Earlier this month, Baltimore City Public Schools leadership announced their recommendation to the Board of School Commissioners that Creative City Public Charter School and Southwest Baltimore Charter School close their doors at the end of this school year. Combined with the closure of Steuart Hill Academic Academy and Eutaw-Marshburn Elementary School last spring, the closure of these schools would mark the loss of four elementary schools in West Baltimore in half as many years.
These closures are the manifestation of an amputation policy that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the district’s effort to consolidate resources and slow the exodus of working families that is damaging every institution in Baltimore, including our school system, it is shuttering schools that cannot keep pace with enrollment and academic performance. Doing this forces even more families to educate their children elsewhere and facilitates further exodus.
As a proud City Schools graduate, I urge, in the strongest possible terms, that the School Board reject leadership’s recommendation and keep these schools open. As a former Student Commissioner on the school board, I know how difficult these votes are, and I want to offer three points of consideration for my former colleagues.
Closing Charter Schools Isn’t Equity
According to City Schools, “the guiding principles of the Annual Review process” include the notion that “communities that have experienced the most disinvestment and have the most need should be the first communities in which we focus investments.”
Baltimore’s demographic collapse has been concentrated in the poorest and least white neighborhoods. Reversing these trends depends, as the Annual Review guidelines correctly assert, on concentrating our resources in communities that already have less.
Per the city’s Community Conditions Index (CCI), all four of these West Baltimore closures are at orange or red zone schools. If our goal is to facilitate further investment in disinvested neighborhoods, these closures are antithetical to that goal.
Much of the closure process rests on academic performance. For charter school closures, called “operator non-renewals”, City Schools outlines its criteria: “operators are expected to accelerate improvement in student achievement in exchange for higher levels of school autonomy and flexibility.”
For charter schools to receive public funding but operate privately, they are rightfully expected to excel. Make no mistake: I am unapologetically a champion of public education and an advocate for traditional schools first. But the rise of charter schools in Baltimore, unideal as it is, has in large part been a rallying of our city’s nonprofit community to patch in gaps where our school district has lacked coverage. That’s most prevalent on the west side, where charter elementary schools dot the city blocks.
If City Schools’ intention is to walk back the advance of charter schools, they should move towards the restoration of traditional school programming in these neighborhoods. But closing these schools altogether helps no one, and comes at a greater expense to working families than to charter school operators.
Education is our Collective Responsibility
When we over-formulize the process of school closures, we put ourselves in a box and prevent leaders from solving policy problems creatively.
Too often, the conversation in the Board room on operator non-renewal revolves around where school leadership has fallen short, where staff have been unable to meet district standards, and what needs to change at the executive level of a school is granted a conditional or partial renewal.
But this sort of top-down reform in schools obfuscates a big component of what allows wealthier and better resourced schools to thrive.
Elementary schools like Roland Park benefit immensely from alumni foundations that organize annual delegations to the Running Festival, host multiple fundraisers throughout the year, and provide critical materials to patch in the school’s gaps where needed. These well-connected and well-resourced networks have become a feature of the city’s better off neighborhoods.
But for schools facing closure, the community is often treated as a passive bystander: a stakeholder whose opinion should be taken into account, but ultimately not a party to what changes within the school’s walls.
With every new proposed closure, a new wave of public outrage begins. Teachers and parents showed up in numbers to ask the School Board not to close Steuart Hill and Eutaw-Marshburn. Our neighbors care about their schools. Baltimoreans care. The extent to which residents are involved in these neighborhood fights to keep schools open is one of our school system’s greatest assets.
If a school appears hopelessly behind in academic performance or facility standards, why is little attention ever paid to channeling the community’s passion about keeping the school open into actually helping the school stay open?
The school board should make it its business to meet with neighborhood leaders and evaluate how residents can address district concerns. If parents are organized enough to pack the Board room, they are organized enough to be involved in whatever is needed to keep a school open, whether it’s supply shortages or staffing support.
For all of the district’s shortcomings, Youthworks and City Schools are the two most important vehicles for social mobility in Baltimore City. Every year, we funnel thousands of students into post-graduate education or directly into the workplace. Each flower in the City Schools garden, no matter how small or struggling, should be nurtured before being pruned.
The School Board’s Job is to Govern
Unfortunately, one reason why the Board has largely declined to modify staff recommendations on closures is due to a pattern of deference politics on North Ave. Here, there is an understandable impulse. School closures and operator non-renewals are recommended by the Office of New Initiatives (ONI), whose staff carry significant administrative expertise and are integral to the central function of City Schools. The predecessor to Angela Alvarez, current head of the ONI, is Alison Perkins-Cohen, who is now chief of staff to district superintendent Sonja Santelises.
Staff expertise is critical to informed school board decision-making. In the face of sustained population loss in Baltimore, the ONI team has consistently applied a cutting formula that balances utilization rates and test scores to determine which schools should close.
Even when there is an overwhelming community consensus against a decision, the Board often feels compelled to vote for a staff recommendation on the basis of deference to expertise. Charm City Virtual was closed by a 7-2 vote despite a packed public comment period and a sustained letter writing campaign to Board members.
Deference politics dominates an array of Board votes, not just school closures. I distinctly recall an instance where Commissioner Andrew Coy, someone definitively within the Board’s progressive bloc (and a man that I consider respect deeply), voted in favor of funding for new metal detectors in schools. In rationalizing his vote, he said “I appreciate the process. I appreciate the work that has gone into and is going to go into this.”
While well-intentioned, Board members are appointed on the basis of criteria that emphasizes their expertise in various areas, from business administration to classroom experience. There should never be an instance where school board members feel that they cannot back up a staff recommendation they are voting to adopt with their own rationale.
Staff makes recommendations to Board members. The school board is the political leadership, and must make political decisions. Community engagement is not just the work of staff, it is the responsibility of the Board, and Board members can and indeed must vote their conscience when the evidence requires it.
We have access to an abundance of research on this: school closures lead to worse academic outcomes for students. Within Baltimore, our empirical evidence is unambiguous: our amputation policy has not stopped population loss in City Schools.
Staff exist to assess decisions on metrics set by political leaders. Metrics are central to the decision-making process, but they are not decisions alone.
As a former Board member, I hope to offer my experience and words of encouragement: we each have a commitment to the collective responsibility of educating Baltimore’s kids. We must build the strongest possible public school system for their sake.
Ethan Eblaghie is a former Student Commissioner on the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners and a student at Columbia University.
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