"Apparently Mr. Weast believes beggars can be choosers."

The Baltimore Sun, Second Opinion:  Petulance hobbles Race to the Top

Montgomery County schools officials and teachers unions from several of Maryland’s large jurisdictions are mounting a rare display of self-defeating petulance in their refusal to sign on to Maryland’s application for the federal Race to the Top competition...

...Montgomery County may turn up its nose at the new standards, believing that its system is better than anything the state could possibly come up with, but what it’s objecting to really amounts to ceding control over 30 percent of the evaluation. And the price of venting its pique is steep -- $12 million for a system that, at the same state school board meeting in which Superintendent Jerry D. Weast voiced his objections, asked for and received a waiver from a $51 million state fine levied because the county did not meet its annual education funding requirements. Apparently Mr. Weast believes beggars can be choosers. But Maryland’s poorer districts – notably Baltimore City and Prince George’s County, which stand to gain the most from Race to the Top – can’t afford to indulge the tantrums of the state’s richest.