Local school systems straining to comply with the state’s sweeping Blueprint for �Ѳ���������Ի�’s Future have had to report to both the Maryland Department of Education and the Blueprint’s Accountability and Implementation Board, a setup creating confusion “since the get-go.”

Now, more than three years into the process, the two agencies said they are working on a memorandum of understanding that could make things a bit smoother for all concerned.

Alex Reese, chief of staff with the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE), did not tell the state Board of Education on Thursday how long it would take to finalize an agreement, but he said a memorandum is in the works.

State law requires the seven-member AIB to oversee the 10-year plan and approve any Blueprint documents submitted by the state’s 24 school systems and other state agencies that craft elements of the Blueprint.

The law also requires the department to provide technical assistance and lend expertise on education policy. The AIB and state Board of Education also hold and approve certain policies associated with the multibillion-dollar Blueprint plan.

Reese said “MSDE will be fully owning Blueprint implementation. We feel good about that as practitioners. We really do feel like we possess that expertise to be able to be poised to fully implement the Blueprint.”

An AIB spokesperson confirmed in an email Thursday evening an agreement is being worked on with the department.

“AIB and MSDE attorneys are working together on an MOU [memorandum of understanding] relating to the agencies’ respective roles and duties,” the spokesperson said.

“There is not currently a timeline confirmed for finalizing it. Because it is an MOU directly between the AIB and MSDE, there would be no need for General Assembly approval,” the email said.

In a quick summation to the state board Thursday, Reese said certain processes will remain the same such as the Blueprint board providing instructions to school systems on what is required in each Blueprint plan. It will continue “interagency collaboration” with agencies such as the state , which focuses on two of the Blueprint’s five pillars, or priorities – hiring and retaining high-quality and diverse teachers, and preparing students for college and technical careers.

The news was welcomed by school leaders, educators and advocates who have expressed frustration over the process of implementing the comprehensive education reform plan.

“One of the biggest complaints, if not the biggest, has been the lack of clarity and final guidance and where we get questions answered. We’ve got to run every decision by both entities [MSDE and AIB],” said Mary Pat Fannon, executive director of the Public School Superintendents’ Association of Maryland.

The association released a 12-page document in that outlined proposals to help improve the plan. One of those recommendations was clearing up the relationship between the two agencies.

“Restructuring and clarifying the relationship of the MSDE and AIB would be very beneficial in the implementation of the Blueprint. This change would clarify roles and responsibilities, and establish clear guidance to the LEAs [local education agencies, or school systems] that they are governed by the procedures and processes promulgated by the MSDE and the State Board,” the December report said.

“Somebody’s got to be the point. Somebody’s got to be the team captain on certain things,” Fannon said.  “Otherwise, it’s just completely frustrating.”

“We are happy they are doing this. This is all going to help in implementation when these guys are 100% clear with us,” Fannon said of the work on an MOU.

Sen. Mary Beth Carozza (R-Lower Shore) was also pleased by the discussions, which she said would help improve the process at the local and state levels. But the senator hopes an agreement can be reached before the 2025-26 school year begins in the fall.

“I would like to think they would make every effort to use the time between now and [when] school starts to give as much clarity to the roles and responsibilities, since it will only have a positive impact at the local level,” Carozza said. “That would be my expectation to keep that on track and to keep it moving.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org.

A grassroots organization that advocates for education equity in Maryland could soon be in a jurisdiction near you to talk about the education reform plan.

The staff with Strong Schools Maryland has already visited four counties this summer – Dorchester, Anne Arundel, Garrett and Prince George’s – to talk about the Blueprint plan with residents at local events. The ‘s next stops are in Caroline County on Wednesday, Wicomico County on Thursday and Carroll County on Saturday.

At least three more are scheduled for later this month: in Baltimore County on July 17, Kent County on July 18 and Baltimore City on July 23.

Riya Gupta, policy researcher with Strong Schools Maryland, said the goal is to visit the remaining 14 counties in the state this summer.

One aspect learned so far: Some people still don’t know much about the Blueprint.

“We’re meeting them where they are,” Gupta said. “We are partnering with local organizations that are already hosting events in their counties … to create presence there, share resources, tell people about what we do.”

The organization was a leading advocate in passage of the Blueprint when it became law three years ago.

One requirement in the Blueprint plan that Strong Schools supports deals with community schools, which receive a concentration of poverty grants and partner with local organizations to help educators, parents and a child’s family. Some of the services include before- or after-school tutoring, English-language learner courses and food pantries.

A state law that took effect this month outlines the responsibilities of a community school coordinator. That person must determine what type of wraparound services certain students may need, develop an implementation plan and coordinate programs “that address out-of-school learning barriers” for students and families.

Gupta said her organization has heard complaints that some community school coordinators are asked to help with teaching and other administrative duties.

“They are doing the jobs of teachers and staff when they have a full job of making sure the community school is running,” she said.

After Strong Schools Maryland completes its summer tour, the plan is to put together a report and submit it to state lawmakers, the Maryland State Board of Education, the Blueprint for �Ѳ���������Ի�’s Future Accountability and Implementation Board, and other stakeholders.

The organization has a message for those who believe the 10-year plan that is slated to invest billions of dollars annually into education is too expensive.

“Our students are worth it,” Gupta said. “We know we have underinvested in our students, specifically our Black and brown students, our students with disabilities, our multi-lingual learners. They’re our future generations that are going to lead our state and our country. The only way to make them more well-equipped is to invest in them.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org. Follow Maryland Matters on and .

To help boost literacy achievement in �Ѳ���������Ի�’s elementary schools, the Blueprint Accountability and Implementation Board approved a proposal Thursday that will send literacy experts to schools in each of Maryland’s counties and the city of Baltimore by the end of this school year.

Before these teams arrive at the schools, Rachel Hise, executive director of the Blueprint board, said school leaders must complete a draft literacy plan for elementary students by Jan. 15.

The goal for the initiative, which the state Board of Education also unanimously approved last week, is to ensure students in third grade are reading at a proficient level.

�Ѳ���������Ի�’s showed improvements with 48% of third-grade students proficient in English language arts, an increase from 41% in 2019 and 46% last year.

However, in that grade had fewer than 7% at a proficient level.

“I think that we all see the challenge but also the opportunity to make some progress sooner than later,” said Blueprint board chair and former Montgomery County Executive Isiah “Ike” Leggett. “We can learn and adjust as we go forward.”

Through the initiative, ten literacy experts working in groups of two will visit 10% of elementary schools located in all 24 school systems starting in January until the end of the current 2023-24 school year. That is in addition to 50 schools that will be reviewed through the Department of Education’s existing expert review teams.

