by MIKE BOWLER

Andres Alonso was taking a big risk two years ago, when he recommended that Baltimore participate in TUDA, the national Trial Urban District Assessment. The city’s new public schools chief, Alonso knew from his New York City experience that there are low public expectations for the academic performance of urban kids.

TUDA, administered by the U.S. Department of Education, is the gold standard of testing, considerably harder than most state exams, including the Maryland School Assessment.

Baltimore could have flopped, thus affirming the view that our kids are even more hopeless than those of New York or Atlanta. But the chance he took paid off: yesterday the scores for “the nation’s report card” were released and the fact that Baltimore came out in the middle of the pack is just part of the good news.

“We were taking a chance,” Alonso said, “but sometimes you’ve got to throw the long pass and not worry about interceptions all the time.”

No gaming the system with TUDA

TUDA, also known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is designed to test large districts, those with a population of 250,000 or more. If the nation ever moves to a set of national education standards, probably some form of the National Assessment will be chosen to measure progress.

In joining the 11 districts participating in TUDA in 2007, Alonso was not only aiming high, he was risking some harsh judgment, because of the chronically low public expectations for the academic performance of urban students. If they do well on the state tests, many assume it’s because the tests have been made easier, that the kids have been “taught to the test” or that they or their teachers have cheated. (This doesn’t apply, of course, to their peers in the suburbs.)

TUDA doesn’t work that way. It’s administered to a carefully selected sample of students who reflect the demographics of the district – in Baltimore’s case mostly poor and black. The TUDA districts in fact have no control over the testing. They can’t game the system, as many states have done with their tests in order to demonstrate “adequate yearly progress” under No Child Left Behind.

How Baltimore did

The results of the 2009 math TUDA came out yesterday. Baltimore’s showing was respectable in the context of the 18 districts participating this year. (Seven joined since 2007, including Baltimore and Philadelphia. And Detroit, which did flop.) Alonso said at a news conference yesterday that he “was never worried” and that the TUDA results validate the city’s very good and much ballyhooed performance on the most recent state tests.

Here are the horse race figures released yesterday: Baltimore scored 222 on a scale of 500 in 4th-grade math. That’s roughly in the middle of the pack. Eight districts, led by Charlotte, N.C., did better, nine worse. Detroit was nearly off the map in awfulness, a performance described by Mike Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools and godfather of TUDA, as “an outrage.”

In 8th-grade math, the city did not fare as well, scoring 257, well behind the 271 average for the 18 districts. Again, the average was pulled down by poor Detroit, which scored 238. In a ranking of the percentage of students below “basic,” Baltimore was fifth from the bottom, ahead of Cleveland, the District of Columbia, Milwaukee and Detroit. Austin and Charlotte were at the top. For years Baltimore’s academic weak spot has been middle school, and it showed again on TUDA.

Good news behind the numbers?

That’s the horse race. But if we look a little deeper, as Alonso did yesterday, there are signs of encouragement. Baltimore kids are competitive with kids in districts that have much more experience with TUDA, with kids in districts that have long histories of school reform, and perhaps most relevant, with kids in districts with greater wealth. Of the TUDA districts, only Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Fresno and Cleveland have higher percentages of kids receiving free and reduced-price lunches, a measure of wealth. Yet Baltimore students outperformed several districts with greater wealth. And Baltimore, with a roughly 90 percent African American enrollment, has the highest percentage of black students among the TUDA districts. Yet the average scores of the city’s black students roughly equaled those of black students in the other TUDA districts and, more remarkably, those of all blacks in the National Assessment in both the 4th and 8th grades.

Other factors may be at work. Districts with a record of reform – Boston, for example – tend to excel. So do those with strong political and educational leadership. Detroit is in a state of turmoil that reflects in its TUDA scores. And districts with strong mayors directly involved in school affairs (Boston and the District of Columbia) are performing well (in D.C.’s case, improving steadily) on TUDA.

All of the above must be taken in context. Baltimore still trails the nation and all other Maryland districts. Even at the 4th-grade level, the city’s strongest suit, 36 percent of students scored below basic on the TUDA scale. As Alonso pointed out, this is just the beginning. He awaits Baltimore scores on the 2009 TUDA reading and science tests next year. The real test will come in 2011, when we will see if there is improvement.

As state schools Superintendent Nancy Grasmick pointed out in praising Alonso for taking the TUDA plunge, “Now he has a baseline. If you don’t have a baseline, there’s nothing to show improvement, so you can’t brag about it.”

So now that Baltimore has embraced TUDA, how about those large Maryland districts that certainly qualify for TUDA and that are assumed to be superior? How about Baltimore County, PG, even the vaunted Montgomery? TUDA makes it possible, for example, to pit Baltimore’s black students against their peers in these districts. Might be interesting. Might be surprising.

To download a copy of the report or read other related material, go here.

To check out a couple of TUDA test questions, go here.

– Mike Bowler was education editor of The Baltimore Sun.