Michael J. Petrilli 08/02/2024 Thomas B Fordham Institute
As regular readers know, I’m a parent of two children enrolled in Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS). As a national ed-policy wonk, I try to stay in my lane, but from timeto time I can’t help but weigh in on local matters. Now is one of those times. We have a new superintendent, Thomas Taylor, and a system that’s facing major challenges, some specific (a recent scandal involving sexual harassment by a principal) and some more typical (pandemic-era learning lossand sky-high chronic absenteeism). I hope national readers will find my analysis of MCPS—the fifteenth largest school system in the nation—applicable to other big districts, too. This post focuses on issues of teaching and learning. My next one will zero in on policy and budget matters.
Despite its enormous size, Montgomery County Public Schools is, in many ways, a typical suburban district. By that I mean that, once upon a time, it served mostly middle-class White children, often from affluent families, who posted high SAT scores and matriculated in sizable numbers to the country’s most selective public and private colleges. All of that earned the county a reputation as a great place to live, and the district a reputation as one of the best in the country.
Those days are long gone, both for Montgomery County and for many other suburban districts. Indeed, MoCo has diversified tremendously and wonderfully. Hispanic students now comprise a plurality of the district’s enrollment, at 35 percent, with Black students making up 22 percent, White students 24 percent, and Asian 14 percent. Almost 30 percent of the children and teenagers served by the district are eligible for free lunches, meaning they hail from poor or working-class families.
These developments are all in line with national trends, given that the suburbs are now the number one places to find diversity in all its American glory, as well as the vast majority of the country’s low-income and working-class children.
Montgomery County still enjoys a reputation for excellence, one that in my opinion is not well earned. Yes, there are pockets of great teaching and learning, as well as fantastic athletics, art, and music programs. In a system of 160,000 kids, with hundreds of schools, it’s possible to find wonderful offerings. Yet, the system’s results are rather mediocre, just as in most school districts, with fewer than half of students meeting standards for proficiency in reading and math, and much lower marks for the county’s Black and Hispanic students.
So how might Montgomery County go from good to great—especially when it comes to serving its diverse population much better than it does now?
High-quality instructional materials
The best thing Montgomery County has going for it is that it’s got a lot of “instructional capacity,” meaning a large, knowledgeable central office, especially when it comes to curriculum, and an extensive network of school-level instructional coaches who provide effective support to teachers. (Though the curriculum people and instructional coaches are in different departments, which isn’t ideal.) In recent years, the district has also adopted (and mandated) some very good curricular materials, including Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) in elementary school, Eureka Math for elementary schools, and Illustrative Math for middle and high schools.
All of these materials are well-regarded by national experts. CKLA, which was just added this past school year, is particularly strong, given its commitment to the science of reading in the early grades, and its solid evidence of effectiveness. The “knowledge” part of its name is key, as it’s based on cognitive science showing that the way to build kids’ reading comprehension is not primarily by teaching “reading comprehension skills,” but by building their knowledge of the world by teaching history, literature, science, geography, and the arts.
Alas, even these strong programs still leave many gaps in the MCPS curriculum that need filling. Its entire science and social studies program is home-grown, as far as I can tell, and quite weak. As CKLA is rolled out in elementary schools, the county’s youngest kids should start getting much more science and social studies content, and in a more systematic way. That’s a good start. But it’s not enough, and the courses at the middle school and high school level still leave a lot to be desired.
The same goes for middle and high school English, which also relies on district-created materials, and based on my kids’ experience, is pretty much of a wasteland. And don’t get me started on foreign language, art, music, and the other electives, where teachers appear to be largely on their own, meaning it’s hit or miss.
Specialized programs
Montgomery County also deserves credit for beefing up its career and technical education offerings in recent years. The district commissioned an analysis by alumnus Matt Gandal and his team and has started to implement some of its recommendations, adding more capacity to what had been meager offerings. The new superintendent should keep it going.
