New Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) Superintendent Jack Smith on Monday night outlined a broad set of milestones for students that he sees as the key to the school system achieving its “moral imperative” of closing the achievement gap.
“For the last few years, we’ve done a lot of work in this system on relationships, the heart of education,” said Smith, who started as superintendent July 1, while addressing the Board of Education during its meeting.
“I’m going to know every day this year how [a student is] progressing. If you’re three grades away, we’re going to try to make up one and a half or two of those grades this year,” Smith said. “And we’re going to check ourselves over and over and over. Accountability and results are part of the science of education.”
Smith suggested constant evaluation of students through a combination of in-class quizzes, teacher opinions, MCPS tests and outside standardized testing such as the statewide PARCC exams to measure whether a student is meeting the milestones assigned for each grade level. He didn’t provide specifics on how this practice would differ from what the school system does now.
“Students who don’t know how to read by the end of third grade, they don’t have competency, they don’t have fluency, they’re failing,” Smith said, defining not having fluency as “if you’re reading so slowly you finish the paragraph and you don’t know what it said.”
“We have the science to know these things,” Smith said.
He presented four student milestones: mastering basic reading, writing and computing skills by the end of second grade; learning to write to communicate and performing mathematic calculations by the end of fifth grade; gaining a deeper understanding of mathematics by the end of eighth grade; and “pulling it all together” in high school with expanded comprehension and problem-solving abilities.
If a student hasn’t achieved a milestone by the end of a particular grade, Smith said a school should allow that student to move on to the next grade, but communicate the student’s specific problem areas to the next teacher for more intense focus.
“If Jack failed seventh-grade math, he probably doesn’t need all 185 days over [again],” Smith said.
Smith said the mechanics of how the philosophy will play out in the classroom will be ironed out over the next few months with help from principals and teachers. He prefaced his thoughts by pointing out disparities in the performance of the school system’s white and Asian students when compared with that of black, Hispanic and low-income students.
“We must act now to create a school system where academic success is not predictable by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, language or disability,” Smith said. “Montgomery County has a long, long history of high achievement from many students. Not all students. …The degree of disparity, it falls most heavily on our African-American students, our Latino students and our students in poverty. We simply have to acknowledge that.”
Board members on Monday night praised Smith, the man they hired in February after former Superintendent Joshua Starr resigned in 2015 when he learned he didn’t have enough support from board members for a contract extension. Board members opposed to extending Starr never made their reasons public, saying the decision was a private personnel issue.
During his tenure, Starr showed an interest in developing students’ grit and determination as well as their academic skills. On Monday night, Smith referenced those goals, saying “all of those things are part of what we ought to be looking at in our results.”
But his focus was clearly on the academic milestones. Smith said ensuring every student is meeting those milestones required him to “be this blunt and direct” about racial discrepancies in the data from PARCC tests, MAP tests and reading levels across elementary schools.
“If we do not do this, we are not going to have a highly, fully successful school system,” Smith said. “And this applies to all of us in this community. All 1,040,000 people are touched by this because our society, our community cannot continue to have a fracture in its learning for children. We can’t do that. We can’t have some who achieve at the highest levels and some who don’t achieve. …We cannot tolerate it any longer. It’s a moral imperative for the individual. It’s a moral imperative for this community. It’s a moral imperative for this country.”
Board member Patricia O’Neill said Smith was “jumping in to the pond feet first and splashing the cold hard truth.”
“Sometimes as a district you can become complacent in the touting of your excellence,” O’Neill said. “But we know we have a lot of students that are not performing.”
