A new education advocacy group is calling for a loosening of Maryland’s charter school law to allow for more school choice and to close achievement gaps.

The Maryland Campaign for Achievement Now (MarylandCAN), the state chapter of the 50CAN nonprofit organization, also is pushing for universal access to pre-kindergarten for all 4-year-olds and a new state law that would allow parents to meet with teachers, such as in parent-teacher conferences, without penalty from their employers.

The Lanham-based organization is highlighting the disparities in Maryland’s public schools, despite their recent No. 1 national ranking for a fourth consecutive year by Bethesda-based Education Week magazine. It calls for an overhaul of the state’s charter school law to help this effort.

As an example of the large inequity, MarylandCAN cites the results of the 2011 Nation Assessment of Educational Progress — a federally administered national test in various subjects — in which Maryland had the second-largest gap in the nation in eighth-grade math between low-income and wealthier students.

“We are home to deep achievement gaps between the haves and have-nots in our state,” MarylandCAN Executive Director Curtis Valentine said in a statement.

Among the five advisory board members of MarylandCAN are two Teach for America alumni (Peter Kannam and Omari Todd, a former executive director of Teach for America Baltimore), a former professor of education at Harvard and Brown universities who also heads the White House Presidential Scholars program (Marina McCarthy), and the 2011 Howard County Teacher of the Year (Haroon Rashed).

Funders of the Campaign for Achievement Now elsewhere in the U.S. include the Walton Family Foundation, which promotes increased “competitive pressure” on K-12 public schools, according to the foundation’s website.

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