Declining birthrates are causing widespread enrollment declines nationally, including in MCPS. MCPS forecasts that by 2031, its enrollment will have fallen by 9 percent from its peak in 2019. Public school enrollment depends on more than birthrates: immigration, housing markets, homeschooling, and private schooling all matter. Recent events including the pandemic, local losses of federal jobs, and immigration enforcement efforts all affected MCPS enrollment, but even if Montgomery County somehow figures out how to make more jobs and more housing, the birthrates will still yield a major hit to enrollment going forward.

Enrollment affects revenues and spending, as well as school closures, boundaries, and consolidations.

Why does enrollment matter for revenues?

State and federal dollars are allocated through multiple programs, but they’re all based on enrollment in some way (e.g., per pupil, per economically disadvantaged pupil). MCPS gets the majority of its budget from Montgomery County, so it’s less fully exposed to that hit than many other districts.

Each year, MCPS asks the County Council for an amount equal to its estimated spending minus estimated state and federal revenue for the operating budget. As we saw this year, estimated needed spending is a fluid concept, but it does depend in large part on enrollment.

But when MCPS makes the ask, it’s for the bottom line, a single (large) dollar amount, not for a certain amount of dollars per pupil. If I were on the County Council, I would want to track the MCPS budget in per-pupil terms, not just total dollars.

Why does enrollment matter for spending?

The impact of enrollment declines on spending – and what students get in exchange – depends on how willing MCPS, the teachers’ union, and the public are to do things differently.

Consider an elementary school with one art teacher that loses 9 percent of its students and still has one art teacher. No one wants to lose an art teacher, but this adds up. There are ways to avoid these “rounding” cost increases, but they all look different than what people are used to. For example, MCPS could hire more part-time staff, or have more teachers split their time across schools. Some of the reduction in full-time positions can happen through staff attrition, but it could also require eliminating additional jobs.

Enrollment feeds into school utilization rates (enrollment/capacity), which are important for prioritizing capital budget decisions. MCPS has a long queue of overdue projects with very real consequences for students and staff in the buildings. While you can have an art teacher spend less than 100 percent of her time in a given school, HVAC, roofing, and other capital investments are not so easily scaled. MCPS made this point at the August 20 Board of Education meeting with this handy graphic:

Source: MCPS presentation on Opening Schools, accessed Aug. 24, 2026

Does enrollment decline mean MCPS and the Board of Education should close schools?

Closing schools is the third rail of school district politics, as anyone who saw the politics around what MCPS has termed the relocation of Wootton HS knows. Right up there with closures are consolidations; nobody likes those either. I assume MCPS and the Board will try hard to avoid closing and consolidating schools, but it seems like they don’t think they can avoid it – why else would we be headed into a countywide elementary and middle school closure and consolidation study this year?

The plan is to follow the closure and consolidation study with a countywide elementary and middle school boundary study. Think about the agony of last year’s boundary studies for only two high schools; the current study will be for MCPS’s 137 elementary and 40 middle schools. It’s going to be a lot, but it’s hard to disagree with Dr. Taylor’s memo that “Declining enrollment and uneven facility utilization present operational and fiscal challenges that warrant a comprehensive review of the school system’s facility portfolio.”

MCPS’s recent move to using a Facilities Condition Index to more fairly describe the needs of different buildings, instead of letting the squeakiest wheels get the capital budget grease, will help with the capital improvement plan, and with decisions about which buildings to close.

Source: https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/facilities/FCI/ accessed Aug. 11, 2026

None of this answers the question I posed: should they close schools? I don’t know, in part because I don’t know what the teachers’ union and the public would be willing to accept in exchange for avoiding it. Consider this thought experiment: would people stand for an elementary school where classroom teachers run specials like art and music themselves? Would the teachers’ union? While the boundary studies should produce helpful demographic projections, they won’t reveal what specific tradeoffs students, families, and staff are willing to make. I also don’t know about the geography, within MCPS, of enrollment decline and facilities health. That’s the kind of information the study should yield.

The political cost of closures depends not only on the closures, but on how people feel about the fairness of the process. This requires trust and transparency, both of which could use a boost in MCPS. (For all the transparency hawks following the potential Board handbook update I wrote about last month, the Board chose not to vote on the update and I haven’t seen anything since. The 2025-2026 handbook is still posted at the time of this writing.)

