This article was republished with permission from WTOP’s news partners at Maryland Matters. Sign up for Maryland Matters’ free email subscription today.
For a third straight year, Maryland schools made slight gains on the annual report card released Tuesday by the state Department of Education.
The state’s report card grades schools on a scale of one to five stars, with five stars going to schools that earn a score of at least 75% on a formula that measures overall school performance.
In the 2024-25 school year, 43% of schools earned four or five stars, up from 41% in the 2023-24 school year. According to the report, 98 schools garnered a five-star rating in the 2024-25 school year, an increase from 91 the previous school year.
Once again, Baltimore County schools led the way with 23 five-star schools, the most in the state. The county’s Eastern Technical High School received the most points in the state with a 92, one point higher than two years ago.
For the second year in a row, the Academy of Health and Sciences at Prince George’s Community College finished in second place, with 89 points.
Also for a second year, two of Worcester County’s 11 schools earned five stars while the other nine all got a four-star rating, for getting a score of at least 60 out of 100 points on the grading formula. The two schools to receive five stars were Pocomoke and Snow Hill high schools.
“I am incredibly proud of our schools for earning four- and five-star ratings across the board,” Worcester County Superintendent Annette Wallace said in a statement. “These results reflect the unwavering commitment to excellence by our educators, staff, students, and families. Worcester County continues to be an educational leader in Maryland, and today’s report card release is yet another reminder of how our community’s investment in public education is transforming lives.”
But this year’s report may be one of the last under the five-star system: The state still plans to assess overall student achievement but with a new rating system, which could happen in the 2026-27 school year.
One reason for the change is a complaint that the current report card does not show enough student growth. State Board President Joshua Michael, for example, said schools could have increased their scores by 7 percentage points from the previous report, but still kept the same star rating.
According to the department’s data, about 986, or nearly 76% of the slightly more than 1,300 schools maintained the same star rating from the previous school year and in 2023-24.
“The biggest problem right now is that growth is not being recognized and differentiating enough between schools,” Michael said during a briefing with reporters. “Schools are not being rewarded for growth enough in our report cards. Quite frankly, [the] report card right now is too much a proxy of poverty in our schools, and we need more factors that are going to help us differentiate.”
Some of the criteria schools are measured on include academic achievement, progress in English language proficiency, and readiness for post-secondary success. According to the department, schools get a star for achieving at least 45 points.
Part of the star ratings are based on results from the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program (MCAP), which measures a student’s proficiency in math, English and science.
Less than a week after she officially took over in April 2024, state Superintendent Carey Wright announced the creation of a state Assessment and Accountability Task Force to assess student achievement.
That came as 76% of Maryland schools got three of five stars in the December 2023 report card, but only 47% of students in third to eighth grades in that school year were rated proficient in English language arts on state tests, and only 25% were proficient in math.
Wright called the current rating system Tuesday “convoluted.”
“When we started digging into it, we just found out that the system that we have right now is really not differentiating amongst schools. I mean, they’re stuck,” she said.
“We’re at 50% proficiency. That means you’ve got 50% that aren’t [proficient]. So that means there’s a lot of kids at the bottom,” Wright said Tuesday. “So, one of the things that we’re looking at is, what if we measure the growth of the bottom 25% in addition to measuring the growth overall?”
The school board voted to accept a report in December 2024 that included recommendations to revising the current ratings system, designing all MCAP tests using the most up-to-date research and developing a comprehensive communication strategy “to showcase positive stories about the assessment system and how schools and districts use the assessment results..”
An accountability advisory group was formed to assess the task force’s recommendations. It is scheduled to present an update on possible next steps toward a new rating system at the school board’s Dec. 9 meeting.
Harford County Superintendent Sean Bulson, who attended Tuesday’s state school board meeting in Baltimore, said in a brief interview he’s pleased with the star-rating results in his school district: Out of 55 schools, seven earned five stars and another 28 had four stars.
But Bulson said he wouldn’t mind seeing the star-rating system gone.
“If I had a real choice, I’d make it go away and have people go back and just look at look at the [student] achievement,” he said. “You can’t just look at one element because kids are more complex than one test score, right?
“So, while the idea is to give something, give people kind of an easy comparison point, I think it obscures a lot of the real work that’s happening,” Bulson said. “I don’t think it helps people gain a good understanding of what’s happening in the schools … and it’s more complex than one rating.”
