BALTIMORE — For years, this city had one of the worst school systems in the country. Fewer than half its students graduated, enrollment had fallen precipitously and proficiency levels were far below the national average.
Monica Lopossay for The New York Times
Andres Alonso took over the Baltimore city schools in 2007 and has brought deep changes in just three academic years.
In 2007, the school board hiredAndres Alonso, a Cuban immigrant with a Harvard degree and strong views on how to change things. In three years, he pushed through a sweeping reorganization of the school system, closing failing schools, slashing the central office staff by a third and replacing three-quarters of all school principals.
Not everyone likes Dr. Alonso’s methods, and many find that his brassy self-confidence can grate. But few are arguing with his results. Since he was hired, the dropout rate has fallen by half, more students are graduating and for the first time in many years, the system has gained students instead of losing them.
For Baltimore, such bragging rights are rare, given that it has lost more than a third of its population since the 1960s, as the middle class — both white and black — has fled to wealthier, safer suburbs.
“We were just about as low as we could be,” said Mary Pat Clarke, chairwoman of the education committee for the Baltimore City Council. “He blew into town with a suitcase full of ideas. Now the school system’s in motion.”
The city is a particularly stark laboratory for urban school reforms. It is a fraction of the size of New York, where Dr. Alonso was a deputy to Chancellor Joel I. Klein, and more troubled than Washington, whose many private schools and status as the nation’s capital have complicated overhaul efforts.
What is more, Baltimore’s troubled schools may be just as much a cause of the city’s problems as a result. The high dropout rate feeds a drug industry that has led to a landscape of boarded-up buildings and despair. The school system is 88 percent black (compared with the city’s 63 percent black population), and 84 percent of students are on free or reduced-price meals, a measure of poverty.
The murder rate here is six times that of New York City.
For Dr. Alonso, 53, those statistics made the job attractive, rather than a reason to run. When the school board offered him the job of superintendent in 2007, he took it without ever having set foot in the city. Nine commissioners met him three times in different places in Maryland, in order to avoid talk that he was leaving his job in New York.
“It’s a test case for what’s possible,” Dr. Alonso said. “There were incredible opportunities because the troubles were so big.”
The system had churned through six superintendents in six years, so Dr. Alonso’s priority was to persuade people that things would be different this time. For his changes to work, he needed a lot of support, but that took some convincing.
“The community felt alienated,” said Bishop Douglas I. Miles, a pastor at Koinonia Baptist Church and a major sponsor of youth programs in the city. “There was a sense that we weren’t wanted except to do bake sales.”
So Dr. Alonso held public meetings, inviting parents, librarians and leaders of nonprofits and churches. He directed community organizers to knock on doors in a campaign to bring back high school dropouts. Students as young as fifth graders were allowed to choose their schools in a boisterous annual fair.
“Everything was about creating a surge of energy into the schools,” he said. “I wanted people to have to push to get past each other.”
Next he took on the culture of the schools, which relied heavily on suspensions for discipline, a practice Dr. Alonso strongly opposed. “Kids come as is,” he likes to say, “and it’s our job to engage them.”
Now school administrators have to get his deputy’s signature for any suspension longer than five days. This year, suspensions fell below 10,000, far fewer than the 26,000 the system gave out in 2004.
Instead, schools handled discipline problems more through mediation, counseling and parent-teacher conferences, and offered incentives like sports and clubs. Mental health professionals were placed in every school with middle grades.
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“There was a lot of punishment energy focused on the kids,” said Michael Sarbanes, executive director of community engagement. “We were trying to overcome a perception that had built up over years that we don’t want you.”
Some of the system’s 198 schools were beyond rescue, and Dr. Alonso closed them, all 26. Many new ones were opened in their place.
In one school that was closed, Homeland Security Academy, a middle school with a security-industry theme, students regularly set fires in the bathrooms.
“There were two and three fires a day and you couldn’t really teach,” said Deanna Delgado, who taught English there.
Even so, the closings drew resistance. Jimmy Gittings, a vice president for the American Federation of School Administrators, which represents school principals, argued that closing schools simply moves around a problem, and leaves its root cause — poverty — untouched.
“The foundation in the development of a child begins at home,” Mr. Gittings said. “We are not getting that foundation. That’s why our schools aren’t strong.”
The reorganization was also speeding the retirement of many older black educators, and though only about 15 percent of new principals were from outside Baltimore, people noticed.
“They come in with these high credentials, and you say, wow,” said the Rev. Alvin C. Hathaway, pastor at the Union Baptist Church. “But then you realize they’re literally moving through the city with a GPS.”
The politics of urban education reform can be fragile, but Dr. Alonso is relatively well protected because the board that chose him is appointed by both the governor and the mayor, making it all but impervious to political winds.
He took full advantage of that freedom, making fast changes. Under the old system, principals fulfilled directives from the central office. Now principals have full control over the schools’ budgets and are held accountable for performance. They are required to consult with a committee of parents and community representatives when deciding how the money will be spent.
The approach, not unlike the one taken by Mr. Klein in New York, has its critics. Diane Ravitch, a professor at New York University and author of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education,” argues that making individual principals more accountable shifts responsibility away from those who run school systems.
Valerie Johnson, who has been teaching in Baltimore since 2005, said she felt uncomfortable with the approach at first. “But because I saw so many dysfunctional schools just existing on their own, I’m more in favor,” she said.
Dr. Alonso, she said, has “gone more to the root of the problem,” instead of focusing solely on test scores.
And Baltimore teachers, who were initially opposed to Dr. Alonso’s methods, last month approved a contract that enshrined them. Now teachers are compensated based on performance, not longevity.
In an era when school reformers have become household names in their cities, Dr. Alonso clearly sees himself among them. He talks loftily of historical forces and once remarked that he felt like a character from “War and Peace.”
Dr. Alonso’s personality is large, but so are Baltimore’s troubles, and his supporters argue his confidence is an asset. Parents, for their part, appreciate the changes.
Bernadette Smith, a 43-year-old mother of five, calls the opening of Green Street Academy, a small environmentally themed school in the building of the defunct West Baltimore Middle School, “a divine intervention.”
Students, called scholars, change classes in single-file lines. Homerooms are named for the colleges the teachers attended. The principal, Edward E. Cozzolino, has drawn a dedicated following of Teach for America alumni. And while it has the feel of a charter school, a full third of its students have special needs.
When Ms. Smith took her fifth grader to see the school, Mr. Cozzolino “got down to my son’s level and looked him in the eye. My son said to me, ‘Mom, this is it.’ ”
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