No Juvenile Inmate Left Behind
No Child Left Behind applied behind bars
City school faces an impossible task educating young inmates to standard
By Sara Neufeld
Sun reporter
Originally published December 9, 2006
Located in the Baltimore City Detention Center, the school's approximately 130 students - ages 14 to 17 - are charged as adults in some of the city's most notorious killings and other crimes.Advertisement
Many of them had dropped out of school before landing in prison, and about a quarter come in reading at a second-grade level.No Child Left Behind requires schools to give annual standardized tests to all their students, and all students must demonstrate proficiency in reading and math by 2014.
Schools such as Eager Street that repeatedly don't make "adequate yearly progress" toward that goal face the public embarrassment of being put on a state failure list, with sanctions that can ultimately be as severe as staff replacement. That leads to demoralized teachers and difficulty recruiting.
"It's not that we want to get out of anything, but no other schools I know of have this to contend with," said Eager Street Principal James Scofield. "To look at the data and assess the school, it's just not fair."
Teachers at many other troubled schools also feel that No Child Left Behind holds them to an unrealistic standard, punishing them if they don't make years of progress with ill-prepared students in a matter of months. But Eager Street is in a particular predicament, because most of the student body turns over from one year to the next.
The state uses the scores of a handful of kids to calculate whether Eager Street has made adequate yearly progress. The calculation can be made using the scores of as few as five students, those who were enrolled early in the school year and are still around on testing day. Generally, that means they are the students facing the most severe criminal charges.
100 percent failure
The test results for all students are posted online and printed in the newspaper: a failure rate of 100 percent this year in seventh- and eighth-grade math and high school algebra and government."It shows us at zero," said Scofield, a veteran city schools administrator. "It looks as if we're doing nothing."
Eager Street students, all but a handful of them boys, have had extraordinarily difficult lives, Scofield said: A "huge" number have been abandoned by parents. A 16-year-old who recently enrolled hadn't been to school since fourth grade, when his mother pulled him out to support the family by any means necessary, including selling drugs.
Students can leave Eager Street if a judge releases them or lessens the criminal charges and moves them to the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center. Otherwise, they stop school on the day they turn 18, when they are moved to the prison's adult wing.
"If I just got locked up, got my freedom taken away, if I'm facing 10 years and I'm 15 or 16 and I'm worried about turning 18 and going to the adult side and getting raped, I'm not thinking about a test," Scofield said.