How can we all see the tradeoffs more clearly?

As an MCPS parent, MCCPTA delegate, and economist who has studied school finance for the last 25 years, I find the published MCPS budget documents insufficient for understanding how MCPS allocates resources. I know I’m not the only one. This is a problem for public trust and informed decision-making. Everyone should be able to understand where money is going inside the district and why.

Or, to speak the Board’s language and align with the strategic plan, there’s a problem with Goal 3, Objectives 11 and 12. Goal 3 is “Ensure a safe, welcoming, and inclusive learning and work environments through positive climate and effective operations.” [sic] Objective 11 is “Ensure communication is clear, culturally responsive, and easy to understand.” Objective 12 is “Operate with efficiency and transparency, ensuring the responsible and accountable use of public resources.” The Strategic Planning Scorecard below is designed to track progress on the goals, but the associated metrics don’t capture anything about public understanding of the budget.

Source: MCPS Strategic Plan 2025-2030, accessed Aug. 25, 2026

So how could we understand these budget tradeoffs better? One starting point would be to put all funding amounts in dollars per affected pupil, meaning per pupil experiencing the spending. So if it’s a K-5 curriculum, show spending per K-5 student; if it’s an athletic program, divide the cost by the number of students participating in it. The point isn’t to just choose whatever costs the least, but to make the very big numbers tossed around in budget discussions more interpretable and tradeoffs more visible.

This year I got my certificate in education finance through the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown. As part of the training, we played this budget hold ’em game. It provided per-pupil cost estimates of different options, which got players moving beyond talking about the financial costs associated with a budget item to talking about the opportunity costs of the ask. That is, if we fund one thing, what other thing do we give up? And how do we decide? We had really interesting (simulated) conversations in the training, and I’d love to hear more of them for real in MCPS.

There will be hard choices ahead, but they should at least be visible ones, based on information that allows comparisons of the actual tradeoffs. Opportunity costs are nothing new, but understanding them – and communicating them clearly to the public – is going to be more important as MCPS and the Board face increasingly hard decisions stemming from enrollment decline.

Pop quiz

The Strategic Plan Scorecard above reports a “56% Read rate for MCPS Weekly Parent Newsletter” [sic]. What reaction will no reader of this newsletter have to this?

a. What’s the denominator?

b. Define “read.”

c. I’m missing out on communications from MCPS?! Where do I sign up?

Answer key

c. If you are reading my newsletter (or you know there is a Strategic Planning Scorecard), I predict you already receive – if not read – that weekly MCPS newsletter, Things to Know.

Extra credit

• This enrollment decline isn’t just an MCPS thing. Read Updating D.C.’s enrollment projections: Trends, methodology, and implications - D.C. Policy Center

• Per-pupil costs went through the roof in severely under-enrolled Chicago schools (ProPublica).

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it (social media, listserv, group chat, etc.).

Today’s guest poster, Regan Kelly, has supported dozens of districts to improve literacy outcomes for students by supporting teachers. Regan started her career as a teacher in Compton, CA and has been a literacy coach, school leader, network leader and consultant. She is an MCPS parent of a 10th and a 7th grader. Thank you, Regan, for taking the time to share your expertise here.

Do you want to improve student outcomes? The most reliable way to do that is to improve teacher practice. Simple, right? Not exactly. How do teachers improve? What support matters most? And who is responsible for making it happen? My experience (and the research!) suggest that anchoring improvement in curriculum and protecting meaningful collaborative time to prepare for instruction are two of the most important ingredients in effective teacher development.

What is planning time?

Planning time has no one definition. In any given day, teachers have blocks of time when they have no students (this might be a free period in middle or high school or a block while kids are in PE or music in elementary). Some of that time is literally free - teachers might grade work, they might email parents, they might make photocopies, they might call their dentist (teachers have few business hours and everyone needs to call the dentist at some point!). Some of that time is structured, usually with a grade-level or department meeting where they meet with other teachers. In these meetings they may be reviewing and internalizing upcoming lessons, anticipating and preparing for student misunderstandings, analyzing student work, rehearsing and getting feedback on the toughest part of the lesson from peers who are doing the same lessons.

