out of their pockets, AND THIS IS DELIBERATE POLICY MEANT TO LOWER EDUCATORS WAGES.
THERE IS NO SHORTFALL. IT IS DELIBERATE POLICY THAT HAS NEO-LIBERALS WORKING HARD TO MOVE ALL WAGES TO POVERTY.
“The CTU has shifted the agenda in Chicago,” she says.
“People who previously didn’t see themselves as possible candidates for public office are now viable candidates.
August 28, 2013
BY Joel Bleifuss
Chicago Teachers Lead the Way The CTU plans to change the political landscape in Chicago.
People who previously didn't see themselves as possible candidates for public office are now viable candidates. The CTU has given people in the city an ability to see that their circumstances could be different than they are currently.
Politics in Chicago is about to get exciting. Not since 1983, when a coalition of Lakefront liberals, Latinos, Blacks and progressive union activists elected Harold Washington mayor, have the prospects for progressive change looked better.
A year ago, the radically democratic Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) made history. With its members galvanized and the community behind them, the union went on strike and forced Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s hand-picked school board to back down.
The CTU has now upped the ante. In April, as the union waged an unsuccessful fight against school closures, CTU President Karen Lewis declared: “If the mayor and his hand-picked corporate school board will not listen to us, we must find those who will.”
The day the closings were announced, Lewis hosted a voter-registration training session in the Bronzeville neighborhood. The union’s goal: The registration of at least 100,000 new voters. As Lewis told the assembled volunteers, “We must change the political landscape in Chicago.”
To that end, the CTU’s Political Action Committee is mapping out an electoral strategy for the Democratic primary on April 15, 2014. The union intends to replace members of the Illinois legislature whose votes in Springfield have failed to serve the educational, employment, housing and transportation needs of Chicago citizens. To that end, the PAC is drawing up a list of Chicago lawmakers to target. The CTU, working with allied community organizations, will then recruit, train and field candidates.
In February 2015, when the primary elections for Chicago’s 50 aldermanic seats roll around, the CTU plans to be well enough organized to radically alter the makeup of the city council.
According to Stacy Davis Gates, the union’s political and legislative director, the groundwork is already laid.
“The CTU has shifted the agenda in Chicago,” she says. “People who previously didn’t see themselves as possible candidates for public office are now viable candidates. The CTU has given people in the city an ability to see that their circumstances could be different than they are currently. That is step one. Step two is organizing. But by working on elections, it does not mean that we are going to abandon our grassroots strategy or direct action. These components complement each other, and all three are necessary for a complete movement.”
In 2011, a transformation of city politics like the one the CTU is now fomenting occurred in New Haven, Conn., where UNITE HERE, which represents Yale University workers, led a political coalition to capture a veto-proof majority in the city council.
UNITE HERE and the CTU are both blazing a trail for what is known as “social movement unionism.” Writing in the Monthly Review, Rico Gutstein and Pauline Lipman observe that the CTU has made “it possible to imagine a counterhegemonic formation that could push forward an agenda for education justice that might spill beyond schools to a claim for the right to the city itself.”
As for Lewis’ own aspirations for office, the plainspoken and charismatic former chemistry teacher maintains she will not challenge Rahm Emanuel in 2015. When asked again in April if she would consider a run for mayor, Lewis said, “No, thank you.” She then added, “Not yet.”
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Philadelphia is just like Baltimore in the level of fraud and corruption emptying their government coffers. Did you know that Pennsylvania has allowed the Fracking industry to operate with little taxation? They are making billions of dollars as are the businesses in Baltimore as schools are starved of revenue.
What we see in this article is what will happen with all school districts. Charter schools are being forced on Philly because of the desire to gentrify and even as this governor forces the expansion of these charters, he is defunding them. There is no intent to make education better, this is only a restructuring of the education system to install an autocratic cheap and captured system to train people for work.
