Baltimore's Disgrace

Its public schools are an educational disaster area. Political squabbling won't get them fixed.

THE LATE Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall graduated from Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore, but the school's glory days are long gone. Just 16 percent of Douglass students passed an English proficiency exam last year, and just 3 percent passed a geometry proficiency test -- and that was after taking a course in geometry. The biology pass rate was barely over 1 percent. The problem is not only that large numbers of Douglass students are unlikely to graduate; they are also doomed by their awful education to dead-end jobs and go-nowhere lives.

That's why the state's effort to remove 11 schools from Baltimore's control, including Douglass High, is long overdue. One can quibble over the process leading up to the state's announcement as well as its timing. But the need for urgent, even dramatic action is clear.

The state's takeover list includes four large high schools and seven middle schools. The high schools in particular are among the worst in the nation. All four of them, representing a fifth of Baltimore's 24,000 high school students, have been on a state "watch list" at least since 1997. But no urgent, comprehensive action has been taken. The state and the city have been complacent -- and complicit -- in their failure.

Unfortunately, the partisan temperature in Annapolis these days is too high for constructive debate. Democrats have moved to block the state takeover, accusing the state's school superintendent, Nancy S. Grasmick, of trying to embarrass Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, the front-running candidate for the Democratic Party's gubernatorial nomination. The tussle is dominating the closing days of Maryland's 2006 legislative session. Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a Republican, vetoed a bill stopping the state takeover; the Democratic-dominated Senate plans a vote to override him today.

That's too bad, because Baltimore schools need urgent attention. In all, 54 of them are classified as low-performing; the 11 schools on the state's takeover list are just the bottom of the barrel. City officials insists they have a plan to reform the failing schools, but it's really too late; they've been failing for too long, and there is no indication the city is up to the task of making significant improvements. The state's own plan is fuzzy; it would seek some third party to take control of the four high schools on its behalf and would compel the city to do the same for the seven middle schools. No real changes in management and supervision would begin for more than a year. But by ordering that the process begin, Maryland has begun to take some responsibility for a disgrace that has been neglected too long.