One year later -- Has MCPS made progress?

Exactly one year ago today, The Montgomery Sentinel published President Obama, Take My Superintendent, Please!, one of a series of articles about Dr. Weast and MCPS by the late Wayne Goldstein.

In the article, Mr. Goldstein made the following 10 suggestions for reform:

1. Hire enough BOE staff to provide independent verification of MCPS performance claims. Take these staff from MCPS, including part of its Office of Shared Accountability, put them under a Chief of Staff who reports only to the BOE, and make the Ombudsman a separate position where the office is also physically removed from the BOE offices.
2. Ask the state legislature to double or triple BOE salaries so that members will be able to justify to themselves and their families putting in the hours that the job demands.
3. Ask to be part of CountyStat and accept their advice, ask the independent County Inspector General and the County Council Office of Legislative Oversight to do lots of audits and studies and make lots of recommendations for improvement.
4. Greatly strengthen MCPS and BOE ethics laws and enforcement so that MCPS officials who cut big corners will find themselves out of a job.
5. Provide very tight oversight of all school Independent Activity Funds, even putting them under centralized control.
6. Rewrite regulations to strengthen community involvement, and otherwise bring back unscripted community participation.
7. Put all MCPS contracts, checks, and credit card charges online in a searchable data base.
8. Make contract funding sources and actions for all goods and services as transparent and as detailed as possible.
9. Have BOE staff regularly scrutinize certain of Weast’s and his top staff’s activities, such as his attending conferences for 57 days in 2008, and the extravagant amounts spent on staff meals and entertainment.
10. Start thinking about what you really want in the next superintendent, which means ruthlessly examining all of Weast’s big failures, studying his modest but genuine successes, deciding what kind of leader can best clean up the mess he created over 12 years, and deciding how you can most honestly try to improve student performance and not to be fooled again by yourselves or another superintendent more focused on marketing claimed successes than enacting genuine positive change.

Now, a year later, it appears that even the most modest of Mr. Goldstein's suggestions have not been implemented by our Board of Education.