Parents United statement on teacher concessions
Posted on August 28, 2013 by parentsunitedphila
This morning, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) made the tough decision to agree to a wage freeze and health care contributions. Parents United for Public Education stands with Philadelphia teachers across the city who are making a difference everyday in our classrooms. We also want to make clear that this means the District’s average 19% below pay average in the region makes our teachers that much less competitive. This is not a point of celebration.
We will hold Superintendent William Hite and the School Reform Commission to their word that the union concessions mean essential staff will be immediately restored to schools. We expect the full restoration of guidance counselors, and the appropriate number of teachers to eliminate overcrowding, split grades, and to maintain lower class size in the primary years. These have been long-standing policies of the School District and well-recognized pedagogical imperatives. We also must work to restore administrative staff as well as nurses and librarians to all schools.
We demand that the Mayor and all city and civic leaders stop the rhetoric around teacher bashing. Philadelphia teachers earn on average in the mid-$40,000 – well below their suburban counterparts – face enormously challenging teaching conditions, have an average level of experience of five years and an average age of 34 years. Nationally, the average teacher experience is 14 years. As parents, we want to see our teachers as decently paid, respected professionals who see teaching as a sustainable profession. We oppose language and policies that promote a high turnover, low-wage, deprofessionalized workforce.
We expect the Mayor and City Council to put aside their differences and recognize that the $50 million they promised to open schools is simply not enough. We are not sending our children to school to go to a shell of a building. We send our children to go to school for the education they deserve. The Mayor and City Council must agree to a compromise that will give us more than the $50 million, whether that is both the sales tax and the properties plan or whether it is a combination along with a $50 million appropriation from the general fund. Any city plan must be crafted with an express goal to restore ALL counselors to our schools and eliminate split grades and overcrowding.
Finally, we expect the Mayor and City Council and our Philadelphia delegation to now go to Harrisburg and present a united front on behalf of our schools. To date, the state has given exactly $2 million of a requested $120 million state rescue package. Governor Corbett and the General Assembly are holding hostage $45 million in funds specifically designated for the School District of Philadelphia. The Corbett administration demands reckless charter expansion in Philadelphia but has eliminated $220 million in charter reimbursements statewide. (This is the face of charters....they do not intend to finance them) We ask our Philadelphia elected officials to stop low-balling Philadelphia’s children. Demand charter reimbursements and the release of our $45 million immediately. In addition, the state must deliver its share of the $120 million rescue package. And finally, the passage of legislation mandating a generous and equitable education funding formula must be the top legislative, political and lobbying priority of every official in the City of Philadelphia.
We have less than two weeks before school begins. Our schools are running on fumes, with principals saying their schools are not even functional. As parents, we have been both appalled and exasperated with the embarrassing displays of the last few weeks from our elected officials, who at times seemed more concerned with posturing than with the actual condition and realities of our schools. The time for talk is over. The time for action is now.
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Steven Conn Author/Professor, Ohio State
GET UPDATES FROM Steven Conn
The Public in Public Education Posted: 08/18/2013 6:22 pm
This summer I've spent some of my time in the 19th century. It is one of the pleasures of being a historian that I get to immerse myself in the thoughts and emotions of an earlier time. But my excursion into the past has also helped me think about the current crisis in public education.
The mid-nineteenth century saw the beginnings of what evolved into our public school system. One by one, states began to establish public schools -- or what they often called "common schools" -- funded by public money and open to all children (with caveats: racial segregation in northern states made schooling decidedly separate and unequal while slavery in the south made it impossible and/or illegal for black children to get any formal education).
Even at the moment of their creation, however, the public schools came under attack. Back then the threat came from Catholic clergy who found the common schools suspiciously Protestant. Some demanded that public money be spent to support a parallel system of Catholic schools while others urged Catholic parents to boycott the public schools altogether and keep their children home.
All of this sounds remarkably familiar. Plenty of legislators, goaded by their constituents, continue to scheme to use public money to pay for religiously-based education, and who knows how many parents now keep their kids at home rather than send them to the local schools.
