Election-Year Education, Quality Control, and The Cyberspace Teachers’ Lounge

Teacher Magazine ’s take on education news from around the Web, March 30-April 5.

Maryland was just this close (imagine thumb and index finger a millimeter apart) from becoming the first state to use NCLB to take failing schools out of a district's hands . Despite repeated efforts to boost achievement, the seven middle and four high schools in Baltimore are in bad shape—at one high school, just 1.4 percent of the students passed the state's biology exam. So last week Nancy Grasmick, Maryland's school superintendent, officially requested that supervision of the schools be split between the state and other managers, including non- and for-profit entities. The state school board granted the request, but Martin O'Malley, Baltimore's Democratic mayor, who happens to be running for governor this year, cried foul. "This is unprecedented," he claimed. "No other state superintendent in the history of the country has ever tried to do what Dr. Grasmick is trying to do...