Will MoCo Follow NYC Steps to Ensure Free Public Education?

A few weeks back on this blog, I wrote about my disappointment with the NYC school Chancellor Joel Klein who apparently let parents and PTSAs fund additional teacher aides in the classroom. The net impact of this practice was that school communities that could afford to pay for extra staff could bypass the Unions, the budget process, the screening and training requirements, and bring in whoever they wanted. Some schools advertised these positions on Craigslist.

NYC has now had a change of heart - after a complaint by the United Federation of Teachers, the teachers union that has, in the past, exercised its great powers to bring the city school system to its knees. Anyone else out there remember the 1968 teachers strike when Al Shanker and his troops kept schools closed until almost Thanksgiving?

Today, the NY Times reveals that Mayor Bloomberg directed an end to this practice. According to the Times:

Principals have been told that any such aides hired for the coming school year must be employees of the Department of Education, their positions included in official school budgets. . .
Supplemental fund-raising from parent groups has long raised questions of fairness. While the ability to provide extras — teaching assistants, books, computers and art supplies, enrichment programs — has helped keep middle-class families in urban public schools, it also can make it more difficult for schools in poor neighborhoods to compete.
And education officials and union leaders say that the informal system of hiring teaching assistants that has sprouted up over the past decade raised security concerns because it was not necessarily subject to the city’s screening process. “It’s hurting our union members, and to some extent it could be hurting kids because we don’t know how qualified they are,” said Ron Davis, a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers, which filed a grievance in October about the hiring.

On July 21, 2009, the Montgomery County Board of Education's Policy Committee meets to discuss the issue of curricular fees in Montgomery County Public Schools. Despite the state law that, like the law in NYC, guarantees a free public education for students, here in MoCo we have been subject to a policy that allows those who can pay supplement their children's education. Thanks to MCCPTA (look for course related fees items) we already have a preview of what the policy may look like. For example, in high schools:

5. Will fees be the same throughout the county?
Response: Designated courses will have a maximum fee amount that may be charged (not to exceed the actual cost of the item). Schools will have the option of not charging any fee or charging up to the maximum fee amount allowed for a designated course. This enables school administrators and school leadership the autonomy to align their resources based on individual instructional programs and needs of each school.

And, more importantly, the Policy Committee agenda only provides 20 minutes for discussion of this item. And of course, the materials are not linked to the meeting agenda.

Can taxpayers in MoCo count on its school leadership to follow NYC's example and take a stand in favor of free public education?

Check back here for my next post - after the meeting.