It’s unclear which specific schools will be visited next year, but the experts will observe classroom instruction, evaluate literacy plans based on the school’s data and assess whether instruction is implemented consistently based on the state’s “” program, a national movement to teach students based on phonics instructions sound, comprehension and vocabulary.

The literacy teams will then submit a report with recommendations to the department, the Blueprint board and staff and each school system.

“This effort to improve early literacy instruction will improve the learning experiences of �Ѳ���������Ի�’s youngest students and prepare them for success at every step in their learning journey,” Clarence Crawford, president of the state Board of Education, said in a statement Thursday.

Deann Collins, deputy state superintendent with the department’s Office of the Deputy Superintendent of Teaching and Learning, said Nov. 9 during a virtual board of education meeting this literacy initiative coincides the Blueprint for �Ѳ���������Ի�’s Future education reform plan, which is overseen by the Blueprint board also known as the AIB.

Collins said money is already appropriated as part of the Blueprint and coincides with Maryland Reads and other statewide reading programs.

According to a from the department, it will cost $1.3 million to visit the schools and form an instructional support team to work with teachers, administrators and other staff at the school systems, also called local education agencies (LEAs).

“It’s a chance to assess, not an ‘I gotcha’  that the LEAs have implemented and are making progress in the science of reading strategies that they’ve been implementing,” Collins said. “These experts will serve as an added value to not only review, but also provide concrete feedback to the LEAs on their literacy plans.”

Depending on the outcomes of this initiative, the department would use a similar process to assess math in elementary schools next school year.

Interim Superintendent Carey Wright, , said literacy teams were also used when she was superintendent in Mississippi, where turnarounds in literacy rates and standardized test scores have been dubbed the “Mississippi Miracle.”

“This gives us a chance to really get in and see what kind of help our districts need,” she said during last week’s meeting. “It’s going to inform our work, but it’s also to give us a chance to really bolster what they’re doing. It is not evaluative. It is strictly good feedback.”

Reading Partners Baltimore, a nonprofit that offers literacy tutoring, supports the decision to create a team of literacy experts to help improve reading in the state.

“Today’s decision to provide every school district in Maryland with literacy experts who will support the continuous improvement of reading instruction is a significant step toward providing students with the opportunities to succeed in school today and in the future,” Zenobia Judd-Williams, executive director of Reading Partners, said in a statement. “We look forward to working with our partners in Baltimore City to ensure children have access to their civil rights to become confident readers.”

Choudhury was hired to lead the Maryland Department of Education in July 2021, after spearheading an audacious and much-admired socioeconomic school integration effort in San Antonio. At a moment when the pandemic had turned longstanding inequities into yawning chasms, Maryland was getting a new superintendent of schools whose innovations had already borne fruit. Choudhury, in turn, appeared to be stepping into a job ready-made for a change agent. 

But recently, Choudhury announced he would not seek a second term when his three-year contract ended in June 2024. In July, with the of its chair, the state Board of Education had until 2028. “Full on,” the head of a key House committee told the Washington Post, “they love him.”

In September, the love affair ended. 

While support for reappointing Choudhury appeared to fall apart quickly, controversy had swirled for weeks. A July cited current and former Education Department employees — many of them speaking anonymously — as saying Choudhury had created a “toxic” environment, berating subordinates. Board of Education leaders told the paper they took the allegations very seriously but ultimately rejected the claims.

Shortly after Choudhury’s announcement, the board asked him to remain until next summer as an adviser and appointed Carey Wright — a Baltimore resident who recently retired from a widely lauded run as state superintendent in Mississippi — as interim chief. 

Wright inherits some bright spots: Released in August, showed that while students’ performance in math still lagged, reading proficiency had . Pushing the state’s 24 districts to implement science-backed reading instruction and to train teachers on the new approaches were at the heart of one of Choudhury’s most popular initiatives, a grant program called Maryland Leads. 

The seeds of his focus on equity were sown early. The son of immigrants from Bangladesh, Choudhury grew up acutely aware of public education’s life-changing potential, and the ways in which many are denied opportunity. His grandfather had built the first school in the family’s ancestral village not reserved for children of elites. As a student in high-poverty schools in Los Angeles, Choudhury lived a variation, singled out for college prep classes while friends languished.

Choudhury started as a classroom teacher but quickly was tapped to help the Los Angeles Unified School District’s turnaround efforts. From there, he went to work in the Dallas Independent School District, where he helped to design a program called Accelerating Campus Excellence, which gave top teachers hefty incentives to work in the schools with the biggest challenges. credits the approach with improving student outcomes.

Choudhury then moved to San Antonio, where he created a mold-breaking method for measuring poverty and used it to integrate schools according to socioeconomic factors and to more fairly distribute resources, including top teaching talent. The district’s rapid academic improvements came to the attention of Texas education officials, who modeled new state policies on it. 

Maryland seemed like a natural next landing spot. After , in 2020 a bipartisan coalition of General Assembly members had passed the Blueprint for �Ѳ���������Ի�’s Future, an ambitious education reform plan that would dramatically boost both school funding and accountability for results. Then-Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, vetoed the measure, objecting that lawmakers had not figured out how to fund the 10-year, $4 billion initiative. 

The assembly overrode the veto. Hogan’s successor, Democrat Wes Moore, has earmarked $500 million to fund the blueprint until 2025. What happens after that is unclear. 

Atypically, �Ѳ���������Ի�’s constitution mandates that its state education agency be politically independent — at least nominally. Governors appoint the Board of Education’s 14 members, who in turn choose the superintendent. In June, with discussion of Choudhury’s next contract underway, Moore appointed six new board members.

The board is not the only entity the superintendent reports to, however. The blueprint — which has the force of law — is also overseen by a newly created Accountability Implementation Board.

In the exit interview that follows, Choudhury declined to specify what ultimately happened to end his tenure. But he addresses some of the challenges he tried to navigate as well as areas where he wishes he had done things differently. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

When you were tapped to be Maryland’s top education official, it must have seemed like a dream job. The hard work of creating bipartisan agreement about a Marshall Plan had already occurred. The resulting Blueprint for Maryland’s Future has the force of law. You inherited a department that’s independent of an elected executive, and districts that seemed eager for your leadership. Why might that not have been enough?

I still believe the opportunity is there. Over a 10-year period, Maryland will significantly increase its per-pupil dollars across the board, plus the dollars that go directly to historically disadvantaged students. But ultimately, as I always say, the money has to land in the right places, and there have to be the right conditions of support and accountability to pull off the big things. Maryland has created the conditions to do it. 

