Race and gender complexity in the 2024 Maryland School Report Card

The 2024 Maryland School Report Card includes school-by-school and district-by-district data, including demographics. As examples, we'll look at the two westernmost districts, Garrett and Allegany counties.

Here's Garrett's page.

Here's Allegany's page.

Both default to the At a Glance tab, which shows Garrett's total enrollment of 3,455, Allegany's of 8,205.

Click on the Demographics tab, then scroll down beneath the bar graph to click on Show Table. Throughout the site, the tables are easier to read and have more exact numbers than the default bar graphs, so keep Showing Tables as you go.

(Why relatively crude bar graphs, not the more informative tables, are the default display would be a good question for the designers at the Maryland Department of Education. The math deficiencies chronicled in the Report Card may have something to do with it. Many of my undergraduate students, all voting and taxpaying adults, claim discomfort even at the sight of numbers.)

After you've Shown Table, you can start selecting the drop-down menus under Filters. If you start with Gender, you see this:

Note that Non-Binary is not an option on the Report Card--though the site does provide some hints in that direction.

Consider: In Garrett County, the reported number of girls and the reported number of boys are 1,700 and 1,755, respectively, which sum to 3,455, exactly the total reported enrollment. To my Depression-era parents, this would have been unremarkable.

In Allegany County, however, the reported number of girls and the reported number of boys are 3,916 and 4,285, respectively, which sum to 8,201. That's four short of the total enrollment of 8,205.

This almost-invisible gap only widens as one moves east. In Washington County, the next district over, the total of girls plus boys is seven short of the total enrollment. In the next district, Frederick County, the sum of girls and boys falls 31 students short of the total.

Statewide, the difference is 591 out of 890,137 students. That's both an infinitesimal percentage and a lot of kids.

Speculation: Is this gap in the Report Card data a de facto report of the number of students, by district, who self-identify as non-binary?

If so, one would expect this gap to keep widening, year after year, until the Report Card gives in and adds a third gender category. That might encourage many students to declare their non-binary status, at least on enrollment paperwork.

We're already seeing this happen in another of the Report Card's drop-down menus, the Race & Ethnicity filter.

That 2+ (neatly alphabetical on the list, if you spell out the numeral) means two or more races--multiracial, if you will. 

In both Garrett and Allegany, 2+ is the second biggest racial category after White. Self-identifying as multiracial are 85 Garrett students and 621 Allegany students, 2.5 percent and 7.6 percent of the respective totals.

To my Depression-era parents in systemically racist South Carolina, publicly acknowledging such a thing would have been unthinkable, however obvious the evidence all around. In the 21st century, that stigma is vanishing fast, in part because routine government documents now allow us to check that extra box--and what's more commonplace, really, than a routine government document?

More gender options would have a similar stigma-shedding effect, should government documents start allowing them.

It's worth remembering that the Maryland School Report Card includes data only for public K-12 schools, not private schools, and not for kids who are homeschooled. How open are those environments to racial and gender diversity? The public can only guess.