Growth at City Springs Elementary

Over seven years ago, The Abell Foundation funded the creation of the Baltimore Curriculum Project. Its charge was to replicate the successful results achieved by an earlier Foundation project at The Barclay School, a K-8 Baltimore City public school that was permitted to use the private Calvert School curriculum in place of the school district’s curriculum. Because the Calvert curriculum was not available for wide replication in other schools, the Baltimore Curriculum Project set out to write and implement a similarly effective curriculum, merging an existing proven curriculum known as Direct Instruction with lesson plans based on the Core Knowledge curriculum sequence.

Beginning with six pilot schools and eventually expanding to 18, implementation proved extremely difficult, for the same reasons that plague most school reform efforts: high teacher turnover, constant external demands that distract schools from focusing on instruction, weak commitment by school leadership, and the often intractable social and academic deficits typically found in children raised in poverty. Though there were some bright spots, all of these factors led to only incremental progress in student achievement in the project's first four years.

However, by the fifth year, the project's flagship school, City Springs Elementary, had achieved remarkable progress.

The Baltimore Curriculum Project attributes the superior success of City Springs not only to its strong, effective curriculum but also to the increased control of its management that the project enjoys and the autonomy it is allowed. City Springs is one of a handful of schools in the City granted status as a New School, a Baltimore City version of a charter school; it is managed not by school district officials, but by an outside operator, in this case the Baltimore Curriculum Project. The Curriculum Project also operates Hampstead Hill Elementary/Middle and Collington Square Elementary/Middle.