The Black and Brown Coalition for Educational Equity and Excellence held a forum in November advocating for a warning system to alert Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) parents when their early elementary school-age children were reading below grade level.
Now, almost a year later, a test to do that is almost underway. But the coalition said it’s been a long time coming, and questions remain.
“We’re happy that it’s happening,” Wylea Chase, director of the Black and Brown Coalition told MoCo360 on Thursday. “[We’re] not happy that it wasn’t already done.”
According to a presentation at the school board strategic planning committee meeting Sept. 23, the district is field testing new ways of communicating with parents of students in kindergarten through third grade when their children are reading below grade level.
Peter Moran, MCPS chief of schools, said the district was focusing on improving parents’ understanding when their student is reading below grade level, why they’re below grade level, what skills students need to work on and the intervention being provided to their students.
Moran said materials that are sent home are often complex and difficult to understand, and that schools needed to sit down with parents to communicate the information.
“One of the greatest resources that we have, if not the greatest resource we have, is parents at home to support their children with the work that we are doing with them at school,” Moran said.
Overall, 69.5% of all MCPS students met Evidence of Learning attainment in literacy, according to data presented to the Montgomery County school board on Sept. 12. The Evidence of Learning framework utilizes several measures, including state testing, district progress tests and report card grades to determine student success, according to the MCPS website.
Disparities among Black and brown students and their white and Asian counterparts have been observed in testing. According to Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program literacy scores, which examines student progress toward proficiency on the Maryland state content standards. 50% or less Black and Hispanic/Latino students in third, sixth and 10th grade earned proficiency on their MCAP tests. White and Asian students often received scores in the high 70s to low 80s.
The field testing will occur at five elementary schools over the next six to eight weeks: JoAnn Leleck at Broad Acres in Silver Spring, Dr. Ronald McNair in Germantown, Rachel Carson in Gaithersburg, Snowden Farm in Clarksburg and Weller Road in Silver Spring. After the field testing, Moran said the intention was to expand the program to the rest of the 135 elementary schools.
The schools were chosen based on their ability to use tiered systems of support proficiently last year based on behavioral intervention data. Moran said they’ve met with all five principals of the schools, and said it was well received.
“This is about delivering expectations, understanding what the best practices are … creating a structure for what we want to see at all schools, and then telling [all schools] ‘This is how we’re doing to operate with our families moving forward,’” Moran said.
Moran said at the meeting that since the district is partnering with the Black and Brown Coalition for this work, they will collect information from parents by surveying focus groups with the organization. While MCPS partnered with the group, Chase said they have concerns and are unhappy it took this long for the field test to start.
Chase said that they were told that implementation of an early alert system would start at the beginning of the school year, but the field testing is now only in the initial stages.
“We know that it takes a lot of human capital to make this happen,” Chase said. “So what happens if a school has already made their plans, not thinking they’re going to be a pilot school?”
MCPS didn’t respond to emails and calls in time for publication as to why there were delays in the project.
Early alert systems such as the one being tested in the five MCPS schools are important because there’s often discrepancy between report card information and standardized test results, Chase said.
“Too often we hear our parents saying, ‘We don’t understand this. … If we had known, we would’ve been able to help our kids, but we didn’t even know,’” Chase said.
Chase said these systems are particularly important as Maryland looks to implement a third grade retention policy.
In an op-ed to MoCo360, coalition co-founders Byron Johns and Diego Uriburu said MCPS needed to move faster to address disparities in literacy.
While the coalition continues to work with MCPS on the early alert system, Chase said they still have questions: Who will be doing the communication and intervention? How will the parents be communicated with? When will they be notified? What will the parents be told?
“We know that [the team in charge of the pilot] is more than capable. We know that they’re going to get it done. But again, there’s discomfort in not having those answers yet,” Chase said. “If we don’t have [those answers] we’re kind of worried that the parents and caregivers won’t have them.”
