Patch: In MCPS, Black Immigrant Students Shine Academically

by Joseph Hawkins

Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Joshua Starr is interested in understanding “performance variability,” and he talks about it constantly.
Here he is just last week talking to high school journalists about it.I’m not 100 percent sure what Starr means by performance variability, but here is a wild guess: I think, for example, he wants to know why affluent MCPS graduating seniors score 1800+ SAT points versus poor MCPS graduating seniors who barely score 1200. Great idea! But figuring out variability requires doing a better job of describing student populations and I’m not convinced that MCPS does this very well.
We know, for example, that there is inner-group variability amongst black or African-American MCPS students. Black girls read better than black boys, and from time to time, MCPS publishes reading scores that back this up. I cannot, however, remember MCPS ever publishing scores for students receiving federal free and reduced meals (FARMS) versus  results for non-FARMS black students. MCPS uses FARMS as a proxy for being poor. If you participate in the program you are poor. Nonetheless, it is unclear to me if poor black students perform lower than their affluent black peers or if poor black girls and affluent black girls out-read their counterparts, poor black boys and affluent black boys. I would guess that they would, but who really knows?

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