Maryland’s new state superintendent of schools, Carey Wright, positioned her tenure as one built on honesty and transparency in an introductory news conference Monday. Among her first actions is creating a task force to examine the Maryland Report Card, the state’s accountability system that measures schools’ performance.
The report card takes multiple factors into account to rate individual schools on a scale of five stars. Measures include graduation rates, performance on statewide exams, attendance and surveys from students and teachers about school life.
Wright was appointed last week on a four-year contract to lead the Maryland State Department of Education and its 24 school districts, a role she’d held in an interim capacity since October.
She is skeptical of a disconnect between 76% of Maryland schools having a rating of three or more stars out of five on the Maryland Report Cart compared to only 23% of students scoring proficient in math and 47% scoring proficient in English language arts on a statewide standardized test.
“That doesn’t ring true,” Wright said of the Maryland Report Card grades. “You can’t have three-quarters of your schools being rated as excellent, if you will, and then not seeing student achievement almost commensurate with that.”
The Center for Assessment, a national education nonprofit that helps design accountability models, is chairing the task force, which consists of superintendents, principals, local assessment officials and representatives of higher education institutions. The task force starts “on a fast track” Thursday and will meet twice monthly, Wright said. It will provide recommendations to improve or change the state’s accountability model before the next Maryland General Assembly legislative session.
Wright is credited with turning around Mississippi’s education system from a consistent last-place national ranking. Mississippi’s students living in poverty outperformed their demographically similar peers under Wright’s nine-year leadership. She said assessment and accountability were important factors in her work in Mississippi.
In Maryland, a state with “massive riches” in resources, Wright said she plans to scrutinize how state math and literacy test scores have continuously declined over the decade with seemingly little attention.
“The only way we’re going to get better is to be honest about where we are and then we’re honest about the strategies we need to put in place,” she said.
Wright and Josh Michael, vice president of the Maryland State Board of Education, said the department plans to update the Maryland Report Card’s complicated website to make it easier for the public to digest.
State education officials have updated the assessment system three times in the past three years, Wright said, a “legitimate concern” that her office is looking into. The task force will drill down on what’s being done in classrooms and by school district leaders to improve proficiency and growth.
“I don’t honestly think our accountability system is holding anyone accountable,” Wright said.
Cheryl Bost, president of the Maryland State Education Association, said Maryland’s accountability system better accounts for the “whole student and their educational experience” than other states but still has room for improvement. She hopes the task force will include teachers’ voices throughout their review.
“Educators have long advocated for an accountability and assessment system that is less dependent on mandated standardized tests that take away far too much time from instruction, narrow curriculum, and ultimately tell us more about a child’s socioeconomic background than their unique qualities as a student,” Bost said in a statement. Teachers best understand the impact assessment systems have on their classrooms and students, she added, and how they could help rather than distract from classroom learning.
Last year, eight Republican lawmakers accused former Maryland Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury of hiding scores of failing schools. Maryland’s inspector general for education said there was no evidence that the department acted improperly in altering data on its website to follow federal privacy laws.
Wright’s task force is looking at how to present more specific data from the statewide exam, called the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program, while also protecting student privacy.
