Superintendent Joshua Starr will officially resign today as the superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools.
Starr served for 3½ years in the post before coming to a mutual agreement with the Montgomery County Board of Education to not renew his contract.
In an interview with National Public Radio’s Ideastream published Sunday, Starr said he’s going to take some time to contemplate his next step. “What is it I want to do for the rest of my career? Where can I make the most impact? What are the greatest needs out there?” Starr said.
Starr was hired by the school system in 2011 on a platform of bringing social and emotional learning to students. At the time and throughout his tenure he spoke out against too much standardized testing and emphasized project-based learning. In the interview, he said his biggest accomplishments at MCPS include raising graduation rates of all students, an increase in SAT and AP scores, and reducing student suspensions.
He said there are many factors that contribute to the the short tenure of superintendents in general, which is about 3½ years in urban districts. “People want to see dramatic improvement quickly,” Starr said in the interview. “The expectation that a superintendent can do it alone, I think, just doesn’t work well. It takes an entire community to eliminate the achievement gap and raise standards. And the budget issues don’t help.”
Debate has raged—in editorial pages and elsewhere—about whether the Montgomery County Board of Education should state why members decided to part ways with Starr, who had publicly said leading up to his resignation that he was interested in having his contract renewed. Starr didn’t discuss the issue in the NPR interview. Two school board members—Rebecca Smondrowski and Michael Durso—who were reported to have been against renewing Starr’s contract also declined to discuss the reasoning behind Starr’s departure in an extended interview on Montgomery Municipal Cable last week.
MCPS Chief Operating Officer Larry Bowers will serve as the interim superintendent while the school board searches for a new candidate, a process it hopes to complete by June. Last week, the school board hired a search firm to begin the process.