But what struck me was the defense of the public schools offered by those deeply committed to them back then. It was not couched in the language of standardized test scores or personal learning outcomes, but rather in the language of the public good and civic virtue. In a country of immigrants, speaking different languages and carrying different cultural baggage, advocates believed that the public schools could create social and national unity.
Here's how one orator put it to a crowd in an 1853 address: "We are made up of strange, and, as yet, unaffiliated elements ... Now what we need is some powerful and rapid process of amalgamation ... Now, the common school, more nearly than anything else, meets this very necessity. It is framed for the masses. Jews, Greeks, Pagans, Europeans, Africans, Asiatics and Americans, all meet here; and meet in childhood and youth; just when in the formation period."
He wasn't alone. The idea that the public schools served a crucial civic function was widespread. That helps explain why public education is specifically included in so many state constitutions. In the 19th century common schools were seen as central to giving a disparate and far-flung nation something in common, and Americans took considerable pride in them. After all, those common schools, with their free access to all (or mostly all), distinguished America from hide-bound Europe.
We don't talk much about education in these terms anymore. Instead, we talk about whether or not education succeeds for individual students, rather than for larger groups of them. We talk more and more in terms of "me" and rarely in terms of "us." Schools themselves, once a source of tremendous civic pride and seen as part of the glue that held communities together, are increasingly viewed as something to opt out of, at least to judge by the grudging and resentful way people fund them these days.
Part of this shift from the civic to the self simply reflects a larger shift in our culture. Over the last generation we have come to see ourselves as customers in virtually all our relationships and interactions: customers of medical care, rather than patients; customers of government rather than citizens; and customers of education rather than students.
And if you don't like the customer service you are receiving, our economic culture demands that you shop around for a better value. Which might be appropriate if you're shopping for new furniture or consumer electronics, but is proving a lousy way to run an educational system.
We have developed a vast (and burdensome and expensive) apparatus to measure individual student achievement -- Scan-tron bubbles until your eyes fall out. It is, of course, much harder to measure the civic value of education, but I'm convinced that we neglect that at our collective peril.
Because in the end, public schools serve an important function not just for the students sitting in the classrooms. They provide an education for all of us in the importance of public institutions -- when we participate in their life, when we demand that they improve, when we are asked to pay for them. They teach citizenship to grown-ups perhaps even more than they do to the kids. This is what the current consumer-satisfaction model of education neglects.
After all, who volunteers for the PTO of an "on-line academy?" Does such a thing even exist? And what kind of civic lesson do we teach our children when we tell them that their education is entirely personal, divorced from a larger social context and done alone? Will we be surprised if they think of society primarily in terms of "me" rather than "we" when they grow up?
Steven Conn teaches history at Ohio State University. He is the editor most recently of the book To Promote the General Welfare: The Case for Big Government (Oxford University Press).
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THE MIDDLE-CLASS NEED TO CARE ABOUT THIS ISSUE:
PLEASE THINK ABOUT WHO IS POOR TODAY AND YOU WILL UNDERSTAND THAT THE NATION'S MIDDLE-CLASS JUST A FEW DECADES AGO ARE NOW THESE POOR AND THE NUMBERS ARE GROWING. HOW MANY $100,000 JOBS WILL THERE BE AND WILL YOU BE ABLE TO ACCESS THE PIPELINE THEY ARE TRYING TO BUILD?
If you look at the reasons given for concern you will see the same policies here in Maryland and especially Baltimore.
If you look at this article you will see what is happening across America. This article highlights a conservative governor but Maryland and Baltimore are doing the same thing.....these are neo-liberals implementing conservative policies. We have the transition to charters, the tiered funding that places the poor and special needs at the lowest funding levels, we have private funding of selected schools categorized as public throwing schools funding equity to the curb.
We keep looking at the income level of $100,000 as that at which families are able to live a first world life. The problem is those voices are the only ones heard and well over 75% of America earns no where near that. THIS ISN'T A TALE OF TWO SOCIETIES......THIS IS WHAT AN AUTOCRATIC SOCIETY LOOKS LIKE!
