When Martin O’Malley announced his candidacy for mayor in June 1999, he chose as his backdrop a drug corner as he declared that eliminating open-air drug markets would be his top priority.
Four years later, when he launched his re-election effort, he stood outside a school, City Springs Elementary on Caroline Street, as he declared that he would make “children, and their future, our No. 1 priority” for his second term in office.
To O’Malley’s most prominent opponent in the September Democratic primary, Andrey Bundley, O’Malley’s shift in focus from policing to schools looks like hypocritical political maneuvering.
O’Malley provided a 2 percent increase in city funds for the operation of the schools between 2000 and this year, according to school statistics, while he provided a 24 percent increase to the Police Department.
Moreover, since a change in state law in 1997, city mayors have been prohibited from running the public schools, which have received 54 percent more state money in exchange for increased state involvement and greater independence from City Hall.
But now O’Malley is being challenged politically by a high school principal, Bundley, who has made the city’s education problems his central issue.
Bundley contends that O’Malley’s recent series of appearances in the schools is designed to soften his image as a single-minded crime fighter, and to co-opt an issue on which he could be vulnerable. Some advocates for children and state legislators are also questioning the mayor’s record on education.
“It’s an anomaly in his behavior. He hasn’t spent any time in the schools until now,” said Bundley. “If you look at his budgets, you see that all of his money has gone into the Police Department. That has been his focus. But you can’t focus only on that.”
Bundley compared the city’s schools to those of a Third World nation, with decaying buildings, lead in the drinking water and staggering dropout rates.
O’Malley strongly denied that he has become interested in the city schools only recently. And he said that using his influence, although reduced, to try to urge the reform of the schools is a logical extension of his overall goal to rejuvenate the city.
The mayor said he has lobbied hard for the schools in Annapolis throughout his term. And he said he helped legislators win a 15 percent per-pupil increase in state funding that has given the city the second-best-funded school system in the state, up from sixth before he took office.
With the additional money has come steadily improving test scores. For the first time this year, the majority of first- and second-graders in the city scored above the national average in math and reading on a national standardized test.
“We’re on the brink of something great, something unprecedented in America – the real resurrection of a once-failed urban school system,” said O’Malley during his June 23 speech at City Springs Elementary School.
Other improvements O’Malley points to include:
At the same time, the mayor said in a recent interview, he has been frustrated by what he described as fiscal mismanagement by school administrators that has led to a budget deficit estimated at more than $40 million.
This financial crisis is forcing hundreds of layoffs, including the transfers of many academic coaches who, some say, are partly responsible for the test score increases.
“For all of the strides that our children have made, and all of the extra dollars the schools have received, what has been lacking is the business operation, especially with regard to accounting and finance,” O’Malley said. “Bad administration will kill good policy every time.”
To help solve the accounting problems, O’Malley recently appointed (with Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.) three new school board members. O’Malley said the new board would help the new interim schools chief executive officer, Bonnie Copeland, install a tighter financial management system.
Copeland said school administrators are working with the mayor’s staff to install a computerized system called “School Stat” that will be based on O’Malley’s CitiStat system used to track government services and spending.
“We very much want to get that kind of system in place,” Copeland said. “And we want to open up the communication to a greater degree between the schools and the mayor’s office.”
The mayor said that when he wanted to help the schools in the past, he was often rebuffed by the school board and former schools CEO Carmen V. Russo, who served from 2000 until last month.
“Oftentimes, I’ve needed a battering ram and a siege team to get in even to try to help the schools,” said O’Malley. “They have been obsessed with their independence.”
He said that once he sent e-mails to school principals, suggesting that they try to enroll more of their students in federally funded free-breakfast programs that have been shown to improve student performance.
“At that point, she [Russo] told me never again to contact principals,” O’Malley said. “She said, ‘It’s nothing personal. You just can’t do it.’ That was the nature of our relationship. … When I can get to a principal, I make progress. But the system administration has not been a real help and has not been real open to my involvement.”
In an interview from Florida, Russo said that she did tell O’Malley to stop talking to school principals. She said she felt it was her responsibility to enforce 1997 state legislation that required a separation between the mayor’s office and the schools in return for a boost in state funding.
Before this compromise, mayors had direct responsibility for maintaining school buildings, hiring and firing school administrators, and overseeing the overall performance of the schools, Russo said.
But since that time, the involvement of mayors has been limited to working with the governor to appoint the nine school board members, who in turn choose a CEO to run the schools. And the city provides a portion of the school system’s budget, with its $208 million contribution to the school’s operating expenses this year (not including capital funds or debt service) comprising about 23 percent of the school system’s $915 million budget. The state provides about 61 percent with the federal government and other sources giving the rest.
“When I became superintendent [in 2000], it was made really clear to me that the Senate bill [in 1997] had separated the school administration from the administration of the city,” Russo said. “I focused on academics. And the mayor focused on crime, because that was a major issue in the city. And when you focus, you set priorities. … Now he’s going into his second term, he sees that he needs to begin to spend some time in the area of education, and I think that’s great for the children of this city.”
Some observers question whether O’Malley deserves any credit for the large increase in state funding for the school system, which has helped drive the test score increases and many other improvements.
The extra money came because of the work of state Del. Howard P. Rawlings, former state Sen. Barbara A. Hoffman, and a “long line of people ahead of O’Malley who deserve credit,” said state Sen. Robert H. Kittleman, a Republican from Howard County who sits on the senate Budget and Taxation Committee.
State Sen. Lisa A. Gladden, a Democrat from Baltimore, gave O’Malley a “gentleman’s C” for his efforts to help the city’s schools. “If he was as tough on the school system as he was on crime, we’d have a great school system,” she said.
Christopher Maher, education director for Advocates for Children and Youth, a nonprofit organization, said: “Money talks when it comes to public education, and I have been disappointed in the money the city has provided under O’Malley. It has not increased since he took office.”
But C. William Struever, former chairman of the school board’s finance committee, said that O’Malley has been a tireless advocate of the system’s financial needs in Annapolis, consistently placing additional money for the schools among his top legislative priorities.
“I think that the mayor’s passion and sense of urgency has already been put to great use in the school system,” Struever said. “And it is arguably one of the fastest-improving school systems in the country.”
<!– ART CREDITKIM HAIRSTON : SUN STAFF
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTMayor Martin O'Malley watches as Raquel Taylor, 9, a pupil at Calvin Rodwell Elementary School, works on a computer.
CUTLINE TEXT–>