I came in to do that work and to rebuild a department. Both of those at the same time? It’s the impossible-possible task. I believed coming in, and I believe now that I have transitioned out, that Maryland has the ability to show what is possible. But it’s not enough to just have the resources. It’s not enough to rebuild a department. It’s not enough to have a bold leader. You have to also have political will and capital — you have to stay the course. 

Maryland can show what’s possible if we stay on the right course for kids. However, in between all of that are a lot of different things related to adult interests and politics, resistance to pain, the tension between local control and setting a standard for excellence. You have to ultimately have people give you the cover to go bold. Decisionmakers all across the state have to want it and support it in order to realize the promise.

I have heard other change agents talk about the process of building bipartisan agreement as warming up the water. Something that needs to happen before a leader with a vision can be tapped. Do you think the process of passing the blueprint did that?

The blueprint was adopted with a lot of support, but it did have good old-fashioned drama leading up to that. It was vetoed, and then there was an override vote to pass it.

Investing in the children of Maryland, giving educators the very best support and families the best possible education — there is no debate about that. However, there is tension — and it’s out in the open — around the cost and how that is sustained.

How much is enough? At the end of the day, we know adequacy matters. If you’re not going to solve other aspects of society — from housing and economic mobility to many other structural inequities — and you’re going to tell families education will give you the tools to get there, you’ve got to make sure that student spending in historically disadvantaged communities, such as Baltimore City or Caroline County Public Schools, out on the Eastern Shore, have the resources needed to overcome the vertical inequity. Where the challenge is, where the unresolved tension exists is, how do you sustain the cost long term? But also, how do you ensure that there’s no retrenched backsliding? 

I am of the opinion that the blueprint got much closer to adequate, immediately. It’s not perfect, but it is pushing it forward. But again, it is not enough to just put in the resources. For example, we know that adopting high-quality instructional materials and giving teachers the tools to master them is very powerful. However, there’s tensions with that that don’t get solved with a law. It could, but implementing it is a whole other thing. 

That does require a state department of education to figure that out and navigate it. That does require being able to get creative and strategic in how you do that. There was not unanimous consent on being more open to more standardization [while] understanding that we have to give up just doing our own thing. That’s something I faced as I did this.

Unlike other state education leaders, you reported to two appointed boards.

Yes, the state Board of Education and, new as a result of the blueprint, an Accountability Implementation Board. Two governing entities who had approval authority. As the leader, you have to figure out how to work with one and the other, how to ensure that any tensions are resolved, how to bring people together — how to do all those things. Sometimes that is possible. When it’s not possible, you have to figure out how to make it possible. 

This is your fourth post as a change agent. What can you tell us about commonalities that enable change and stymie change?

Let’s start with the commonalities that enable change. You have to have the policy conditions to do great work, but those conditions don’t have to be apples to apples. For example, Texas has one of the stronger literacy laws for teacher training around the science of reading, whereas Maryland does not. However, Maryland does have policy conditions that allowed my team to enable training for staff, which was absolutely critical as part of our recovery.

You’ve got to have buy-in, you have to have a group of talented folks who enjoy impossible-possible challenges. And you’ve got to be able to invest in them and enable them to succeed. The places I have been, I had that. 

Making student-centered decisions requires the cover of decisionmakers, of community engagement organizations and stakeholders. And sometimes even an individual. You may have it coming in, and you’ve got to sustain it as a leader. Otherwise, you’re going to be on some kind of suicide mission. And you’re not going to be able to get the work done. So that matters, big time. 

Now let’s talk about the things that block change. One is not having that cover. Sometimes you have to build toward it, sometimes you just don’t have it. Not having — or losing — that matters. 

Another thing that blocks change is if you lose the ability to fund and support the thing you started. Resources matter. If people work against that or move away from that, then you’re done. 

We have research around that. For example, in Dallas, our turnaround work — Accelerating Campus Excellence — showed that when we invested more, along with making sure the money is in the right places, it transformed low-performing schools in an extraordinary way. When that money was removed, there was a retrench back. 

Your detractors have depicted you as abrasive and sometimes overconfident. Do you think that’s fair?

I am a passionate leader who wears my emotions on my sleeve. I treat people with a great amount of dignity and respect. If someone asked me, what’s your proof of that? My track record. I’ve built amazing teams. People enjoy working with me to change things in the world.

At the same time, I am passionate about making sure the right things happen. When you come into a place and you are told that the status quo is not working for kids, we are failing children, we are not doing enough, you are going to as a leader rub up against the status quo. You’re going to make some people who have overseen that status quo uncomfortable. 

I am not surprised that I have detractors. We had detractors in this work in Dallas. In this country, when there has been a moment of change, when there have not been detractors? I would love to know. I would love to see polling from the Civil Rights era, on our greatest leaders. Pick your moment in history — do they happen without some noise? 

This work is very personal. I’m 100% the product of Title 1 schools. I helped my [immigrant] family navigate filling out forms and other things. Our child care scholarship program … was taking six weeks to get people scholarships. It was very important to me that I set a new standard of excellent customer service. We put in a fast-track application. It has done wonders. We can get people a scholarship within three to four days. We have increased the number of children who are being served by the child care system by almost 40%. 

Look at the data on the rebuilding of the department. It was a place where people used to go to retire and get rehired. It was the place where people — leaders on the ground, teachers, directors — would not come to work. During my time, that completely changed. I brought the best turnaround principal from Baltimore City to be my chief transformation and school improvement officer. Before, someone like that would never come to the job. I got the principal of the year to head up our community schools department.

The leadership of the department reflects the diversity of the children of Maryland. I cut attrition to historic levels, cut the vacancy rate and increased retention to nearly a decade low. And all of that while still wearing my passion on my sleeve. I am very proud of that. 

About the confidence? In this role, for the first time I have found myself for my passion. In an update that I provided to the General Assembly on how things were going with the department as well as to address some of the false claims that were beginning to surface, I found myself having to do that. 

I am not sorry for the high expectations. I am proud of what we pulled off. But I don’t know why I found myself having to apologize. I have ideas why.

What do you want from your leader other than confidence that something is going to work for children? I don’t mean a sense of hubris that is not rooted in evidence-based practices. I am talking about if we are going to do things in the world for kids —train up our teachers when it comes to how to most effectively teach reading, scale up apprenticeships and do it creatively using federal dollars we’re not going to get back — I have to be confident it’s going to work. Is it a perfect science? No, but I have to be a confident leader. 