Why America Should Care About Philadelphia’s Children
Philadelphia, the place where the Declaration of Independence was signed and the Constitution was written, and the site of the oldest residential street in the United States, has become the site where the nation’s drift away from its founding ideals is most acutely obvious.
A recent op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer described the situation of the city’s public schools as a “slow train wreck.” The district faced “a $304 million hole in the amount of money that’s needed to open safe schools.” A “rescue package” offered by the state was woefully inadequate. Recently, the city borrowed $50 million just to open the schools on time. And a big showdown between teachers and school administrators is expected later this month.
“This should be a big national story,” the op-ed writer concluded, “arguably as big as what happened in Detroit. At the end of the day, Detroit’s bankruptcy was something that happened on a piece of paper. What’s happening here is real kids and real schools.”
Indeed, what’s happening in the City of Brotherly Love should be a national story, which is why it is important to get the narrative straight.
“A Public School System From Hell”
Writing at Salon.com, Aaron Kase explained how the state of Pennsylvania, led by its conservative governor Tom Corbett, has been intent on turning the city’s school district into “a public school system from hell.”
Three factors – budget cuts to the city’s neighborhood schools, the city’s efforts to raise property taxes to offset what schools weren’t getting from the state, and the transfer of public resources to new charter schools and online academies – have forced more well-off people to move to the suburbs and made Philadelphia “one of the poorest and most highly taxed cities in the nation.”
The teachers – “who already make disproportionately less money than their suburban counterparts while teaching in much more challenging environments” – are being accused of not solving a problem they never caused. So the district administration – which was appointed by the very state that accuses the district of incompetence – has suspended automatic pay raises and told the teachers that more sacrifice is needed on their part.
Parents and students have poured into the streets to protest the situation. Kase quoted one of the parent leaders, Helen Gym, who said, “it’s indescribably insane” that a school where she sends her children has been turned into “a shell of a building” because of the willful neglect inflicted on her community.
But what’s attacking Philadelphia schools is not a form of “insanity,” and it is entirely “describable.”
A Strategy Instead Of a Solution
As at least one clever blogger has noted, Corbett’s deliberate effort to starve Philadelphia schools of necessary funds has been very coldly calculated. As was reported by the Philadelphia Citypaper back in June, a Republican firm conducting a “secret poll” found that Corbett and his education policies were deeply unpopular in the state, and his re-election prospects were in trouble.
The pollsters then argued for “an approach to the city’s schools that is more political than solutions-oriented.” Corbett, they maintained, should cast the current Philadelphia school crisis as “an opportunity for the governor to wedge the electorate” and “coalesce his base.” The “base” in this case are not the citizens of Philadelphia – who are, after all, the people who send their children to these schools – but Pennsylvanians outside of Philadelphia who may be apt to object to seeing their taxes going to educate other people’s children.
Fomenting and then tapping into people’s animosity toward spending money on other people’s children – especially when those children are impoverished and don’t have the same skin color – is not something exclusive to the Corbett campaign nor confined to Pennsylvania.
“Screwing” Our Schools
The strategy behind starving Philadelphia’s schools had been established some time ago.
As Rutgers University professor Bruce Baker explained on his blog, Pennsylvania is an exemplar of “how states harm local public school districts” with willful intention and impunity.
First, “the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has among the least equitable state school finance systems in the country,” giving less state and local revenue to the state’s highest needs schools – including Philadelphia and other “screwed,” in Baker’s wording, city districts such as Reading and Allentown.
Adding to the unfair base funding, the state also distributes special education funds to schools without regard to need and requires traditional public schools to pay “special education tuition to charter schools” in a manner that “is poorly conceived, creates perverse incentives for charter school operators, and inappropriately drains disproportionate resources from sending districts.”
This pattern of providing less money to schools that need it the most is “historic,” explained Michael D. Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, in the pages of Education Week.
