School board approves testing all on math, English

Exam results won’t carry consequences for schools, students

Maryland students — whether they learn in-person or online — will have to take statewide standardized tests this spring, but the results won’t carry any consequences for students or schools.

The state school board voted Tuesday to start using the new Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program in math and English, but will drop other tests in social studies and science from the schedule. The tests also can be administered later in the school year than usual.

The new testing program was set to be introduced last spring but wasn’t given after schools went virtual because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The board urged State Superintendent of Schools Karen Salmon to shorten the length of the testing time. The math test would take two hours and 40 minutes and the English test four hours and 40 minutes, the same as what the state education department planned for last year’s suspended exam, according to department documents. Salmon told the board the testing time already had been reduced.

The testing time for the new math and English tests is about a third less than the former test, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, last used in 2019.

Rose Maria Li, a state school board member from Montgomery County, as well as other members, told Salmon the disruption caused by the testing could be minimized if it was shorter.

ability to direct the allocations throughout the state, I would hope this would just be the first step in the effort to centralize the entire allocation and administration of the statewide vaccination program,” he said.

Brown faced his own criticism in 2013 when he was Maryland’s lieutenant governor and oversaw the state’s new health exchange where people could buy insurance under the Affordable Care Act. The site crashed on the first day and ultimately had to be replaced with costly new technology. “I think Governor Hogan is afraid of failure,” Brown said. “He’s afraid if he assumes responsibility for a centralized system and it doesn’t work, he will be criticized and critiqued.”

But he and others said the state’s proposed preregistration site should be expanded. For now, it will only allow people to sign up for the state’s mass vaccination sites in Prince George’s County and at the Baltimore Convention Center, plus one scheduled to open Thursday at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore. Another site in Southern Maryland is planned to open next month, and others are on the drawing board. People still would have to add their names to sites run by counties and others online or by phone.

State officials did not answer other questions about the proposed sign-up site, including who would operate the portal or whether other vaccination centers eventually will be included. “We will be discussing it with the counties on our next call with them, and get their input,” said Charles Gischlar, a spokesman for the state health department, in an email Tuesday, a day after acting health secretary Dennis R. Schrader announced the new preregistration site.

State Sen. Clarence Lam, a physician, called the effort a late attempt to create a coordinated website and “another example of the state not anticipating problems and working to prevent them.”

He said he was concerned the promised state portal might be too limited and too late to fix the confusion and frustration over vaccine access. He said there are too many unknowns about how the site will work to know whether it will be effective.

For example, he said, it’s unclear if the state’s new system can work with the different patient data systems used by different operators of the mass vaccination sites.

“I think it’s a step in the right direction, but I question how much it’s actually going to be helpful,” said Lam, a Democrat who represents Howard and Baltimore counties. “The devil is in the details in all this.”

The tangle of technology used by providers has vexed vaccine seekers who have been turned away when limited doses are quickly spoken for. Some have turned to private Facebook pages and other resources to guide them in their pursuit, which some have likened to a scavenger hunt or the Hunger Games.

And though the state has disbursed more than 1.1 million doses, data shows Maryland remains behind most other states in getting shots into arms, ranking 41st of 50 states and the District of Columbia for the number of doses it has administered per 100,000 residents, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Critics also say the way doses are distributed benefits the tech-savvy, and those able to drive anywhere anytime at the expense of older people and minority groups.

The health department’s Gischlar said the new registration portal could “further free up hospitals and local health departments to focus on ensuring equitable access, and reaching hard-hit communities.”

Hogan and others agree the biggest issues will be resolved once more vaccine is made available. So far, demand has outstripped the supply of vaccine.

It’s not clear when states can expect their vaccine allocations from the federal government to jump, but federal regulators are reviewing a third vaccine for emergency use and it could gain that authorization by week’s end. or now, the state reports it is receiving about 12,000 doses a day to vaccinate the more than 2 million people who currently qualify.

Maryland officials had planned to collect the names of people interested in the vaccine before it began arriving in December, according to local health officials. Many local health departments created their own waitlists when the state did not create one.

One system available at the time to state officials, called COVIDReadi, billed itself in a brochure circulated last fall as a preregistration system able to help providers identify specific groups who qualified for vaccine by age, race, address and other factors.

It was created by an Owings Mills-based nonprofit called Maryland Partnership for Prevention, which is normally responsible for helping vaccinate school kids against the flu. The partnership also developed a vaccine registration and tracking system called PrepMod that the state issued to every local health department. It’s also used by about a dozen Maryland hospitals and 26 other states.

The preregistration and registration systems were designed to work together.

Tiffany Tate, the Partnership for Prevention’s executive director, developed the registration system after the H1N1 outbreak in 2009. She said she watched in disbelief as workers collected information from people in line on clipboards to be manually entered into computers later. The PrepMod system she created has been used in schools around the state for flu vaccine registration and tracking for the past several years.

She said when the coronavirus pandemic was emerging she was astounded to learn another system had not been developed to manage vaccine distribution and tracking. She retooled PrepMod and has continued making improvements as issues have come up, such as people sharing registration links and overbooking, problems she never had with flu vaccinations.

