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From the Baltimore Sun


Schoolyard brawl

Grasmick mingles politics, accountability

City and state leaders stand on opposing sides of the debate over how to improve public education in Baltimore



By Liz Bowie
Sun reporter

April 2, 2006

Nancy S. Grasmick took perhaps the greatest gamble of her 15-year career as Maryland's schools chief by being the first state superintendent in the nation to seek a takeover under federal law.

Critics immediately called her move political, an election-year shot designed to help her ally the governor keep his job. And within two days, she lost her first round in Annapolis when the General Assembly approved a one-year moratorium putting her bold attempt to seize control of 11 Baltimore schools on indefinite hold.

While the impetus for Grasmick's audacious stand may be politics, both her critics and supporters say, her decision is also consistent with her long-held determination to make schools more accountable.

"The superintendent has really been an activist for much of her tenure," said Marion Orr, a political science professor at Brown University and author of Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore. "This move really is not inconsistent."

However, some say Grasmick clearly has been less cooperative with and more aggressive toward Baltimore in the last couple of years, perhaps as her level of frustration with the city schools grew and she was emboldened by working under a governor and a president who embraced her philosophy.

She sees her takeover bid as something she had to do for the children.

"My belief is that for all our students, in the world they face, education is the ticket," Grasmick said.

"If we are not measuring, then we have denied students a lifelong opportunity."

In some ways, Grasmick has been headed toward this moment since she took the job.

In 1991, the state school board, then headed by Robert C. Embry Jr., was looking for a new superintendent who would change the direction of education in Maryland.

Across the nation the accountability movement was just beginning.

In Maryland, a blue-ribbon commission had issued a report that called for state-run tests that measured what children knew.

Grasmick was a Baltimore native and graduate of the city's elite Western High School. She had dedicated herself to education, beginning as a city special education teacher and moving on to high-level administrative jobs for the state and other systems.

Grasmick had the edge to get the state superintendent's job, Embry said, because she believed in the accountability movement. And Gov. William Donald Schaefer liked her.

"She was a local person. She was articulate and smart ... a woman," said Embry, who now heads the nonprofit Abell Foundation.

She was also politically adept - she has survived through three governors and many changes in the state board. The 67-year-old is now the longest-serving state superintendent in the country.

During her tenure, she launched the state tests known as the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program. The unpopular tests were tough exams given in the third, fifth and eighth grades. Individual student scores were never reported. Rather, MSPAP was designed to measure how well schools were teaching.

Each year, Grasmick would announce the results personally.

Those scores for the first time exposed the depth of the problems of Baltimore students. Some schools were miles behind their suburban counterparts, it turned out. Armed with the new data, two groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, sued the state to try to get more money for city schools.


City-state partnership
By 1997, those lawsuits were culminating in a partial state takeover of the city school system - which Grasmick helped to craft. She was part of the negotiations when Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke agreed to give up some control of his city's schools in return for more state funding.

Schmoke said recently that in his first years as mayor, he had a cool relationship with Grasmick because of her closeness to Schaefer, his predecessor. But Schmoke's respect for her grew as he got to know her better. "I came to appreciate her interest and her sincerity," he said.

Grasmick happily took on a greater role in the Baltimore system under the new city-state partnership.

She helped draw up the list of candidates for the new school board appointed jointly by the governor and the mayor. She interviewed the candidates being considered for the chief executive officer's job.

By 2000, the abysmal performance documented by Grasmick's tests allowed her and the state school board to take over three city elementary schools. The state contracted with Edison Schools to operate them.

When George W. Bush was elected, he brought the accountability movement to a national stage with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Largely because of Grasmick's efforts, Maryland was years ahead of most other states. It was used to the idea of testing, of making lists of failing schools public and of taking action to try to improve poor schools.


Turning point
The turning point in Grasmick's attitude toward the city schools, some people believe, came when the schools faced a severe financial crisis two years ago. The system was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Some in Annapolis began pointing fingers at Grasmick, who seemed angry to be blamed.

"It seems that is when her attitude changed and she became less collaborative," said Bebe Verdery, education director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Maryland.

"I think the relationship really deteriorated dramatically at the point the deficit hit the press in a big way."

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. announced that the state would bail out the school system but was taking more control. His effort was trumped by Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, a political rival, who came through with a last-minute deal to close the financial gap.

Grasmick began to chastise the city system more and more frequently.

But something else was happening, too.

Though both Democrats, Grasmick and her husband, Louis, a lumber company magnate and developer, began to ally themselves with Ehrlich and contributed to his campaign. She flirted with the idea of becoming Ehrlich's lieutenant governor but ultimately declined.

In addition, she became more of a figure on the national education scene, serving on commissions and making trips to Washington to confer with the Bush administration's Education Department - which shares her enthusiasm for testing and accountability.

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said last week, "I am president of the Nancy Grasmick fan club."

"It seems to me she has become more aggressive in pushing school reform in the past few years," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based nonprofit. Jennings speculates that Grasmick may feel she might be coming to the end of her career and doesn't want to leave without having turned around the city schools.

"She was in effect half of the partnership. She is to a degree responsible for Baltimore," he said.

Grasmick and her staff portray the decision-making process that led to last week's action as apolitical.

During many meetings over several months, Grasmick and 20 to 25 staff members sat in a conference room around a large table on the eighth floor of the state department headquarters in Baltimore. They were poring over the details of the city school system's plan for improving its worst schools, trying to decide whether the plan was sufficient.

Ultimately, they decided to take control of four high schools and to require that seven middle schools be put in the hands of independent operators. Some details of the action were decided only within the past two weeks, according to Ronald Peiffer, one of Grasmick's top aides.


Actions questioned
To many across the city, the actions seemed unusually harsh.

"I think people are legitimately asking questions. It seems like a far-reaching act," said Patricia A. Foerster, president of the Maryland State Teachers Association.

Grasmick had other options that were not as extreme.

"It seems like an odd move for a superintendent to make, particularly with her political acumen," Orr said. He wonders if she might have miscalculated how swift and strong the response could be.

Embry believes that Grasmick might have accomplished what she wanted - getting outside groups to run some problem schools - without conflict if she had simply sat down with city school officials and worked out an agreement. Six small high schools are already being run by outside groups, he pointed out, and there has been a lot of support for charters in the city.

"You may say that she is taking a risk that needed to be taken," Embry said. "Or you may say that the things she wants to order could have been accomplished with negotiation."

liz.bowie@baltsun.com