“The state, for decades,” Casserly continued, “has not adequately supported Philadelphia or its schoolchildren.
“The crisis is not related just to an economy that’s gone sour in the last few years,” he said. “It’s related to a longer historical lack of support.”
Not Just A Philadelphia Story
What’s most troubling about this Philadelphia story is that the plot line is being repeated throughout the country.
In Chicago, another community with lots of minority school children from low-income families, unfair funding practices from the state of Illinois (another of Baker’s “least-fair states”) have systematically damaged the city’s schools. The state’s unwillingness to provide adequate money to pay for educating “other people’s children” is having profound effects on Chicago’s ability to provide students with opportunities to learn. Baltimore is Chicago in this regard.
Principals, straining for lack of funds, struggle with deciding how to fire teachers, while doing the least amount of damage, and how to choose between hiring a music teacher, a drama teacher, or a teacher of visual arts because they have enough funds for just one of those.
According to the Chicago Teachers’ Union, the 19 percent workforce reduction forced onto the district translated into 1,700 lost teacher positions. Most hard-hit were teachers of visual or performing arts and music, gym teachers and librarians, teachers of foreign languages, computer teachers, and staffing for special education students and students who have trouble with the English language.
School libraries, few that there are, are being forced to share space with the general public. And just this week, the city demolished a prized community center to make way for a new athletic field to be used by a private high school.
Despite these cuts and the calls for budget constraint, the city continues to find money to open more charter schools that result in transferring even more public funds to private coffers. Chicago blogger Mike Klonsky couldn’t help but note, “Even while some 30,000 students, most in African-American communities, were being targeted for ejection from their so-called ‘underutilized’ schools, and even while neighborhood schools were facing draconian budget cuts, the plans were already being laid to open dozens of new privately-run, non-union schools… many will be put in the very same neighborhood as closed schools.”
The Problem Of Educating Other People’s Children
One would think an education crisis in Philadelphia – a city so central to the founding of our country – would awaken Americans’ devotion to public education that has long been so central to the American Dream. Indeed, many of the signatories to those famous documents drafted in Philadelphia spoke passionately of the need to educate Americans in a system that is open and free to all the public.
But here’s what’s preventing America from doing what’s right for Philadelphia’s children and all children around the country. As a recent survey of public attitudes about public schools found, public education in America is diverging into a tale of two systems.
An article in The Huffington Post looked into the survey results and found, “Minority and low-income parents are more likely to see serious problems in their schools – from low expectations to bullying to out-of-date technology and textbooks – than those who are affluent or white.”
The “overall impressions” parents have about their local schools may be positive, but “deep demographic differences” characterized by income, education, and race influence whether parents see “per-student spending, the quality of school buildings and the availability of support resources as important drivers of school quality.”
According to the survey, parents from households making more than $100,000 are less worried about their schools than are the parents of households earning less than $50,000 a year.
And why wouldn’t they be? Their schools are doing fine! But what wily politicians in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and elsewhere are doing is transforming this willful ignorance of the conditions of other people’s children into resentment over addressing those conditions.
The actions of these politicians – Pennsylvania’s governor Corbett, Chicago’s mayor Rahm Emanuel, and others – are about as un-American as you can get.
Over the next two weeks, our nation will be commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, that transcendent moment when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. As we approach that day – August 28 – Americans everywhere should pause to remember that King called the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence “a promissory note” that our country has all too often “defaulted on,” especially as it applies to the rights of poor, minority children.
Kings dream was for “little black boys and black girls” to be able to “join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.” Look into the faces of school children in Philadelphia, Chicago, and elsewhere, and promise them the nation will not default on our promise again. And the dream King wanted will stay alive.