Likewise with its approach to selective-enrollment schools and programs for “highly gifted” students. These include “centers for the highly gifted” for fourth and fifth graders, plus a handful of selective-enrollment magnet schools at the middle and high school levels. Some of these, like the math-science magnet at Blair High School, are nationally recognized.
A pre-pandemic reform made a shift to equity, in that the system started to prioritize the selection of students from high-poverty schools into these programs. Those changes were highly controversial, especially among the county’s Asian population. But the reforms were appropriate, in my view, given that students from poor schools were less likely to attend class with other high achieving peers, and thus had a greater need for programs that could bring gifted kids together. The county also worked to replicate these programs, and should keep doing more on that front, too.
The problem is that the district promised that there would be beefed up offerings for advanced students at regular elementary, middle, and high schools, and that’s a promise it has not kept. For example, there’s a fantastic program focusing on the humanities at Eastern Middle School, which challenges students to read great literature and non-fiction, well beyond what most middle schoolers get to tackle. There was talk at one point about exporting the curriculum to all middle schools in the district. To my knowledge, that has never happened, and so we are left with a middle school and high school ELA program that is very weak tea.
Likewise, the county shies away from ability grouping, except in mathematics, where students can qualify for a “compacted” program that allows them to cover fourth, fifth, and sixth grade material over the course of fourth and fifth grades. That puts them on track to take algebra in the seventh grade. It’s great, though the county is constantly threatening to get rid of it “because equity.”
But in every other subject, in both middle and high school, the “honors” courses are barely deserving of the name, as they serve virtually all students. So until kids enroll in Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses, the high achievers study next to low-achieving peers, who might be reading many grade levels below them. That’s not good for anyone or conducive to great teaching. It also means is that lots of kids who might be ready to succeed in AP or IB courses with the right level of challenge and support—starting in middle school if not earlier—don’t get it. (And the kids who need extra help to catch up don’t get it either.) If ability grouping works for math, so does it work for ELA, social studies, and science.
Where major changes are needed
Montgomery County’s biggest problems in the teaching and learning department are self-inflicted. Like many districts, it bought into fashionable but dubious ideas around equity in recent years, which led it to make changes around grading, discipline, and attendance which have served to encourage the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” in President George W. Bush’s memorable words.
For example, it adopted a “no-zeros” policy in grading, meaning that students who bomb a test or fail to turn in assignments get a 50 percent as a minimum. It also introduced a generous retake policy for exams and encouraged teachers to downplay deadlines. All of this was supposedly to level the playing field, but it’s wreaking havoc here and across the country. The district has backtracked on some of these policies—the no-zeros policy is now history—but could and should go further. One example: It’s still the case that students who get an A in the first quarter and a B in the second quarter receive an A for the semester. Anyone who understands incentives (and teenagers!) will understand what that implies for student effort.
Montgomery County has also leaned into a soft-on-discipline approach, with a big focus on restorative justice. This might work in some cases, but it’s clearly failing in some of the district’s toughest schools. It also fails to hold students or parents accountable for attendance. (Kids can miss a lot of class and still get good grades; they can miss almost every class and still graduate.) The cell-phone policy is left to every principal, and enforcement is left to every teacher. It’s time for a phones “away for the day” policy, districtwide.
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Montgomery County is heading in the right direction on several fronts when it comes to teaching and learning. It has chosen some great curricular products, and I trust that its impressive systemic capacity to support teachers in implementing those products will help them be taught in the classroom with fidelity and effectiveness. Other districts around the country could learn a lot from Montgomery County on this front.
The district is also moving forward on career and technical education and expanding programs for advanced students.
But it needs to beef up its English and science courses in middle school and high school. It desperately needs to make a U-turn when it comes to its grading, discipline, and attendance policies. And it needs to fulfill its promise to expand offerings for advanced learners at students’ home campuses. All of these items should be on Superintendent Taylor’s to-do list, the sooner the better.
Next time, we will tackle policy and budget issues. Stay tuned.