As a student at Bethesda Chevy-Chase High School in the 1990s, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) Superintendent Thomas Taylor said he recognized there were “significant inequalities” in the quality of education provided throughout county schools.
“The experience I had at [B-CC] was different than the experience that a student at Poolesville or a student at Gaithersburg, or a student at Paint Branch would have experienced at the same time,” Taylor said.
But when he came back to lead the school district this July, he said was surprised that such disparities still exist.
“Unfortunately, a lot of those inequalities still persist today,” Taylor told the Bethesda Chevy Chase Democratic Breakfast Club on Tuesday morning.
Taylor, who graduated from B-CC in 1996, visited the breakfast club virtually, sharing his insight into the job so far and answering questions on issues from school overcrowding to earlier school start times.
Among the many topics broached by club members, Taylor said the persistent inequalities and the lack of progress on eliminating them was his biggest surprise upon returning to the county he called home as a student.
“As Montgomery has continued to grow in its diversity … we have not grown in our toolkit on how we meet the needs of Black children and brown children, how we meet the needs of our students with disabilities, and how we meet the needs of our English language learners,” Taylor told the roughly 30 attendees. “These are real weak spots for Montgomery County and things we need to address immediately.”
Students not meeting graduation requirements is a “community crisis” and an issue that’s disproportionately impacted communities of color, Taylor said.
Taylor said some of the systems the district formerly had in place to “chip away” at inequalities have eroded and haven’t been shored up over time. As the superintendent, though, Taylor said much of his work is creating processes and systems that can improve student outcomes.
Taylor said the school board has “pointed [him] in the right direction” to address the inequalities within the district. The first and most significant is a bigger focus on literacy and mathematics, he said, targeting the performance of specific student demographic groups.
Recent testing data has shown that disparities among certain student demographics continue to plague the district, with Black and Hispanic/Latino students scoring lower than their white and Asian classmates, according to state data.
Taylor said he’s also exploring programming within schools, including how the number of programs and their accessibility may differ in different areas of the county. In general, he said, there’s “not been a lot of love for the eastern part of the county” when it comes to exciting programming and adequate facilities.
“There’s an opportunity for us to right a lot of that and to fix that in a really deliberate and intentional way,” Taylor said. “It is an opportunity to reshape the programming that we offer in Montgomery County and provide access in corners of the county that have been historically marginalized.”
Taylor noted that “nothing in MCPS is overnight work” when it comes to making changes, but he is enjoying looking into creating a culture focused on improvement and opportunities for students.