Let’s talk about Maryland Leads. You used the state’s share of pandemic recovery aid to fund grants to school systems to kickstart their efforts to comply with the blueprint. 

As a state chief, you can get people to do something by inspiring them. You have the bullhorn, you have the ability to call a press conference, issue guidance. You have the ability to incentivize via grant making — especially during the era of American Rescue Plan and ESSER dollars. Third is a mandate: You shall do this. All three are needed ultimately, to get things right.

Ultimately, if you want the work to last beyond you, you have to utilize the first — inspiration. Getting people to want to ensure effective instructional practices, getting local superintendents, getting local boards, to want to organically move toward the right practices is ultimately going to stick. You can make some things happen faster through a mandate, but when the mandate goes away — or the wind blows a different way and the mandate is taken away — is the change actually going to stick? 

And frankly, people need dollars sometimes to pull off what you’re telling them to do. I recently gave a congressional briefing about Maryland Leads. It’s a drop in the bucket when you think about the recurring dollars that school systems have and what the blueprint puts in. However, we designed that drop in a bucket to shift those recurring dollars into the right evidence-based practices. 

Give us some examples. 

There’s no better example than the science of reading. Maryland is not a state with robust literacy laws. It has some level of law that can be worked with, but it is not ultimately enough to get people to where we need them to be. We used our state set-aside to [incentivize] seven strategies, one of which was the science of reading. Others included reimagining the school day and staff recruitment and retention. It wasn’t necessarily a significant amount of money. But I come back to this idea of a drop of money, designed well, can do extraordinary things. 

Baltimore City Superintendent Sonja Santelises is a very strong academic leader who, prior to me coming in, had a priority of shifting the school system toward evidence-based literacy practices and the use of high-quality curricula. They also started supplementing that curricula to ensure that it reflected the students of Baltimore. 

What Maryland Leads enabled her to do is scale their work around coaching. A Rand Corp. study on the use of high-quality instructional materials shows that it’s not enough just to adopt them. Coaching teachers on how to master their use is where you can truly unlock the power. And they had a significant jump in literacy rates coming out of the pandemic, almost 5 percentage points. That’s incredible. It’s one of the highest gains in terms of proficiency, as well as growth. 

Prince George’s County also scaled up its adoption of high-quality material and its training and support for teachers. Of the top 50 Maryland schools that made the greatest improvements, especially in literacy, more than half were in Prince George’s County. 

I’m always thinking about sustainability. In Texas, I could only dream of the dollars that Maryland is putting into its education system. In Texas, we had to make the dollar really sweat. Maryland Leads was designed to last beyond ESSER. If you have skin in the game, an initiative is more likely to last. So we told districts we would match their dollars.

I also used the force of law around the blueprint. We had to design a template [outlining] districts’ plans for implementing the blueprint and get the Accountability Implementation Board to adopt it. We asked, what is your high-quality instructional material? Where are you with training your teachers? All of that was us trying, essentially, to use Maryland Leads to supercharge the strategy and then use the blueprint to enshrine it. 

Superintendent Santelises wrote that your work on something called Neighborhood Indicators of Poverty is “the strongest work product ever produced by the Maryland State Department of Education.” What is that, and what will it enable?

I do appreciate Dr. Santelises’ comment, because she knows that if schools were more adequately funded, as well as given tools to leverage that money to ensure it lands in the right places, and the political cover to do it — going back to that cover piece, right? — that she could do even more great things.

When I went to work in San Antonio, Superintendent Pedro Martinez, one of my mentors, was already looking at income. I came in and said, to build a better measure of poverty, you can’t just look at income, you’ve got to look at other factors, like family makeup and home ownership. Our measure ultimately got adopted by the state of Texas. It was used to revamp compensatory funding and bring San Antonio more adequate resources. It took our Title 1 dollars from close to $50 million to close to $80 million. 

It also created something called the teacher incentive allotment that essentially tied teacher placement and impact to pay. If you’re not going to disrupt segregation, then you better make sure that [the most impacted] schools are some of the most expensive and that those teachers are compensated like rock stars. 

One thing that got me really excited about the blueprint, that made me put my hat in for the job, is that to see if there’s a better way to measure poverty, it said the department had to by January 2023. I seized that moment. Based on my team’s work in Texas, we were able to show that there is a much better way to fund our schools and give them adequate resources. Especially students living in abject poverty.

Maryland was already putting significant money into concentration of poverty and compensatory funding. But one of the things we did with that report was show that Baltimore City, as well as some of our rural counties, like Caroline County, were not being given what they should be in order to pull off bigger things quickly. 

We put a model bill at the end of the report: Here’s the way you can enshrine it. And by the way, you should use it not just to give more money to systems, along with another layer of accountability, but also to pay teachers who have the toughest assignments in our state in a differentiated manner. This past legislative session it got introduced. 

If you had it to do over again, are there things you would do differently? Do you have any regrets?

I definitely have reflected on this over the last few weeks, given how fresh my transition is. Yes. I’m into implementation, I like hanging out with my team, thinking through, Okay, we’ve got to pull this off, what’s it going to take? And then monitoring progress. However, as a leader — and I looked at case studies of other leaders — you’ve got to spend some time that is not about the work and the strategy and implementing the details. I could spend more time engaging, talking to people who are power brokers, who have more political capital, who have the ability to ultimately be for or against something and can either work against you or for you. 

I know there are moments where I have to say no, this is not the right decision for kids, or no, we can’t change course here. But at the same time, if I could go back, I would maybe take another moment to think through and be like, Hey, maybe it is okay to adapt the strategy here, but not compromise the student-centered focus that I wanted to keep. 

I would have spent more time explaining the changes. Sometimes, I do 20 things at the same time. You have to if you’re going to pull off 20 things. I had a mandate to implement the blueprint, work collaboratively with two governing entities and rebuild the department — while constantly hearing billions of dollars are going into our education system, we’re failing children, we have to recover from the pandemic. I’m used to moving with urgency. Children deserve that. But I think maybe I could have used my brakes or yellow light and done a little more to explain some things.

I had three years. And I blinked and I was already in my contract renewal phase.

When I first met you, you told me a story about you, as a young person of color identified as gifted in an integrated, high-poverty school, realizing not all your classmates got the same opportunities. That Mohammed, who had that moment as a very young man, has his belief set changed?

That’s an important question. I absolutely have not wavered in my beliefs that the world needs to be changed for kids for the better. That’s something that has inspired me ever since I visited the school that my grandfather started in the village [in Bangladesh]. That hasn’t changed. I want to build schools, figuratively and literally, and be on that mission. It gives me purpose. 

