Report: No widespread grade changes found

Inspector general applauds BCPSS for improvement

A review of Baltimore City schools that examined more than 18 million records found “no widespread grade manipulation” across the system, officials said at Tuesday night’s Board of School Commissioners meeting.

The state’s Department of Education ordered the audit after a 2022 Maryland Inspector General for Education report found the city school system’s grading policies were inconsistent, particularly when grades were rounded up within 1 to 3 percentage points of passing. There were more than 12,500 instances in which high school grades were changed from a fail to a pass between 2016 and the end of the 2019-20 school year.

Consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal analyzed records from the 2022-23 school year, the first “near-normal” school year since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, according to school officials.

More than 250,000 records were identified as grade changes, but about 40% of those changes, or 107,400 records, were considered technical record-keeping documents with no effect. Overall, just 0.02% of all the modified records were considered changes to final report card grades.

Sonja Santelises, CEO of the Baltimore City Public Schools System, said grades can be changed for legitimate reasons, such as correcting entrance errors or miscalculations. She emphasized that out of millions of grade entries, only four final grades were changed from fail to pass.

“When we talk about mass grade changing, we are talking about four grades that benefited students out of 18 million,” Santelises said.

Richard Henry, Maryland’s inspector general for education, applauded BCPSS for its improvement.

“The recent review conducted by Alvarez & Marsal demonstrates that the (Office of the Inspector General for Education’s) findings and recommendations were taken seriously, and policies and procedures are now in place to protect the integrity of the grading system,” Henry said in a statement.

The primary driver of the system’s grade change issues was teachers, mostly in elementary schools, entering grades late after the marking period ended, said Jim Grady, an Alvarez & Marsal managing director of public sector services. The majority of grades entered late were because a student transferred to a new school and their grades from the previous school were sent late.

Nearly 3,500 final grades were changed from “null” to pass, according to the analysis.

Rachel Pfeifer, BCPSS executive director of academics, presented an overview of the audit’s result Tuesday. The review was not an investigation, Pfeifer said, but rather a performance tool used when updating the system’s grading policies, which occurs every five years.

City schools overhauled their grading policies in 2017 and in 2019 after school officials discovered administrators at Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts fabricated classes and approved students for graduation by changing failing grades. A damning OIGE report on the scheme was published after a two-year investigation.

Also Tuesday, school officials announced that students who attended a city prekindergarten program or

Judy Center outperformed their peers on the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment. The assessment includes observations of a child’s behavior and motor skills, as well as verbal questions to gauge math and language skills.

Preparing 3- and 4-yearolds for kindergarten and elementary school is a major priority for the state education department and a focus of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, the state’s education reform plan. The Blueprint calls for adding more Judy Centers across the state; the centers help children from all backgrounds build social and academic skills needed for school.

“All of our student [racial and socioeconomic] groups equaled or outperformed the same groups at the state level,” Santelises said.

Studies have shown that children who have a strong foundation for learning are more likely to succeed in later grade levels. About 46% of city school students demonstrated readiness on the 2023-24 assessment, compared with 44% of Maryland students overall.

Multilingual learner students in Baltimore increased readiness by 9 percentage points from 15% to 24%, doubling the state’s readiness of 12%. Students with disabilities increased by 11 percentage points to equal the state’s readiness of 18%.

“What we are doing for our youngest learners is working, it’s making a difference, it’s having an impact,” said Joan Dabrowski, BCPSS’ chief academic officer.

Baltimore City and Cecil County have the most Judy Centers in Maryland. An annual report on the assessment will be published in the next few weeks, a spokesperson for the state education department said.