Tuesday the 10th of December, during a school board meeting, the 2024 Maryland Report Card was released. The Maryland School Report Card rates schools across the state on a scale from one to five stars.
The ratings were first created in 2018, and are determined by a multitude of factors including graduation rate, academic performance, and school quality.
To earn five stars, schools need at least 75 points and this year, the Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA) earned only 70. BSA has been a five star school since 2022, but in 2024 it was rated four stars. The ratings are based on the previous school year, 2023-2024, data.
Although BSA did have a perfect score in its graduation rate and “readiness for post secondary success,” it lagged behind in the categories “academic achievement” and “quality of school environment”.
According to this year’s Maryland School Report Card, only 38 percent of students are proficient in Mathematics, and only 58 percent of students are proficient in English. This represents a five point drop in Math proficiency from last year, and a fifteen point drop in English proficiency. However, these scores are different than what was initially communicated to BSA administration about proficiency rates. In an email to families, school administrators stated “The MSDE report card uses a slightly different formula for determining ELA proficiency so our number there was listed as lower.”
The report card also claims that nearly 20 of BSA students are “chronically absent,” a measure which calculates how many students are absent for more than ten percent of school days.
There is also a high discrepancy in test performance between racial groups and classes of income. While 38 percent of BSA is proficient in Math, only 12 percent of economically disadvantaged students are proficient in that subject.
15 percent of Black students at BSA are proficient in Math, while 74 percent of white students are proficient in that same subject, according to the report card. This indicates a racial gap of nearly 60 percentage points, higher than any other high school in the Baltimore city system.
Thomas Askey, vice principal of BSA and Dean of Academic Affairs emphasizes, “There is a large effect to something like the report card when it comes to property values and student enrollment, because people want to live near high performing schools.”
Some people are uncomfortable with the weight the report card is given. An anonymous administrator at BSA said, “There’s so much richness here. I don’t believe that level of unique magic can be captured in a number.”
They went on to say, “I do recognize that there are areas of improvement we can consider. I mean, change is always necessary.”
Askey has many questions about how different data points are calculated. For example, although the report card said that almost 20 percent of students were chronically absent, he claims that BSA “does not have a single data point” to suggest that level of absenteeism.
Another area of concern for Askey is in the academic proficiency category. He claims that there are no test scores suggesting that 38 percent of students are proficient in math.
When asked about how the school plans to respond in its learning plan, he stated, “First we need to make sense of the data.”
He and principal Rosiland Cauthen plan to meet with an official at the Maryland Department of Education later this week to try and better understand how they reached their figures. The state includes this guidance about definitions.
Askey continued on to state that when BSA was rated five stars in the past, perhaps the school administration did not look into the state’s methodology for creating the report card as much as they should have. After the school’s score was lowered he received “tons” of emails from concerned parents.
In their email to families from December 6, they stated that “As an administrative team, we are going to continue to strive for collective improvement while simultaneously acknowledging how much success, joy, and fulfillment permeates this building each and every day. We are proud to lead this school and believe that what makes us great is not only what we are accomplishing and sharing as our successes, but also our belief that we can always get better at both the bigger and smaller tasks that drive this work. “
To many, the school report card shows the areas where BSA still needs to improve. To others, it can be instrumental in helping choose a high school. Nonetheless, questions remain about where the state gets its numbers, and if it’s even fair to try and show performance of a school in a single number.
To review any school in Maryland’s ratings, visit the Maryland School Report Card website.
To contact this writer, email Muse Newspaper at musebsa@bsfa.org.
Featured image from the Maryland State Department of Education.