However, I did have a moment where I asked myself — especially as I faced the detractors and their attempts to smear my team and my administration, and then ultimately finding myself making the decision to not return — at what cost? Is this worth everything that you have put in? I had that moment. 

Ultimately, my resolve for wanting to stay the course has not changed. However, as someone who sits in the CEO’s seat, you have to be ready to make compromises while still moving forward. Don’t do 10 of something, do five of something. Maybe you have to place an adult interest over students’ interests — but for the greater good of still staying the course on student interest. 

I think the young kid that I was when I first declared that I wanted to be in education had a pure drive. You have to be able to pull this off, because children’s lives matter. Definitely children of color and in poverty — that reflects what happened to me as an individual and what I became. However, if I don’t figure out long term how to better navigate those compromises and still feel like I’m not giving up or selling out, then I should stop. 

I will say it one more time: I believe that I have to learn about the art of compromise. And I can’t tell you what the threshold is. You have to put yourself on that threshold and be like, Yeah, that’s a compromise, but it doesn’t take away from the student-focused goal we have. Or, That’s a compromise that will throw off the work and may potentially also ruin my ability to continue. 

What do you do, Mohammed? I know those moments have to happen throughout a leader’s journey. And I hope that I’m better for what comes next.

Carey Wright will become �Ѳ���������Ի�’s interim superintendent of public schools after the state Board of Education’s unanimous vote during an online session Wednesday.

Wright is expected to start her new gig Oct. 23 to oversee a public school system with nearly 890,000 students and becoming the leading advocate for the 10-year Blueprint for �Ѳ���������Ի�’s Future education reform plan.

Wright stepped down last week as a four-year member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which helps set policies for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card.

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While serving on the governing board, she worked as state superintendent of education in Mississippi from 2013 until she retired last year.

Wright served at that position since the state board was created in 1982.

Maryland school board President Clarence Crawford said in a brief interview that one of Wright’s strengths is her work in literacy reform in Mississippi. During her tenure in the state, she’s credited with increasing the state’s graduation rate from 75.5% to 88.4%.

“She’s also known as a consensus builder. She went to Mississippi not knowing anyone going down there, but somehow was able to develop relationships with a largely Republican legislature and governor,” Crawford said. “We’re very fortunate to have her.”

Before Wright takes over, Sylvia Lawson, deputy state superintendent for organizational services, will serve as acting superintendent beginning this upcoming weekend.

That’s because will resign Friday as the state’s current public schools leader and the next day become senior adviser for the state school board.

Choudhury will provide education guidance, advice and strategies on state priorities such as the education reform plan.

As part of an agreement between Choudhury and the school board, he will continue to receive his base salary of $310,000 on a current contract that expires June 30. He will also have the option to work remotely or at the department’s office in Baltimore.

Wright’s term as interim superintendent will also end in June.

After the board’s vote, Wright joined the Zoom session and gave brief remarks such as working with the board, department staff, state and local leaders, teachers, students and families.

“We’ve got a grand opportunity here to ensure strong equitable outcomes for all of our students. I just want you to know I intend to take advantage of that opportunity to make sure that this actually comes to happen,” Wright said. “Thank you, again, for your support. It is very much appreciated. I am looking forward to getting to know all of you much better.”

Crawford said a national search for a permanent leader will continue. He will lead a transition joint committee comprised of some board members and department leadership.

Board Vice President Joshua Michael will lead a search committee with other board members. That group will work to search for a firm to help recruit a permanent leader to begin a new four-year term starting July 1.

Meanwhile, Wright has roots in Maryland, obtaining her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Maryland in College Park. She started her teaching career in the 1970s at Prince George’s County Public Schools.

According to Wright’s LinkedIn profile, she spent more than 26 years in Howard County public schools as a teacher, principal and director of special education and student services.

In May 2003, when she left Howard County, she headed south to Montgomery County for about six years to work as an associate superintendent at the school system’s Office of Special Education and Student Services.

Between August 2009 to May 2013, she worked as a chief academic officer and then a deputy chief for D.C. public schools.

She then worked in Mississippi from November 2013 until she retired in June 2022.

Wright also manages her own company called The Wright Approach Consulting. Her LinkedIn page describes her work as including leadership development and training, special education compliance and professional development for administrators and teachers.

Cheryl Bost, president of the state’s Education Association, released a statement on Wright’s selection.

“We look forward to meeting with and learning more about Dr. Wright and her plans as interim superintendent,” she said. “To be successful in Maryland, Dr. Wright will need to have an open door for educators, support the implementation of the Blueprint for �Ѳ���������Ի�’s Future with a focus on equity, and ensure that schools are welcoming and safe places for all of our students, no matter who they are or where they’re from.”

Howard, Baltimore and Frederick counties proposed double-digit hikes — above 2023 levels by 10.5%, 11.2% and 13.4%, respectively — according to an analysis by the school data service Burbio. 

Much of the funding for the additional spending is coming from the state, which will send over $7.5 billion to local districts in 2024 thanks to the Blueprint law, an increase of more than $600 million above 2022-23 levels, according to preliminary budget figures provided to ����Ӱ�� by the State Department of Education. Some 21 of the state’s 23 school districts will receive more funds than they did this year.

Prince George’s County is set to get the largest bump with an extra $195 million from the state for next year, the data show. The smaller Caroline County will receive the greatest new windfall proportional to its student body with $1,680 added for each of its 5,600 students. Allegany County and Baltimore City are the only districts that will see a slight drop in funds compared to this year.

William Kirwan, who chaired the commission that drafted the legislation for the 2021 Blueprint policy, said the new budget plans are “absolutely” a marker of schools’ progress toward complying with the landmark law’s provisions.

The 10-year Blueprint plan is in its third year of implementation. Ultimately, it will inject an additional $3.8 billion annually into the state’s education system, some $4,000 extra per student. In return for the funds, the law compels districts to work toward improvement measures such as universal preschool, $60,000 minimum annual teacher salaries by 2026 and widened access to college and career-preparation courses for high schoolers.

“No state has ever undertaken anything like this,” Kirwan said. He describes the changes as a “total overhaul.”

School budgets have been swelling nationwide thanks to the federal COVID stimulus package delivering $190 billion for K-12 education in one-time funds. But the preliminary figures from Burbio show that growth is continuing at a faster rate in several Maryland districts than in comparable school systems in other states. And unlike pandemic stimulus cash, Blueprint funds represent a longer-lasting source of revenue.

