State Gets Leeway to Design Own Plan for Fixing Schools

For many Maryland schools that miss academic targets year after year under the No Child Left Behind law, the stigma associated with needing help will ease under a precedent-setting program the federal government announced yesterday.

The U.S. Education Department's action will relax one of the 2002 law's toughest and most-criticized provisions, with repercussions for Prince George's and Montgomery schools. Instead of lumping together chronically struggling schools with those that are generally strong performers but fall slightly short of targets, Maryland will have two accountability tracks: schools with "comprehensive" needs and those with "focused" needs.

Five other states also won leeway from the department. Virginia sought to join the experiment, but its bid was not accepted.

Under the law, an entire school is considered to have failed to meet academic standards even if it misses reading or math testing goals by a small amount or among a subgroup of students defined by race, ethnicity, family income, English language ability or participation in special education. If a school fails for several consecutive years, it can be forced to make increasingly serious changes, such as allowing students to transfer to another school, offering free tutoring or replacing staff.

Those sanctions will remain in place. But Maryland's new program will change the labels for schools not meeting standards and encourage school systems to target help to students who need it most.

Nancy S. Grasmick, the Maryland schools superintendent, said the program responds to concerns of superintendents and principals who oversee good schools that failed to meet standards in a single category.

"Principals have said to me repeatedly, 'I am offended to be a school that "needs improvement" or "corrective action," because this is a high-performing school, but we have persistent problems in this area,' " Grasmick said. "It sort of paints the entire population with the same brush."

In March, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced that states would have the opportunity to develop plans that address a school's individual problems. Seventeen states applied. Of them, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Maryland received approval, Spellings said yesterday in Austin.

A panel of independent educators evaluated the proposals.

"None of the methods proposed were free of significant limitations," the panel wrote in a memo. Many plans were "based on methods of convenience" rather than focusing on the underlying causes of the schools' inability to meet standards, the panel wrote, and some proposals would let schools persistently fail without restructuring.

The panel, according to a letter from a senior federal education official, had concerns about a Virginia proposal to limit requirements for free tutoring and transfers for failing subgroups of students at under-performing schools. Virginia Department of Education spokeswoman Julie Grimes said the state will continue to seek flexibility from the federal government.

Maryland was among a handful of states singled out for being "keenly in tune with forward thinkers who focused their interventions to the areas of need in schools."

"We were just delighted that our proposal was selected," Grasmick said. John E. Deasy, superintendent in Prince George's County, where 21 schools need restructuring, said he was "very supportive" of the move.

Maryland's plan distinguishes between schools with comprehensive needs, which have failed to meet academic standards in several categories, and those with focused needs, which fall short in one or two subgroups of students.

Focused-needs schools can target interventions to the subgroups that need help, such as those with disabilities who receive special education, or those who are English learners. Both categories of schools would be required to begin interventions in the first year that they failed to meet federal standards.

Of 233 Maryland schools in need of improvement, about six in 10 would fall into the comprehensive group, while four in 10 would fall into the focused category, according to William Reinhard, a spokesman for the Maryland State Department of Education. About 90 percent of schools that did not achieve progress goals for the first time in 2007 would fall into the focused-needs category.

Staff writer Michael Alison Chandler contributed to this report.