Examiner: Md. school board blasts Montgomery County textbook deal

By: LISA GARTNER
Examiner Staff Writer
September 7, 2010

The Maryland State Board of Education has condemned Montgomery County’s contract with a global textbook publisher to create and market its own name-brand curriculum.

The agreement “appears duplicative of state efforts, wasteful of resources, and further balkanizes [Montgomery County Public Schools] from the statewide reform initiatives,” the board wrote, even as it dismissed an appeal of the contract....

...Montgomery school board member Laura Berthiaume, who voted against the contract, said she won’t be surprised if the state’s curriculum eventually trumps Montgomery’s.

“We are going to find ourselves in three or four years having developed a product that will never be used by us,” Berthiaume said. “The state has a legal authority to impose [its curriculum] on us, and I don’t know why it wouldn’t.”

The contract allows Pearson and the school board to withdraw by Sept. 30, but the school system isn’t planning to back out, spokesman Dana Tofig said. The curriculum will be “fully aligned” with national standards and has voluntarily been implemented at kindergarten and first-grade levels in 110 schools.

Read full article at this link.

FACT CHECK: MCPS has 131 elementary schools. Mr. Tofig's statement in the Examiner means that the new curriculum has not even been implemented in all MCPS elementary schools. Why have 21 elementary schools declined to implement this new curriculum? 

Note also that Mr. Tofig's quote says the Pearson/MCPS curriculum will be fully aligned with "national standards", not Maryland standards. In the opinion discussed in this Examiner article the Maryland State Board of Education made very clear that they are the final word on Maryland curriculum.