���ܰ�������’s includes the projected budgets of large districts in four states: Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maryland. The Maryland districts accounted for five of the top six largest proposed spending increases out of the 15 included.

The Howard County Public School System it plans to use Blueprint funds to recruit, retain and train educators, including a grow-your-own initiative to help paraprofessionals become lead teachers. It also is devoting money to pay the tuition of high school students who take dual enrollment courses at a local community college, among other efforts.

In Baltimore County, the funds will help the school district raise teachers’ minimum starting salary to next year and cover the costs of AP tests for all students enrolled in those advanced classes, among other measures, spokesperson Charles Herndon said.

Each year, Blueprint funds will provide roughly 500 Maryland students pursuing a teaching degree with a full scholarship for tuition, Kirwan added.

Existing teacher shortages “will be short-lived in Maryland when word gets out,” he predicts.

The Blueprint’s formula adjusts funding levels using a measure for concentration of poverty, and delivers the most total funding per pupil to Somerset County and Baltimore City schools, the two districts in the state serving the highest share of students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch. Baltimore City’s slight drop in funding in 2024 is because it will go from receiving the highest per-pupil allocation to the second-highest.

Meanwhile, as funding flows to schools and as officials move to launch new initiatives, districts have until March 15 to submit formalized implementation plans to a newly created board overseeing the Blueprint’s rollout.

The decade-long policy is scheduled to be fully implemented by 2033.

“It’s a long process,” Kirwan said.

The “Blueprint for �Ѳ���������Ի�’s Future” had been in the works since 2016, when the legislature set up an expert commission with a humble charge: Develop a plan to remake �Ѳ���������Ի�’s schools into some of the very best in the world.

In a Sunday emergency legislative meeting just before the COVID shutdown, the landmark policy, all of it, passed with bipartisan support.

“We certainly weren’t gonna let that legislation go another year when we were so close … and [knew] how important it was,” Kaiser recalls.

Now, over two years later, Maryland has begun its decades-long, multibillion-dollar mission to transform its schools. One superintendent called the effort a “seismic shift” for education in the state. A researcher described it as a “radical reimagining” of schooling. 

But outside the Old Line State, the Blueprint has barely made a splash, garnering little national attention.

“It’s sort of passed under the radar,” said William Kirwan, who chaired the commission that drafted the legislation. 

As the policy rolls out, he suspects “the results will begin to get noticed and … we can be a bellwether for the rest of the country.”

The Blueprint’s highlights include: 

• Free preschool for all low-income families
• A revamped teacher pipeline to diversify candidates and boost minimum pay to $60,000 per year
• A new model of secondary school that prepares all students for college or careers by 10th grade, leaving the final years of high school for apprenticeships and advanced coursework

“The changes are so significant, we’re basically building a new system of pre-K through 12 education,” said Kirwan, who was the longtime chancellor of the University System of Maryland.

Districts will phase in the plan over a 10-year period and the policy will ultimately inject an additional $3.8 billion annually into the state’s education system. That shakes out to a 22% increase in overall education spending in the state, or about $4,000 more per student per year, noted Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab. 

Funding comes from taxes on casino revenues and internet sales, among other sources. A newly created , of which Kirwan is a member, will guide districts through the upcoming changes and approve or deny their improvement plans.

Closing opportunity gaps

Not only does the Blueprint aim to raise the state’s overall academic achievement, which Kirwan calls “mediocre” based on past results from the Nation’s Report Card, it also seeks to correct what many experts describe as a highly unequal school system with a regressive finance structure. 

Baltimore City and Prince George’s County schools serve the highest share of Black and Hispanic students in the state and for years have received among the of any district — $3,600 and $4,500 below the level recommended in the state funding formula, respectively.

“The most persistently underfunded school systems in the state disproportionately educate the most Black and brown kids,” said Shamoyia Gardiner, executive director of .

The Blueprint will vastly reduce that imbalance by infusing the largest share of funds to the neediest districts. Its formula adjusts funding levels based on a measure for concentration of poverty. The formula does not consider racial makeups after the state attorney general said doing so would be illegal, Gardiner explained.

“The promise of the Blueprint is that in a world-class system, most of our kids are going to succeed and we’re not going to be able to tell these differences along the lines of race or class,” she added.

Now in the wake of COVID, which hit vulnerable students such as those from low-income families the hardest, the stakes for faithfully implementing the Blueprint have only been elevated, said Education Trust researcher Robert Ruffins.

“The gap that already existed … has widened, but we have the opportunity to close it if we get this right,” he said.

Trepidation & promise

Some observers criticize the mammoth policy, arguing that while it heaps funds toward schools, it has no mechanism to guarantee that the proposed changes deliver their intended effects.

“It’s kind of a wish list of all the things we think will make Maryland schools better without a promise that when we spend all the money these things will be fixed,” said Annette Anderson, a Johns Hopkins University education professor whose three children attend Baltimore City Schools. “I don’t feel like we have the accountability. … How do we measure that we’re making progress on this?”

Kirwan counters that the nature of the policy mitigates that concern. Districts are required to submit their plans to an independent body “with real teeth,” the Accountability and Implementation Board, for review and possible amendments to ensure they roll out changes faithfully, he said. 

Rachel Hise, executive director of the accountability board, added that a quarter of each district’s annual Blueprint funding will be automatically withheld until the board decides to release it. Starting in 2026, that decision will include whether the school system has made sufficient progress to improve student performance measured, in part, by test scores.

Still, school leaders fret whether some of the changes will be feasible for districts already weakened by educator shortages and seeking to recover lost ground from the pandemic.

John Woolums, director of governmental relations for the Maryland Association of Boards of Education, describes himself as a “cheerleader” for the Blueprint, but acknowledges that some of the school boards in his network have trepidations about implementation. The policy requires schools to gradually reduce teacher caseloads so they can devote time during the school day to small-group tutoring and intervention.

“Just the math of that requires that you have additional staff to meet the needs of other students during that time,” Woolums said.

Another issue that will require “outside-the-box thinking,” said Hise, is physical space for expanded preschool programs. One possible solution she points to is running early child care centers within high schools. With more upperclassmen out of the building during the day for apprenticeships, some classrooms will be unoccupied, she anticipates. At the same time, the programs could give interested high schoolers new real-world learning opportunities.

“You’ve got 11th and 12th graders who are apprenticing within that child care center … learning a new field while they’re still in high school,” she proposed.

Michael Martirano, superintendent of the roughly 57,325-student Howard County Public School System, said he’s actively considering that option. It’s an example of how the different prongs of the Blueprint can reinforce each other and bring about innovative solutions, he said.

