Baltimore schools are shedding an old reputation built on years of dysfunction

When I pulled up to Northern High School one November day in the late 1990s, the students were milling around outside in a state of confusion and anger.

The principal had just suspended 1,200 of her 1,800 students in one afternoon for disobeying an order to pick up their report cards, and I was there to report on the desperate action to gain control. She stood just inside the locked doors and told hundreds of kids to return to their classrooms as they chanted back at her, “Hell no, we won’t go.”

Will McKenna, who was teaching at Northern at the time, remembers the school as unmanageable. “She panicked and had a knee-jerk reaction and tried to get the kids to respond to her,” he said.

That day was just a slice of the scandal, the lack of accountability, and the disorder in the school system. At the time, Black and white middle-class residents were fleeing Baltimore by the tens of thousands. Middle and high schools built to educate thousands of students were failing. High schools like Northern graduated about 30% of their students, according to Johns Hopkins University research. The city had ceded partial control of its schools to the state a few months before, and scandals lay ahead.

To McKenna, who remembers high schools in the late 1990s as “shockingly violent” places where fights erupted between neighborhood groups and only half of his students came to class, Baltimore’s schools today are unrecognizable.

“The district is light years ahead of where it was,” said McKenna, who went on to found two charter schools. “It is night-and-day different.”

Baltimore City Public Schools is still fighting a bad reputation, but it has transformed from a thicket of dysfunction to unprecedented stability. Along the way, one CEO would upend the status quo in an attempt to break the bureaucratic malaise and another would create a new level of professionalism. Today, 72% of city students graduate. High schools I visit have few students who spend their days wandering the halls. And the system is no longer careening from one crisis to the next as it was in the early 2000s.

As the school year ends, City Schools bids farewell to Sonja Santelises, its longest-running superintendent in 80 years, who installed top leadership, built or renovated dozens of buildings, launched an academic overhaul that is paying off in rising test scores, and instilled financial discipline.

She leaves the system primed for growth, with middle-class families — Black and white — flocking to dozens of elementary/middle schools with test scores that meet the state average. Pre-K spots are sought after. Schools have a wealth of activities, and arts education is beginning to blossom.

If all goes well, incoming CEO Jermaine Dawson has the opportunity to reverse the narrative that all city schools are failing.

He’ll still have significant problems. The city has the highest poverty rate and the lowest percentage of students passing state tests. Too many students have prolonged absences, and the city needs to distribute course offerings more equitably so that middle and high school students aren’t as dependent on a mass transit system that can’t reliably get them to school on time.

But understanding the school system’s journey from the late 1990s, when a judge contemplated a district takeover, to where it is today might give Dawson a roadmap to avoid some of the issues that still echo through the halls.

Facing a court takeover

Former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke recalls the smirk on the face of a man suing the state for the failures of City Schools. In Schmoke’s office that day in the mid-1990s, the plaintiff said he would see that the school system was taken over by the courts.

It was a credible threat: A judge was so angry at the city’s failure to improve special education services that he embedded his own shadow governance inside the administration.

“People had dug in their heels on how to resolve” the issues, Schmoke said. So in 1996 he forged an agreement with the state to prevent a takeover: For a $254 million increase in state aid over five years, the city would cede some of its control over the school system to the state. The legislature revamped the system in 1997, requiring joint school board appointments by the governor and the mayor.

But that fresh start didn’t resolve deeply embedded problems.

A string of scandals kept coming.

In 1999, Paul Laurence Dunbar High School opened without class schedules. Teens wandered the halls for weeks or attended classes they didn’t need.

In the same school year, a top administrator gave two consultants lucrative no-bid contracts to finance and manage a $12.3 million project. He vacationed with one of the consultants at a cliffside hotel in Puerto Rico, where the nightly rate was $1,200.

Then in 2004, a major financial management failure led to layoffs of 900 employees and the firing of top administrators. CEO Bonnie Copeland, who was appointed that summer, discovered that the district had failed to rein in spending. Six months later, the deficit had grown to $58 million and the district was on the verge of bankruptcy, weeks away from being unable to pay its teachers.

Dramatic overhauls were attempted: The state took over three low-performing schools and gave them to an outside company to run, an effort that ultimately failed. Charter schools started to open. CEOs changed every few years.

Large, unmanageable neighborhood high schools were broken apart into smaller ones. One year, I followed two students who were left homeless by parental drug addiction as they successfully earned high school diplomas at one of those high schools that was closing down. They read so poorly they could barely understand the stories I wrote about them.

Break it to fix it

In 2007, the lively, Cuban-born and Harvard-educated Andrés Alonso became the first CEO to make major structural changes, some of which remain today. He negotiated one of the first pay-for-performance teacher contracts in the country, closed many underperforming schools, and increased principal autonomy. He gave middle and high school students universal choice, allowing them to leave their underperforming neighborhood schools. He also helped push a $1 billion plan to improve school facilities through the Maryland General Assembly.

Some longtime city educators describe Alonso as a catalyst who intentionally broke things and dislodged a recalcitrant bureaucracy.

“At some point the system needs a shock when it’s got such calcified underperformance‚” said Santelises, who came in as the chief academic officer during the last several years of Alonso’s tenure. Each summer, Alonso fired a third of all the principals whose schools’ test scores hadn’t improved. But often their replacements were assigned mere days before the start of school.

“What Alonso helped us realize was that there could be a different way to do things. You didn’t have to nibble around the edges. You could take some big swings and it could make a big difference,” said Roger Schulman, CEO of the nonprofit Fund for Educational Excellence, who worked for an education nonprofit that collaborated with City Schools at the time.

