The "More" Child

One, two, three, four.  I declare a … class war.

Ladies and gentlemen, Montgomery County Public Schools has declared a class war.  Yes, in the past two weeks, MCPS has called out parent advocates in the county.  First up, the January 22nd article by Daniel DeVise in the Washington Post, When the Label is ‘Gifted,’ the Debate is Heated.  The article rehashes the series of events that resulted from the Post’s earlier article on the gifted label issue, detailed here in previous posts, then once more trots out the work of the Montgomery County Education Forum.

Within the school system, the gifted label is increasingly viewed as a liability, chiefly because it is seen as inequitable. White and Asian American students are twice as likely to be labeled gifted as Hispanic and black students. The share of students identified as gifted varies — widely and largely inexplicably — among schools with similar demographics and test scores. In 2005, an alliance of groups called the Equity in Education Coalition began lobbying school officials to abolish the label, saying it bestowed unfair advantages upon designated students. (emphasis added)

I love the bland “within the school system, the gifted label is increasingly viewed as a liability.”  These are the same folks who have gone the record as saying that the GT designation is about measuring academic preparation and familial affluence.

Then comes the front page story that appeared in the Post on Friday, Well-Connected Parents Take on School Boards:  Web-Savvy Activists Push for Educational Change.  The article draws heavily on the recent successes by parents across the river in Fairfax County.  There a group called FairGrade successfully persuaded the school system to realign the county’s grading system so that students would no longer be penalized when competing for college scholarships and admission.  Meanwhile another group called SLEEP finally met with success–after years of lobbying–when the FCPS Transportation staff released a report outlining a plan for implementing reasonable bell schedules with no added cost.

On my side of the river, the ongoing efforts of Montgomery County’s Parents’ Coalition are cited.

The coalition has claimed two victories in recent weeks. It successfully lobbied the school board to eliminate hundreds of course fees, and its concerns about loose credit-card spending practices among school staff were validated by a state audit.  [Note:  the Post writer neglected to mention December's Bus Radio reversal.]

Brian Edwards, chief of staff for Montgomery Superintendent Jerry D. Weast, said the coalition is run by a “small cadre” of parents who have been longtime critics of the system. In the past, he said, their complaints would have been registered through phone calls or e-mails. Now, organized on the Web, they attract more media and public attention.

Other Montgomery parents are organizing online around issues such as gifted or special education, and they keep close tabs on pending program changes.

The articles notes (emphasis added) that:

School officials say they welcome the heightened interest in public education, because parent involvement often leads to student success. But they also warn that the wildfire Web-based campaigns can spread rumors quickly and tend to benefit affluent, well-connected parents.

And that:

Sometimes such parent groups, whose agendas tend to be limited to helping their own children….

And that:

Officials caution that the new technology has turned up the volume for select parent voices. It can be especially apparent in parts of Fairfax or Montgomery where well-educated parents are not afraid to throw their weight around and register complaints with a phone call to the superintendent or the media. Blast e-mails and Web sites give these parents even more of an edge, compared with others who lack time or resources, some observers say.

I just love this.  You have the school system–a multi-million dollar communications “Goliath”–evading criticism and mischaracterizing and denigrating parent activist “Davids” who are working on a shoe string and in their meager spare time, all the while purporting to defend the defenseless, traditionally silent parents.

Uh, news flash.  It’s called democracy.  To paraphrase our late Secretary of Defense, you operate a school system with the parent advocates you have not the parent advocates you want or wish to have at a later time.

In one sense MPCS is right.  The vast majority of parents are mushrooms.  Silent.  In the dark.  And MCPS is doing all it can to keep them happily in the dark, hosting window-dressing “Parent Academy” workshops and churning out happy-feel-good press releases so that people can continue to feel relieved and justified that they shelled out big bucks for a house in MoCo with its “good schools” and focus instead on organizing that International Night, Book Fair or Staff Appreciation Luncheon.  Meanwhile, the system “that is all about the data” obfuscates, withholds and hides information to the point where parents–who have oh so much time on their hands–have to file FOIA requests and haunt listservs trying to piece together what actually is happening in the county.  How about making information so easily available, so transparent and in such easily manipulatable formats (goodbye .pdfs) so that *all* parents have access?  (Where oh where, for example, can one find those School Improvement Plans…you know, the ones that are part of the tortured Baldridge process…that is all about “stakeholder involvement?”)

Yes, our schools are “good” when compared to most places.  But that doesn’t mean they and the people who run them are without flaws.  In the case of the GT labeling issue, the school system put out “misinformation” (“Montgomery Erasing Gifted Label”) and then was justifiably pressed by parents to clarify its own “mis-statements.”

GT advocate Fred Stichnoth puts it well: “[S]chool officials are so lost both in the fog of their own ideology, reinforced by the echo in their bubble–including parent groups too willing to mouth exactly what officials want to hear;  and in the momentum of their day-to-day program work;  that they have not seen to the bottom of what they are up to, and cannot attain the perspective or clarity to do so.  So they are defensive:  relegated to lashing out.”