MCPS Superintendent Jerry D. Weast was featured in a December 26 opinion piece in Education Week online. You can read it here (it’s by free subscription).
I’ll just quote the opening:
Jerry D. Weast, the schools superintendent in Montgomery County, Md., was recently asked what he was doing to improve low-performing schools. His answer should serve as a wake-up call for school districts throughout the nation.
Weast replied that his public school district spends big bucks every year trying to teach low-income parents “how to kick my butt … how to work the system just like affluent people.”
Sigh.
I suppose I am among the parents referenced in the article, the ones who know how to “work the system,” with “White-collar jobs [that] allow them the flexibility to attend parent-teacher conferences, volunteer in the classroom, and chaperone field trips” (although I am anything but “well-heeled.”) I’ve sat on the school’s SIP (School Improvement Program) committee, attended PTA meetings, gone to Family Math Nights, written letters when it’s time to plan for the next year’s placement. And you know what? I don’t think it’s made a spit of difference. MCPS talks a great game about parent involvement, but it is a one-way relationship, with parents as just another block of “stakeholders” needed to ratify decisions that have already been made.
The piece touts MCPS’s “parent-friendly programs and policies,” its call center to answer questions in Spanish and English, its “Parent Academy,” and how parent information is translated and available online in Chinese, French, Korean, Vietnamese, and other languages.
Meh.
You know what I really want? What would make me feel “involved?” Would make me think the school really wants “success for every student?” I want a maybe three sentence e-mail every week or two from one of my kid’s teachers. Just a quick little “M. did a great job on her reading journal this week.” or “I’ve noticed that M. is having some difficulty seeing the board, you might want to have her eyes checked.” Just some real, meaningful feedback about my kid. Show me that you know my kid and that you care. Don’t spring things on me at conference time or worse, after I’ve approached the school and things all of a sudden things are going badly. And don’t go on about NCLB test scores, about Baldridge benchmarks, or MSAs or BCRs. I don’t care about your bureaucratic sausage making. Talk to me specifically about my child and his or her development as a thinking, creative, thoughtful citizen. What you are doing to help him or her build on strengths and work on challenges. Do that, build a relationship throughout the year, and I guarantee parents would be much more involved and supportive.
But back to butt-kicking. As a matter of fact I have “kicked Jerry Weast’s butt.” This summer I was still seething over our experience with the middle school magnet that shall not be named. I just felt a simmering rage that no one would know what happened, that it could happen to other families, other kids. And so I wrote him a letter, using the pretext of sharing news of C.’s recent SAT achievement as an opening to share some of what we’ve been through all these years and to highlight some areas of concern (accountability, better staff training in giftedness, for example). (And please pardon me for continuing to mention the SAT, but unfortunately it’s the only thing that gets some people’s attention. C. is much, much more than these numbers.) I also cc:’d the head of AEI.
Well a few weeks passed and I got no reply. And then out of the blue one morning I got a call from the person who oversees all the special programs in the county, basically asking me to recount what had happened, to name names. He told me, “When a student with your daughter’s profile leaves a program ostensibly meant for students like her, it raises some questions.” Well that was refreshing to hear. Imagine, someone actually looking at one of these programs with a critical eye. So I told him everything, followed up with an e-mail and mailed him my entire dossier of e-mails, correspondence, the timeline.
A few days later I got another letter, cc’d five ways from Jerry Weast on down. A lot of it was boilerplate about how they strive to meet the needs of gifted students, but the closing was quite solicitous…urging me to contact certain people if I had any concerns and expressing confidence that C. would be appropriately challenged should she return to MCPS. The cynics in my circle said, “They want her back for her test scores.” I’m sure they were concerned about a lawsuit or going public. I’m not suing, but take some small satisfaction from those cc:’s and the thought that at least our case has been brought to the attention of those at the highest levels. And yet…nothing as far as I can tell has changed. Same teachers and administrators are still there, and I continue to hear tales from other “survivors” of the program.
Sigh.