“There’s synergy and energy around all of these [components] to think differently about getting better results for kids with this infusion of dollars from the state,” the superintendent said.

Even in the early years of implementation, Martirano has seen how the provisions of the Blueprint have given him leverage to make changes he’s long wished for. 

For example, with the Blueprint’s mandate that teacher minimum salaries eventually reach $60,000, the leader proactively brought his district’s floor up to $56,000 last year, which he said largely insulated Howard County from recent teacher shortages affecting nearby districts. The school system hired a record 500 new teachers this year and had less than 1% vacancies for teacher roles, he said.

“Things that I may have wanted to advance before … that may have been difficult to implement in the past are now an expectation,” Martirano said. “These are not negotiables. These are things that now have to be done.”

‘In it for the long haul’

But even with early signs of progress, Hise, who penned most of the bill’s text as a legislative analyst, knows that the road will be long before the policy is implemented in full.

Alongside some of the top-performing international school systems, the 2016 legislative commission studied Massachusetts, which since the 1990s has adhered to a comprehensive school improvement plan and is now touted as one of the best U.S. states for education. It took decades of work to get to that point, Hise observed.

Still, there are shortcomings, she said.

“[Massachusetts schools] still have an achievement gap that they need to close,” said the policy expert. “The [Blueprint’s] goal is to raise all boats and also close the gap.”

Gardiner, of Strong Schools Maryland, hopes her state will stay committed to the policy’s provisions, which, to her concern, have already seen slowdowns. Republican Gov. Larry Hogan vetoed the original bill in 2020, forcing a veto override vote from the legislature in 2021 and setting the implementation process at least a year behind. Democrat Wes Moore will replace the term-limited governor in January, but further out, especially as several , she fears commitment could wane.

“The fact that we are already so delayed … makes me want to ensure that we don’t slide any further away from our original vision,” Gardiner said.

The policy finds a key ally in State Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury, who has the Blueprint is one of the “main reasons” he took the top job in Maryland schools in 2021. The state has an opportunity to become a leader in high-quality, equitable education, he says.

The responsiveness to community feedback instills confidence in sharlimar douglass, leader of the Maryland Alliance for Racial Equity in Education. (She does not capitalize her name.) The accountability board has held a series of virtual working sessions that douglass, who has attended each one, estimates typically draw at least 90 people.

“The process by which the board is working to make sure that all stakeholders are heard from has been excellent,” the advocate said. “Everything that’s put in the chat seems to be responded to.”

Hise, for her part, is keeping her focus on the future.

“Systemic change takes time,” she said. “You can’t look at it in two- or four-year terms. You have to be in it for the long haul and you have to be committed to it across election outcomes and changes in leadership. It has to be above all of that. That’s the goal.”

Maryland offers a rare enticement to Democrats in a year of ebbing popular support and forbidding electoral prospects — perhaps the party’s best chance to flip control over any state government. Popular Republican Gov. Larry Hogan is term-limited, spurring a parade of hopefuls to pile into the race before the primaries on July 19.

Among the 10 candidates seeking the Democratic nomination is John King, one of the most recognizable names in American education policy. A former teacher, charter school founder, and state superintendent of New York, King gained national prominence when then-President Obama named him U.S. secretary of education in 2016. After a stint in the world of , he launched his campaign last April with a heavy emphasis on his background in schools.

At the outset, King’s candidacy looked like the perfect meeting of man and moment: As governor, he could lean on decades of leadership experience to help pull Maryland schools out of the post-COVID doldrums. Even more importantly, his fluency in K-12 issues might prove especially useful now that the state has begun implementation of the , a colossal reform to education finance and accountability that has been gestating for years. It is hoped that the billions of dollars of new education funding included in the plan could set the course for systemic improvement in learning for all students.

In the year since his announcement, however, King’s candidacy hasn’t caught fire. With less than two months to go before the primary, that he lags behind competitors with greater local visibility and more to spend. A packed Democratic field has made it difficult for any favorite to emerge, and local prognosticators wide-open, but the former education secretary has struggled to brand himself in an environment where schools are off the front burner. Paradoxically, the very presence of the Blueprint reforms — which the next governor, Democrat or Republican, will be bound to enact — may be blunting what should be King’s advantage as a well-known authority on education. 

“Education is not an issue, for all practical purposes,” argued Kalman “Buzzy” Hettleman, a two-time Baltimore school board member and former Maryland Secretary of Human Resources. “The Democratic candidates are mostly all progressive…and there are no real differences of any sort among them. The Blueprint has sort of preempted education from being a significant issue.”

For his own part, King maintains that his brand of progressive leadership will win over Democratic voters and that the task of changing Maryland schools will require the expertise that he alone brings to the race.

“The Blueprint will lead to greater investment in our high-needs schools, expansion of pre-K, expansion of high-quality career and technical education, making all of our high-poverty schools community schools with wraparound services,” King said in an interview with ����Ӱ��. “There’s a ton of potential, but we need a governor who will actually follow through on that Blueprint, and that’s one of the core commitments of our campaign.”

But Kurt Schmoke, the president of the University of Baltimore and a former three-term mayor of the state’s largest city, wondered aloud whether any candidate could “make schools the focal point of the campaign.”

“Education is a governing issue, not a campaign issue,” Schmoke said. “That’s John’s problem.”

‘The Blueprint is now the agenda’

Few experts are as familiar with the needs of local schools as David Hornbeck, who served as state superintendent from 1976 to 1988 and now leads the nonprofit . The group was founded specifically to draw attention to the recommendations of the Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education, which eventually became the basis of the Blueprint for �Ѳ���������Ի�’s Future.

That panel (known locally as the Kirwan Commission after its chairman, former University of Maryland chancellor Brit Kirwan) was assembled in 2016 by the Maryland General Assembly to recommend necessary improvements to an education system that many saw as and . — that academic performance was generally unimpressive, significant achievement gaps divided students by race and class, and the state wasn’t meeting its financial obligations to poor children — were as unflattering as its proposed remedies were ambitious. 

“I consider the Blueprint to be one of the most dramatic, comprehensive, systemic pieces of education legislation ever in the United States,” said Hornbeck, who compared its significance to the advent of the first “common schools” in the early 19th century. “It has that potential, and whoever the next governor is has the challenge of making that happen and the opportunity to take Maryland not only straight to the top of performance in the United States but to compete favorably in the global context,” he added.

