As the beginning of the new school year approaches, Maryland State Superintendent of Schools Mohammed Choudhury is already looking ahead to the next academic year and those following.
That’s because the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, legislation providing billions in additional funding to the state’s schools, starts to roll out across the state this year.
With one year now under his belt, The Baltimore Sun sat down with Choudhury to discuss his experience on the job and what he’s looking forward to. His comments were edited for length and clarity.
Q: This school year marks one year of you serving as Maryland’s state superintendent. How did the first year go and what lessons are you taking with you into this academic year?
A: One of the things that I love about Maryland and this role is everyone is engaged in ensuring that we have a high quality education system. And why is everyone engaged? Because we have one of the biggest pieces of legislation to ever pass in the history of Maryland called the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. The legislation passed the spring before I started, so my first year was going to really set the tone of not only my leadership but also how the department is going to lead on implementing the blueprint.
The biggest lesson learned is because everyone’s engaged, I have to make sure I keep engaging everyone. I would put myself as one of the small few of agency heads who has to make sure that he’s constantly engaging activists, superintendents, assembly members. At the same time, I’m going to expand the tent, so it’s not the same voices [being engaged] all the time. If you look at the roundtables that we put together, these are individuals who have never been asked to come into a circle to talk to leaders in the state, and so I’m very proud to say that we’ve done that.
Q: Across the state many districts still have a number of teacher vacancies. How do you plan to address the teacher shortage issue?
A: This teacher shortage is years in the making. It’s existed before the pandemic, and the pandemic has also accelerated it. It is true that the vast majority of our system started with a higher number of vacancies last year. And then for some, they were able to close the gap as we went to the end of the school year.
Yes, less and less people are interested in becoming teachers in the state of Maryland. Over the last 10 years, a third of teacher prep [programs] has declined in terms of enrollment of who wants to be teachers. Every day teachers are conducting, metaphorically speaking, brain surgery on our future leaders and future workers, and yet, we don’t compensate it and treat it in that way. And I think the Blueprint forces that conversation, taking teacher pay to $60,000.
Immediate fixes are everything from retention bonuses, sign-on bonuses, stipends — you’ve got to keep the people you have. We’ve also made it less complicated for people who have a bachelor’s degree who are interested in teaching to come into the profession by giving waivers to our conditionally certified teachers. Essentially, what it does is gives people a longer window to take their required classes to pass the test, rather than a shorter window of two years.
Long term, we need to raise teacher pay. We need to treat teachers like rock stars. We need to also make sure that regions that have struggled to bring teachers in — West Baltimore, Dorchester and others — have a competitive edge in pay and learning conditions. I do believe in differentiated compensation for people who are working different types of assignments. A teacher working to turn around and transform a school in West Baltimore is very different from a teacher working in a middle school in say, Clarksville, Maryland in Howard County; those are very different assignments.
Q: This school year will be the fourth in a row touched by the COVID-19 pandemic. Are you anticipating that this will be the year things finally go back to “normal”?
A: One of the things I’ve said is a return to normal is not good enough. Being able to go back to normal in terms of less disruptions, closures, quarantines and universal masking mandates and such? Yes, I do expect this school year to be much more normal and less disruptive.
The thing that I’m most looking forward to this year is less quarantines because we know that much more now. We have vaccines for all age groups, pretty much. We have many other testing options that don’t require an assembly line in a school where school staff have to also do testing on top of their everyday duties. I would hope that it feels like a time when we’re we’re not obsessing about COVID-19, and we’re obsessing about student learning and achievement gaps and opportunities.
Q: Nationwide free school lunch is no longer going to be guaranteed. How will the free lunch/reduced lunch landscape look in Maryland?
A: I think Maryland needs to begin that conversation on how we can make free meals permanent in our state. Obviously, it would be great if the feds ended up opening up [free meal programming], but some other states are choosing not to wait for that. California has already gone there. There are some assembly members who are passionate about this issue, but it is not something that has gotten the focus and hearing that it deserves.
Another thing we’re investing in that’s a big deal is the Blueprint allocating concentration of poverty grants, which essentially doles out funding for school systems that are 80% economically disadvantaged. Eventually it’s going to come down to 50%. Those schools get a concentration of poverty grant, which enables them to hire a community schools coordinator, and it also gives them a per pupil bump to be able to essentially leverage partnerships to do wraparound services.
Q: In Baltimore City and County schools, systems have made changes to their school security protocols to address issues in student safety. How do you assess their responses?
A: Similar to the teacher shortage, [school safety concerns are] not universally felt everywhere in the same way at the same rates. [Violent] incidents have dropped in some places compared to the previous few years, and then other places [are seeing] higher [numbers of incidents] than what it was usually. And then within that, where it’s higher, it’s specifically concentrated in a specific set of schools or region. And so to just say our schools are unsafe places, and things are out of control, I take issue with that because that’s not rooted in facts.
Being able to invest in communities, schools, being able to invest in mental health supports, being able to provide coordinated wraparound services to our students is going to be key in being able to identify students with challenges earlier.
I came from [Texas], a state where we have invested in every possible technology you can think of in terms of detecting weapons and knives and everything else: clear backpacks, schools doing drills, SROs equipped with all kinds of weapons. Even then, that is not enough to avoid Uvalde.
Hardening schools is not going to solve this. Being able to identify students who need help and support and mental health before they take that energy and apply it in unhealthy ways, that is the thing that solves it.
