The Flight to Private Schools

From a school system perspective, Anne Arundel County is a complex place. Some of its population is rural, much is suburban, and some is urban. Ten of the twelve feeder systems are majority white, with white populations around eighty percent. The Annapolis feeder system and the Meade feeder system have been roughly half black, half white. (Hispanic students are now a growing part of the Annapolis system.) As the county's most urbanized population, the Annapolis school system is atypical of the surrounding county.

Students in the Annapolis schools cover the entire range. Children from highly educated professional families attend public school in Annapolis. Children from single mom households in public housing attend public school in Annapolis. And this isn't likely to change. Annapolis is an attractive place to live. Upper middle class white families are in Annapolis to stay. Annapolis also has a very high percentage of public housing - roughly an eighth of all housing units in the city of Annapolis proper are public housing. (On the Annapolis peninsula as a whole, the proportion of public housing is about half that much.)

The demands this places on a school system are diverse. Parents in upper middle class families look for strong Gifted & Talented programs. They look for Advanced Placement classes in the high school. They look for International Baccalaureate, now in the high school, and being considered for middle school.

Parents from low income families want a school system that will care about their kids, help them overcome their problems, motivate them, and get them learning.

And there's thousands of kids in Annapolis who don't fall in either of those categories - they just want a solid education without necessarily pushing themselvs into honors classes at every chance. They're children. They need support, they need direction, they need to spend some time growing up.

To the extent the county school system has a strategic plan, it gives no thought to tailoring the plan to the specific circumstances of individual feeder systems. As a result, county administrators have no larger vision for Annapolis area schools. Instead, they simply improvise. They add reading tutors here, they add guidance counselors there, they tend to overlook the need for Gifted & Talented support.

From time to time, school officials at Riva Road appoint principals who are not well-suited to their schools. Each time this happens, annoyed parents pull their kids out of public school and switch to private schools. PTA moms find themselves putting in months of painful behind-the-scenes work to get a faltering principal replaced with someone more effective.

Now, thanks in significant measure to the introduction of the Open Court reading program and the Saxon math program, the elementary school performance levels are rising. The honors program at the high school remains very strong. Annapolis High students are as likely as any to win the county's annual math competition. My daughter went from Annapolis High to Yale. The best students in the Annapolis feeder system are every bit as good as the best students anywhere else in the county. As a public school parent, I know well the positives in our schools.

Even so, the overall picture remains mixed. A great many families have voted with their feet. They've moved children into private schools, a stark vote of No Confidence in the public school system's vision and management capabilities.

What follows gives you a bit of the story in maps and numbers.

The charts below show the Annapolis peninsula, both the City of Annapolis, and the areas that are still considered "county." Almost all the area shown below feeds into Annapolis High, except for a small area that attends South River schools. Each section in the map represents one or two census block groups.

In the center area of the map, we see the Parole neighborhood, with a very high percentage of black families. I would characterize the Parole neighborhood as a stable lower middle class neighborhood. Parole parents are fiercely loyal to the Mills-Parole Elementary School. Parole's alumni association is legendary. Just north of Parole, you see a triangular shaped area that's also primarily black. This is the Annapolis Gardens-Bowman Court neighborhood - mostly public housing. Move your finger toward town a little. Now you'll see Homewood - a neighborhood to the north of West Street that's almost all white.

In the map as a whole, you can find another five or six neighborhoods with substantial black percentages. In some cases, these percentages reflect the location of public housing projects. But not all. There's a strong upper middle class professional neighborhood represented on this map as well - Arundel By The Bay, almost all the way to Thomas Point.

What's striking to me, given the size and strength of the black community in the Annapolis area, is the continuing presence of a few white neighborhoods that have no black families whatever, or, at most, just one or two. The South Haven neighborhood (in the center on the left side of the map) is almost entirely white. Hillsmere, broken out as two separate block groups, is nearly all white as well. Two or three other areas follow a similar pattern.

Now we turn to the numbers on private school enrollment. I used larger groupings in this chart, primarily because I didn't have block group data for the 1980 census. I only had tract data, which consolidates four or five block groups into a single census tract.

As you can see, private school children made up 15% of the total in 1980. (I believe the census numbers for private schooling also include home schooling.)

By 1990, the percentage had grown to 23%.

In 2000, the percentage had risen even higher, to 32%.

Now look at the block group pattern from the latest census. Block groups (and small clusters of block groups) with 0% to 10% private school enrollment are shown in light green.

Areas with 11% to 30% private school enrollment are shown in light gray.

Dark gray represents 31% to 60% private school enrollment.

Magenta represents 61% plus private school enrollment.

The South Haven neighborhood sends more than sixty percent of its children to private school. The lower part of Hillsmere does the same, as do Bay Ridge, Murray Hill, Homewood, and the neighborhood located between the Navy Stadium to the west and Clay Street to the east.

My view is that a public school system which had an effective vision for serving all the children of the Annapolis area would not have lost so many children to private schools. By the same token, a community smarter about pulling together on behalf of all its residents would also have taken a different path.

This map reflects a series of overlapping weaknesses, both in the Annapolis community as a whole, and in the county school system.

Steve Johnson
The Wallcharts Workshop
April 2006