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We have seen much of the education claims in MD under O'Malley pale when the light of day fall upon them. Below we see a change in AP exams that gives some insight into higher scores and numbers achieving these scores. As we know here in Balt City schools are teaching to the test. Parents hate the routine and it is a huge disservice to public education but it will bring a few more people into an achievement window. So, if an underserved school hits hard on one subject it will have students with a passing score in that subject, but as this article shows most of these schools designated as AP in underserved communities have students with failing grades taking these AP tests. A well-rounded education is being sacrificed for performance in one area and that performance does not translate across the student's academic portfolio. 'All they do is math and reading' I hear over and over. No doubt these are important but what we are seeing is that students are not developing the critical thinking and problem-solving skills that come from time spent on material.
'The College Board announced Aug. 16 that beginning this May, AP exams will be scored with no point deductions for incorrect answers. Essentially, students will not be penalized for wrong answers'.
The Churchill Observer 2010
We see in this article from Churchill that O'Malley subsidized the fees for taking the tests while he was defunding underserved classrooms with tiered per-pupil spending. Students that are already positioned to succeed are getting lots more money as private funding is now allowed in some schools creating an imbalance that has nothing to do with 'public' education.
What we see are schools in city centers being designated AP that are filled with students who are not AP as this Sun article alludes. What will happen is that these schools will get progressively harder to meet AP standards forcing the children that are there now out.....which is the point. So, instead of finally benefiting from better city schools, underserved families will be forced to leave the schools as children fail. Maryland simply front-loads schools in wealthy areas with tons of resources while the city selects which schools will fail from lack of resources and calling all of this 'public' schools.
We like the idea of access that subsidized funding for AP tests gives, but do these students need more money in regular classes? OF COURSE! Remember, Maryland now has a tiered funding system that values underserved and special needs students less than AP children so are they really looking for success for the student or a ranking that does not hold water?
AP test scoring changes, Md. to waive future fees
By Becky Price, Arts Editor
September 30, 2010
Filed under News
Every year, ambitious high school students enroll in numerous Advanced Placement (AP) courses with hopes of gaining college credit by passing the exam. Starting this year, however, the highly coveted college exams will be graded differently due to impending modifications in the AP program.
The College Board announced Aug. 16 that beginning this May, AP exams will be scored with no point deductions for incorrect answers. Essentially, students will not be penalized for wrong answers.
“Existing research confirms that both formula scoring, in which points are deducted for incorrect answers, and rights scoring, in which no points are deducted for incorrect answers, are valid scoring procedures,” Jennifer Topiel, a representative from College Board, said. “The AP program’s change [from formula] to rights scoring enables us to more efficiently make many changes to the AP program at once.”
According to Topiel, the “rights-only” system will make grading easier, and will make it easier to compare the tests collectively.
Additionally, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley announced his plan for the “AP Access and Success” program that will waive the $86 fee required to take an AP exam for all Maryland students and cut the $15 PSAT fee for high school juniors. The program is aimed to give those students who otherwise could not afford the $86 fee the opportunity to take the AP exams.
“[O’Malley] is proposing that the state direct $3 million of state education funds to cover the cost of AP exams,” Brain Feldman, a Maryland Delegate, said. “The money ultimately comes from Maryland taxpayers as do virtually all funds in Maryland’s general fund operating budget.”
O’Malley’s plan will be phased out over a two-year period, starting with the 2011-2012 school year. In the first year Biology, Calculus, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Science and Physics exams will be covered by the state’s budget, no matter what economic status the student is in. By the 2012-2013 year, all remaining AP exams will be covered by state expenses.
According to the College Board’s 2009 AP Report to the Nation, Maryland leads the nation in the number of public school students achieving success, with 23.4 percent scoring a three or higher on an AP exam. The number of Maryland students participating in AP coursework has increased by more than 50 percent since 2004.
The cut fee may lead to increased enrollment in AP exams and courses in less privileged areas of Maryland, but it might have only a minimal effect on the CHS cluster.
“I don’t think that students and parents look at the costs of the tests before they enroll in a class,” college and career center coordinator Luana Zimmerman said. “We assist students who can’t pay for the tests. Ninety-eight to 99 percent of our students enrolled in an AP take the exam.”
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