Both Tate and state officials said more training was upcoming on the patches.

“It’s remarkable to me that 10, 11 years later the government still hadn’t given us a product like that,” she said. “I adapted this one. But there are still perils with any technology.”

Ed Singer, the Carroll County health officer, said it might not matter if the state offered local counties the option to use whatever preregistration system it adopts. His department has been working closely with community partners to create a priority list and it may be hard to change “mid-effort.”

Some proponents of a centralized waitlist agree it could cause disruption if it failed, as happened with the health exchange. The state’s Beacon One-Stop system for unemployment insurance also has had its troubles, trapping some users in limbo without benefits.

But a universal preregistration site would be particularly useful in this case, said Tinglong Dai, an associate professor of operations management and business analytics in the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School who has been following vaccine distribution.

One-stop preregistration sites are “not only a logical thing to do, but probably the only option one has when the demand outstrips supply in the short term,” he said. “It’s also not surprising that many other states are considering the same direction.”

Dai said it could be a challenge to make a site trustworthy and useful. It would have to offer registered users information such as their updated wait times and how they connect to appointment slots when they are available. It also might be tough to include all the disparate sites now offering vaccines in Maryland. That doesn’t mean the state’s leadership shouldn’t try.

“The idea that a centralized managed website can become a ‘single source of failure’ is not without merit,” Dai said. “But great leaders should be motivated by a desire to deliver excellent results, not by a fear of failure. Given the status quo of Maryland’s vaccination effort, there is very little downside. The upside potential is huge.”

Some disturbing allegations have been made against the Maryland State Police and the way it treats its Black troopers. More than 20 of the officers took their complaints to members of the General Assembly’s Legislative Black Caucus, and last week lawmakers grilled Secretary of the State Police Col. Woodrow “Jerry” Jones III about an alleged culture of discrimination where Black officers feel there is little room for advancement and that they are disciplined more harshly for infractions than their white colleagues. Other accusations include ignoring retaliation against officers who complain, including not taking seriously when a Black trooper found a banana (a tired and old racist trope, we should say) on the hood of his car. The lawmakers were also told these troopers were forced to listen to racist jokes from white colleagues.

A spokesman for the state police denied the allegations, and Col. Jones said during the meeting with Black Caucus members that he does not tolerate racism and discrimination against anyone. He described the allegations against his agency as “vague” and said more detail would help better address the issue. Concerned troopers could provide a waiver to their personnel records so the cases could be discussed with lawmakers, Col. Jones also said.

But we find it hard to believe that the state police is a model of racial harmony when more than 20 troopers felt strongly enough about what they perceived as unfair treatment to bring the matter to lawmakers — and an attorney. Maybe the department could argue that one or two complaints were cases of sour grapes. Such a large number raises serious concern and should not be brushed off and ignored. Members of the caucus said they have heard such concerns about racial inequities for 15 years or more and have reached their last bit of patience on the issue. Years of such allegations also sends up red flags.

Col. Jones told lawmakers the state police has policies that address discrimination. That sounds good, but if the culture of the department is such that people feel as if the rules aren’t going to be enforced, who is going to come forward? Especially when discipline matters go before other troopers, as several lawmakers pointed out. Words on paper mean little if that is all they are. Col. Jones wants people to come forward and to foster a community of trust. Clearly, the department hasn’t done a good job with that.

Also, how can Col. Jones dispute allegations regarding promotions when he couldn’t even tell the Black Caucus how many African Americans are in the specialized K-9 and aviation units? How did lawmakers know that was a concern among Black troopers, but their boss did not? The specialized units come with better pay, which raises the question of wage equity within the department as well. Black Caucus members gave Col. Jones 30 days to provide them with that information and other data as well, including a breakdown of major and minor infractions by race, the number of promotions and demotions by race, and what kind of diversity training officers get.

If the information doesn’t address the lawmakers concerns, they promised to take next steps, including targeting the agency’s “sizable budget.” We hope lawmakers follow through. If complaints of discrimination have gone on unaddressed for as long as claimed, that is unacceptable and the state police department needs to be held accountable once and for all. Thanks to a social justice movement sparked by several high profile police brutality incidents, the spotlight is on troubles with policing, and that scrutiny should include problems within departments as well. The Black Caucus should also consider whether an audit of the police department is appropriate. Even better, the General Assembly could launch an investigation, much like they did over the hefty severance received by the former head of the Maryland Environmental Service, an independent state agency. If the state police has done nothing wrong and has nothing to hide, they should welcome any kind of investigation.

Col. Jones vehemently said he is ready to give lawmakers any information they need, and pointed out that over the past five years, the Maryland State Police has spent $500,000 on a marketing campaign specifically focused on African Americans and other minorities that included partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, as suggested by the Legislative Black Caucus. Of the 467 troopers hired in the past five years, 33% were minorities and 14% African Americans, a spokesman for the department said. For the first time in the department’s history, every command level responsible for the promotional process is a minority.

The question still remains, however, how officers are treated within the department. Enough are saying not fairly, and that is something that needs to be addressed.