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Mystery unfolding in Baltimore?

A lot of people are asking questions about this sudden resignation.

Baltimore’s schools chief said yesterday that she will resign after steering Maryland’s lowest-performing school system through three years of modest achievement gains amid clashes with the state government that have become an issue in the gubernatorial campaign.

Bonnie S. Copeland’s resignation announcement came on the eve of the release of state test results for elementary and middle schools — scores Maryland uses to judge whether schools are meeting the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law or falling short. Year after year, Baltimore has had more schools labeled in need of improvement than any system in the state.

Yet Copeland and other Baltimore officials, including Mayor Martin O’Malley, a Democratic candidate for governor, have depicted the city schools as being on the rise. State officials, including Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), have said the progress is not enough and have demanded shake-ups to improve lagging schools.

A few thoughts based on the article:

• While Education Wonk is appropriately screaming bloody murder over the condition of Baltimore’s public schools, I don’t know that it’s entirely fair to lay the blame for all of it completely on Copeland.  The way the WaPo article tells it, she inherited a big mess when she took the job.  For whatever it’s worth, now the situation appears to merely be awful rather than a crisis. 
• Seems like electoral politics are definitely a factor.  With candidates from both parties trying to outdo one another in calling Baltimore schools a crisis, she may have decided her job was on the line anyway.  
• On second thought, was Copeland dodging this bullet?

Copeland’s announcement came less than three weeks after the school system’s chief operating officer, Eric Letsinger, was fired amid questions about whether he tried to pay for a fishing trip with school funds.

So was Copeland a casualty of the gubernatorial election cycle, financial corruption, or her own job performance?  Like I said–it’s a mystery!