I'm starting to think we should have a reader contest by that name. Last week I printed a letter from Joe Hawkins, a former Montgomery County official, explaining the underbelly of Weast's tenure. Here's another (thoughtful) critique, this time from Julie Greenberg, a former Montgomery County math teacher who now serves as Senior Policy Director at the National Council on Teacher Quality:
Judging by the "who's who in education reform" who wrote endorsements for the back cover of Leading for Equity, Mike is not alone in falling for its siren song. Here's some relevant background: Ever since about 2003, when Superintendent Jerry Weast signed Montgomery County up in Harvard's Public Education Leadership Project, he and the Harvard Graduate School of Education have formed a mutual admiration society in which he touts their brand of??institutional management and they sing his praises--all the way to what I expect will be a Harvard appointment on his retirement.?? Since 2003, Harvard has issued various "white papers" of questionable objectivity that exalted Weast and his leadership, and this book simply does the same for a larger audience. Leaving aside that many teachers and parents would have a very different take on the events portrayed (and not--as is insinuated in the book--because they are reactionary or racist), Leading for Equity cherry-picks statistics to focus only on the ones that Weast has decided will represent his legacy: reading readiness and AP participation. In this age of accountability, hasn't anyone noticed that there's only isolated mention in the book of state assessments in grades 3-10? (Not that they would help make the case for Montgomery County's excellence in educating minorities: every county in the state has seen the same large increases in minority scores as Montgomery County, and the county's minority students' marginal advantage over those statewide is probably largely explained by their relative wealth.)Other statistics that go entirely unmentioned in Leading for Equity are no harder to find. Daniel de Vise's Washington Post piece on July 28th pointed out how Weast has focused attention away from declines in minority SAT scores (detailed in Flypaper on Friday by Joe Hawkins) and increasing racial achievement gaps in high school graduation rates. You could add to the list the fact that while college remediation rates in reading for all Montgomery County graduates have been stable, and remediation rates in English for graduates have declined (they peaked in '03), college remediation rates in math are large and growing. Apropos of these math woes, one of the district's characteristically ponderous task forces has been organized to attempt to keep the lid on mutinous sentiment among math teachers.
Again, the authors of Leading for Equity don't mention any of these inconvenient statistics or problems, even as they write that college and workplace readiness is the district's "North Star."
Over the last decade, Montgomery County's spending per pupil has increased 78 percent, outpacing inflation by over 48 percent. The percent increase in staff has been over four times the percent increase in students. Unless student mobility is the culprit, the potential for improved achievement for minority students with all of this spending, Robin Hood-like or not, has been largely squandered, not realized. (Releasing the relevant student data, as Joe Hawkins urged, should answer this question.) Likewise, the potential for Harvard to deal with the facts with integrity has also been squandered, not realized.