But scandals continued to surface.

In 2009, Alonso quietly gave city school board chair Brian D. Morris a $175,000 administrative job even though he had a long history of financial and legal woes and had not earned the bachelor’s degree he claimed to have. Morris resigned under public pressure within days of getting the job.

Several schools were caught in 2010 cheating on annual state tests, a scandal that brought national attention to the city.

Two years later, an investigation found the system had paid $14 million in overtime over several years, with the top earner being Alonso’s driver. Credit card purchases by administrators amounted to $500,000. The head of IT spent $250,000 on renovations to his office suite.

Alonso left in 2013 after six years on the job. After two short-term leaders, Santelises took over the system in 2016. The board gave her a simple directive: “Manage the chaos.”

Santelises finds stability

Santelises, a more understated leader than Alonso, had never run a school system. But she did know Baltimore, and her children attended city public schools. Known for defending the potential of every city kid in passionate bursts, Santelises was a tall, imposing figure with a backbone.

She clamped down on what she called “the jackals” who expected contracts for pet projects in their neighborhood schools, a practice that she said could waste millions of dollars.

And she set a foundation for greater academic gains. She began the job when the nation had just dumped on schools a rigid accountability system called No Child Left Behind that forced urban schools to narrow education to what was tested, mostly English and math.

She didn’t believe in that limited focus, particularly for Baltimore’s kids.

“I don’t do ghetto schooling. I don’t do double blocks of math, double blocks of English language arts. ‘You play on some pavement, you come back. You should be grateful we give you some food,’” she said.

Santelises remade Baltimore’s curriculum and gave students access to honors and Advanced Placement classes, now offered in 30 schools. Pass rates increased fourfold. She increased social studies and science time, reintroduced the arts and, working with Under Armour, invested in middle and high school sports.

Long before many Maryland school systems, she began using a phonics-based curriculum now known as the science of reading. As a result, reading scores have risen nine percentage points, faster than in many districts in the state since COVID, although they remain the lowest. Math scores have risen six percentage points as well.

On the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, the city’s fourth graders made some of the fastest gains in math scores among urban school districts nationwide since the pandemic, though those scores remain low, too.

In other words, city students are behind but catching up fast.

“She is a remarkable lady. She lasted the test of time,” said Ben Mosley, principal of Glenmount Elementary/Middle, one of many schools that have improved over time. It earned four out of five stars on the Maryland School Report Card this year. “I think she put us on the right path academically. Do we have a lot to do? Absolutely.”

City Schools still contends with the concentrated poverty affecting 70% of its students. Mosley has seen it firsthand: He recalled two students whose family lived in a car for a year before finding an apartment.

“The mother has five kids and they share two beds on the floor with no frame. These kids watched their sister commit suicide. All that trauma built up over the years,” he said.

“Multiply that story by 25 in every school.”

Mosley’s school was the center of gravity for children isolated and lonely after the pandemic. I spent days watching elementary teachers handle their fears with grace and patience. As other superintendents focused on academic gains, Santelises directed schools to first heal children, then teach, believing that students could only learn after their trauma was resolved.

In spite of progress, the school system struggled to shake the public perception that its schools were failing. Two scandals under Santelises didn’t help: A principal at Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts changed grades, enrolled students in classes that didn’t exist and inflated enrollment, a 2019 investigation found. Then in 2022, the Office of Inspector General found 12,500 instances across the system in which teachers and principals changed failing grades to passing.

Baltimore television station Fox45 has relentlessly criticized Santelises’ leadership, a storyline that Goucher College media professor David Zurawik said mirrors its coverage of the city as a whole.

The narrative, he said, “is what happens if you have Democrats and persons of color running your city? It’s a mess.”

The coverage dominates television news about the school system and positions Santelises as the problem, Zurawik said.

“She becomes the embodiment of everything that they say is wrong with Baltimore City schools. It’s a crazy oversimplification, but it works to some extent in the language of TV,” he said.

Santelises called it a “blitzkrieg” that “undercut any kind of progress, any kind of hope.”

That narrative, however, apparently did not persuade many middle-class families who in recent years have been sending their children to a range of city public schools they would not have chosen some decades ago.

At the turn of the century, families angled to get their children into a couple of elementary schools in the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

Annie Milli, executive director of Live Baltimore until 2024, said the feeling was often “Roland Park [Elementary/Middle] or nothing.”

Her organization spent years campaigning to get parents to consider their neighborhood schools, an effort that paid off as schools improved.

Today, six schools rank ahead of Roland Park, which still does well, on the state reading test. In math, 15 elementary/middle schools had higher pass rates than the state average of 27%.

When a family new to Baltimore asks what schools are good, Facebook erupts in lively chatter. “The array and variety of schools that are being named blows me away,” Milli said. “I think [Santelises] did things big and small, including understanding where to put principals” who helped increase neighborhood confidence in schools.

While she believes the system needs to make much more progress, Santelises sees growing faith in schools. “We have more middle-class Black parents who see this school as an option and aren’t bolting for the counties,” she said.

In the end, parents often judge their school system through the lens of their children’s experience, and some parents’ views of their neighborhood school seem to be changing. The city lost 65,000 residents between 2000 and 2020, but the population has stabilized in recent years. Milli thinks the rising faith in schools has something to do with it.

Schulman sees that in his front yard. He bought a house in Hampden about 25 years ago.

At the time, none of his neighbors were sending their children to nearby Hampden Elementary. “As soon as kids got to school age they moved out,” he said.

Now he looks out the window each morning and sees dozens of kids walking to the school, which leads the city in reading test scores.

“I think for my friends who live in the city, we do feel hope.”

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.