ROCKVILLE – A consultant hired by Montgomery County Public Schools found that schools with elevated levels of poverty had fewer high-quality teachers despite spending more money per student than schools with low levels of poverty.
In a presentation in front of the Montgomery County Board of Education on “resource allocations analysis” June 11, the consultant – Education Resource Strategies Inc. (ERS) explained aspects of that equity gap.
During the presentation, ERS partner Johnathan Travers discussed teacher quality as well as “instructional time and attention,” both of which, he said, can be used to measure equity.
“What does access to high-teaching quality look like now, across the system?” asked Travers. “There are a lot of ways of being able to look at and measure this.”
MCPS hired Education Resource Strategies, Inc. to examine spending per student in all schools, which will be required next fiscal year under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). This act replaced the No Child Left Behind Act a few years ago.
“In accordance with the new regulations set forth in the Every Student Succeeds Act, school districts will be required to publish per-pupil spending by individual schools,” according to the request for proposal released in June 2018. “MCPS must prepare for the technical changes needed to report spending by individual schools.”
In the fall, per-pupil spending in schools will become public...
Staff wasn't surprised because they know they've been mostly letting teachers go wherever they want without any regard for the inequity this creates in the system. The least experienced teachers end up concentrated in high-poverty schools and then we wonder why those schools perform poorly. We can do so much better.
ReplyDeleteThe better schools don't want the newer less experienced teachers either, any more than they want boundary changes (and we know what comments have been made at those meetings and sent to local newspapers). We should do better, but how and in what ways remains the unanswered question.
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