Editor’s note: This is the second in a series about Montgomery County [Maryland] Public Schools (MCPS), the fifteenth largest district in the country. Part one covered curricular and related issues and is available here. The author is an MCPS parent.
“Does MCPS deserve a passing grade?” So asks the current edition of the glossy Bethesda Magazine, showing up at area grocery stores and landing in residents’ mailboxes. The answer, as readers of part one of this series surely know, is an unfortunate no. A well-meaning impulse to promote equity has instead led to the soft bigotry of low expectations, with grade inflation, misbehavior, and absenteeism rampant, and Covid-era learning loss still going largely unaddressed. And then there are the myriad scandals that the district’s central office is dealing with, from a serial sexual abuser who was promoted to principal under the last superintendent to an electric-bus scheme that has landed several people in prison.
As new superintendent Thomas Taylor and his team flesh out their strategic plan, then, they need to get control of basic processes that have clearly gone awry and must address the lax culture that pervades too many of the system’s 200-plus schools.
Yet it’s not all doom and gloom. As I wrote last time, the county has made smart choices when it comes to high-quality instructional materials, especially with its recent purchase of Core Knowledge Language Arts for the early grades. Its instructional support for frontline teachers is reputed to be solid. Plus, the district’s Peer Assistance and Review process continues to weed out some ineffective teachers before they get tenure. These are not small things.
But at the very top of Taylor et al.’s reform list should be one overriding priority: getting the very best teachers into the district’s toughest schools. And that means squeezing every dime out of wasteful expenditures and directing major resources into higher salaries for those willing to teach and lead at high-poverty campuses.
The reason this is critical is that, as I wrote earlier this year, when we pay teachers the same regardless of which school they work in—standard practice in the vast majority of districts in America—we end up in a situation in which high-poverty schools have lower-quality teachers, on average, than affluent ones.
That, sadly, is the case in Montgomery County. According to an Education Resource Strategies report from 2019, the district’s disadvantaged schools have twice the proportion of new teachers as rich schools do (20 percent versus 10 percent). Because those new teachers get paid much less than veteran teachers do, the study also found that “higher-need schools have lower average teacher compensation.” At the middle school level, for example, affluent schools pay their teachers $9,000 more on average than high-poverty schools do. Given that new teachers tend to be less effective than experienced ones, this “teacher quality gap” is almost certainly contributing to Montgomery County’s achievement gap.
The way this and other districts can fix the problem is by adopting a Dallas-style or D.C.-style teacher pay initiative, in which highly-effective teachers are provided significantly larger salaries in order to teach in the highest-poverty schools—and ineffective teachers in those schools are transferred elsewhere or, ideally, out of the profession.
The good news is that these types of teacher-pay initiatives work. They successfully attract great teachers to the neediest schools, and boost student achievement as a result. That’s why state-appointed superintendent Mike Miles brought a Dallas-style plan with him to Houston, where he’s now offering up to $15,000 for effective teachers to switch to high-need schools. He said the other day that he’s having “no trouble” finding interested and qualified applicants.
Given its proximity, D.C.’s system should certainly be a model that MCPS officials study and emulate. Especially since Montgomery County is surely losing talent to the city. It doesn’t help that starting salaries in DCPS are north of $63,000, compared to less than $60,000 for MCPS. But the big difference is D.C.’s IMPACTplus program, which offers bonuses to brand-new teachers of up to $20,000 if they teach in high-poverty schools and are deemed highly effective. As the city brags, “Under IMPACTplus, a Highly Effective teacher has the potential to earn $79,975 in her/his first year, and can achieve the maximum salary of $131,540 in just nine years.”
Happily, MCPS is not starting from a complete standstill when it comes to differential pay. It already offers a $10,000 supplement for National Board Certified teachers, plus another $7,000 when those teachers teach in a handful of the County’s highest-poverty schools. While I might quibble with tying extra pay to National Board Certification—D.C.’s system is much more directly connected to classroom performance and student outcomes—the bigger problem is that so much of the supplement flows to affluent schools. MCPS should think about moving to:
- A smaller boost for National Board Certification (say, $5,000).
- A larger boost for anyone teaching in high-poverty schools (say, $15,000, which the research indicates is the pay boost needed to attract good teachers to high-need campuses).
- A list of eligible high-poverty schools that is much larger than the dozen or so identified now by MCPS.
This wouldn’t completely close the gap with D.C. (or close the County’s achievement gap) but would go a long way.
Finding the money to invest in effective teachers
Getting the all-powerful Montgomery County Education Association to agree with such a plan would be a major hurdle (ironic, since we’re talking about raising teacher salaries!). Sadly, though, unions generally oppose “differential pay.” They prefer industrial-style single salary schedules, with any bumps in salary driven by experience, more graduate degrees, or other “credentials.” We’ve tried that system for decades, though, and as in most other places, it’s left MCPS with gaping teacher quality gaps, and too few excellent teachers in the schools that need them most.
Another challenge would be finding the resources to fund these salary stipends. So where should MCPS look? There are two big buckets: central office, and employee benefits.
It’s true that school districts need to be careful not to steal resources from central support staff that add value to student learning. Curriculum and instruction staff in particular can be essential to making sure teachers have the professional support they need to be effective.
Still, it sure seems like there are a lot of highly-paid administrators in MCPS’s central office that may not actually be necessary, many of them former principals. Encouraging some of these folks to retire would be a good start and could save a few million dollars a year.
The real money, though, is in employee benefits—a whopping 23 percent of MCPS’s total budget , an astounding $765 million every year. Now let me be clear: Teachers, administrators, and other staff deserve fair and competitive health insurance, retirement, and other benefits. But what MCPS provides—to existing employees, but especially to retirees—goes far, far beyond that. Many expenditures are expensive giveaways to the unions, giveaways that are completely unrelated to serving students or improving outcomes.
What do I have in mind?
- The district’s supplemental pension program, which costs employees just .5 percent of their salaries but into which MCPS plows almost $80 million per year, for a generous pension on top of what the state provides.
- The district’s retiree healthcare insurance benefit, which costs MCPS over $30 million annually, even though retirees could gain coverage via other jobs, Obamacare, and/or Medicare.
- Its policy of paying 25-35 percent of the value of employees’ unused sick leave when they retire, which costs more than $8 million per year.
(These figures come from the district, given to me after I filed a Freedom of Information Act request. You can see the MCPS documents here and here.)
Add them up and these questionable uses of taxpayer funds sum to around $120 million every year.
This is money that could be invested in differential pay for teaching in high-poverty schools; $120 million a year could support stipends worth $15,000 for more than half of MCPS’s 14,000 teachers. That would be transformative.
I’m sure the MCEA and other unions will fight tooth and nail to keep the salary schedules, and especially the retirement perks identified above. And they will make sure school board members—elected thanks to the MCEA and its Apple Ballot—remember who butters their bread. But if MCPS is committed to excellence and equity, it would gore these sacred cows, the sooner the better. And if it’s not willing to put the needs of disadvantaged kids over the demands of the teachers unions, we will know that its commitment to narrowing achievement and opportunity gaps is just a fraud.