In legislative form, the Blueprint earmarks nearly $4 billion in state and local funding to lift the salaries of school staff, dramatically expand access to pre-kindergarten for three- and four-year-olds, improve career and technical education offerings, and provide supplemental support for schools and districts that enroll disproportionate numbers of students from low-income families. It also established a new regulatory body, the seven-member Accountability and Implementation Board, to evaluate schools’ progress and enforce new performance requirements, overruling the state department of education when necessary.

But it faced a rocky path to enactment. Gov. Hogan, who has pushed for tax cuts and waged several high-profile budget battles with the overwhelmingly Democratic General Assembly, when asked during his 2018 reelection campaign how he would raise the necessary revenue to fund the Kirwan initiatives. He controversially vetoed the Blueprint when it was passed in 2020, and even after the veto was overridden, critics complained that he in his 2022 budget; while its members have begun their work, they have resorted to drawing funds from newly-legalized sports betting revenues.

Hornbeck said that even after a half-decade of deliberation and legislating around the work of the Kirwan Commission, implementation would be “far harder than passing the bill itself.” The next governor, no matter their own positions or prior qualifications, will need to devote his administration to the tough challenge of holding districts’ feet to the fire and keeping the spotlight pointed on school improvement.  

“The worst thing that can happen, in my view, is for people to dust off their hands, say, ‘Well, we’ve handled that,’ and move on to something else,” Hornbeck said. “Yes, the Blueprint is now the agenda, it has hopefully taken the education policy question off the table, but it has not neutralized it by any means. If anything, it has defined the opportunity of leadership in this area.”

With opportunity comes political cost: specifically, the candidates’ ability to gain attention with their own policy proposals. Arguably no candidate is affected more than King, who might have otherwise staked out a niche as the education candidate. 

Schools form a thread running through King’s biography, the site of two generations of service to community and a proofpoint of what an energetic public sector can achieve. The son of a guidance counselor and a school principal, the former cabinet secretary was orphaned by the age of 12. He has that he might have ended up “dead or in prison” but for the influence of great teachers.

“Both my parents passed away when I was a kid, and schools saved my life,” King said. “I share that story in the context of making the case that government can be a transformative, positive force: We can have a pragmatic, progressive vision that moves the state forward, with government being that force for good in people’s lives.” 

But with the Blueprint flattening the distinctions between candidates in an already crowded field, it’s an open question whether Democratic voters are looking for a nominee with K-12 experience. A found that 17 percent of Maryland residents said they wanted the state government to prioritize education; but amid in Baltimore and the Washington, D.C., suburbs, an even greater number said they wanted more focus on public safety.

“There are many well-known, established candidates who have been on the political scene in Maryland for a very long time,” said Matt Gallagher, president of the Baltimore-focused , a local philanthropy. “And while public education is always one of the dominant issues of any campaign, particularly in Maryland, I would say that for a very significant part of this campaign…it probably hasn’t received the same level of attention as it has in prior cycles.”

A crowded field

Roughly 6 weeks remain in a campaign that has seen little polling during the course of the primary. And while several candidates, including King, have their statewide advertising purchases, most of the existing public opinion data indicates that the former education secretary has significant ground to make up.

The  found Comptroller Peter Franchot — a relative moderate who some believe would give the Democrats their best chance in a cycle that favors Republicans — leading all candidates with just 20 percent. He was followed by Wes Moore, a bestselling author who also founded a nonprofit to help high school graduates transition to college. Tom Perez, a former U.S. Labor Secretary and Democratic National Committee chair, held third place, and King was even further behind, winning over just 4 percent of the remaining respondents. A significant plurality of respondents to the survey, which was conducted jointly by the Baltimore Sun and the University of Baltimore, were undecided.

Those figures, from one of the only independent polls conducted thus far, generally reflect the candidates’ relative positioning in other surveys. But they do clash somewhat with the contents of an internal King polling memo , which found King tied with Moore at 16 percent and behind only Franchot. That memo was produced by the Democratic polling firm , and has been  as a sign of growing momentum behind their cause

Party support is divided as starkly as Democratic voters. Perez, a longtime resident of heavily populated Montgomery County, has swept the endorsements of many of its Democratic leaders. Rushern Baker — the fourth-place candidate in the Sun poll and a well-known veteran of the 2018 gubernatorial campaign — is predictably popular in Prince George’s County, where he once served as county executive. Moore has the backing of the Maryland State Educators’ Association, 2018 nominee Benjamin Jealous, and even U.S. House Majority Leader (and Maryland native) Steny Hoyer; he is also a powerhouse fundraiser.

Gallagher, who previously served as chief of staff to Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley, noted that candidates who can boast long-running relationships with Democratic voters are likely favored.

“When you think about the voting block that Prince George’s and Montgomery County represent — and the fact that they’re going to be divided up by some pretty known quantities — it makes it tough to break through as a first-time candidate,” Gallagher said. “Lateral entry in statewide politics is very difficult, particularly when you’re trying to overcome other candidates whom hundreds of thousands of people have voted for before.”

Schmoke, who mulled several statewide runs after his tenure as Baltimore mayor, said that the time remaining before Democrats choose a nominee would be sufficient for King to make up ground — but only if he had an advertising budget to match.

“If he doesn’t have the resources, having a very low name recognition…is truly a problem,” warned Schmoke, who has yet to endorse any candidate but employed Moore as a mayoral intern in the late 1990s. “But if he can raise the money to do the media buys, he can become competitive.”

There is reason to think that the primary electorate is still substantially up for grabs. According to an April poll conducted on behalf of For the People MD, a political action committee supporting King, said they’d given the nomination battle little or no thought thus far. Meanwhile, almost two-thirds who said they preferred any candidate indicated that they were open to voting for someone else.

King said that he was the only candidate who had stumped in every Maryland county and that his field operation represented “the strongest grassroots campaign in this race.” He added that he patterned his own run after the successful candidacy of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who campaigned as an outsider in 2006 and became only the second African American ever elected governor of a U.S. state.

“If you look at that Patrick campaign, what he did was meet-and-greets, every day, to build that grassroots movement,” King said. “He’d been a federal official before, hadn’t been involved in Massachusetts state politics, but he built a grassroots movement around a set of ideas for how to move the state forward. That’s what we’re doing in Maryland.”

But Hettleman warned that Baker, Moore, and Perez were all dynamic, non-white candidates who brought their own political skills and organizational advantages to the table. 

“Each of those guys is formidable, and each comes with something of a constituency. John King is known only to education folks like me. He has no real, on-the-ground experience in Maryland, and I doubt if all the money in the world would change the dynamics. But he doesn’t have that either.”