Ideally they are guided, supported and led by a grade level/subject area leader, an instructional coach, or a school leader. Someone who can support them in the follow up from the collaboration with observation and feedback on their execution. And all of that collaborative work is a form of what we call “job-embedded” teacher development - a way to help teachers improve their practice tomorrow for their students with the curriculum they use.

Before I go any further, I want to shift our language. I’ll suggest that we call this preparation and not planning. Here’s why:

• If I asked you to plan a trip to the beach, you’d be starting from scratch: Which beach? How long? Where should we stay? That’s planning.

• If I asked you to prepare for a trip to Ocean City next week, you’d do different things: check the weather, find the beach umbrella, call the dog sitter, pack the car. That’s preparing.

That’s the distinction I want to make. Teachers with a high-quality curriculum are rarely starting from scratch. Their work is preparing to teach a lesson well—not inventing one. And this preparation is hard work and requires deep knowledge and expertise about the content, curriculum and students. MCPS is launching a new math curriculum and you can imagine how critical preparation is for new lessons.

Framing teacher planning time as preparation really shifts the focus to what we need teachers, who are experts, to focus on: making sure the grade level content in the curriculum is accessible to all students. I actually call this intellectual prep because I think this is the hard stuff we need our amazing teachers focused on and working collaboratively to do.

Why does teacher preparation time matter for kids?

To improve student performance, you must improve how teachers teach. If you want teachers to teach their curriculum (the one the Board of Education voted to adopt), you need to improve how teachers teach that curriculum, not just in general. And teachers need to get this support on the job: grounded in their materials, attending to the unique needs of their students, with peers and leaders who know their students and in ways that are applicable the next day. When teachers participate in this sort of job-embedded, curriculum-based professional learning, students’ test scores improved by 9 percent of a standard deviation - about the same improvement you’d get from switching from an average teacher to a top performer.

Teacher planning time can look like an adult issue, but its ultimate purpose is improving the quality and consistency of what students experience every day. The question is not whether teachers deserve planning time—they do. The question is how a school system can organize that time so teachers receive the support they deserve and students receive consistently strong instruction. Research increasingly points toward collaborative, curriculum-based preparation as one of the highest-leverage uses of that time. When planning time is treated as protected instructional infrastructure—not merely a contractual benefit—it becomes one of the most powerful tools available for improving teaching and learning.

What does job-embedded, curriculum-based professional learning actually look like?

Across the country, districts are adopting strong curricula (like MCPS now has in K-8 ELA and math!) and they know that a one-time training over the summer is not enough for sustained improvement. And they know that teachers deserve more support. Many districts and several states (including Maryland!) are using a similar shared theory of action (much simplified here): curriculum + curriculum-based professional learning and support = improvements in teacher practice and student achievement. Preparation that is timely (next Tuesday’s lesson!), collaborative (how did you explain that concept to your class?), grounded in students (what will my students struggle with?) will support teachers to maintain the rigor of the lesson but make it work for their students. In most school systems this sort of planning is built into the schedule and expectations on a weekly basis (so in elementary, for example, each grade level should have at least one weekly collaborative preparation meeting, typically at least 45 minutes, for math and one for reading), it is led by a principal, assistant principal, instructional coach or teacher leader/chair and districts use a common set of tools or protocols to structure the time and maximize impact.

MCPS has the raw materials for this to work! We have strong, externally-vetted curriculum in reading and math K-8. We have reading specialists. staff development specialists and content/department leads in elementary, middle and high schools. We have time built into the day for teacher preparation. But following the research and organizing those raw materials in ways that help teachers improve their practice as professionals takes work.

How do MCPS teachers get support for using new curricula?

Let’s do a little deep dive into elementary literacy. As of fall 2024, each elementary school had a reading specialist who was specifically tasked with supporting and developing teachers in the use of our newly adopted curriculum, Amplify CKLA. And for a year, that is exactly what they did - meeting weekly or more with teachers to prepare lessons, review student work, rehearse, look at data, collaborate. When MCPS’ internal research shop, the Office of Shared Accountability, evaluated that first year, they heard from some staff who needed more support implementing CKLA, and recommended the district provide it. MCPS agreed in their response below.

In the “responsive action plan” section above, MCPS describe how they would “expand and refine professional learning opportunities.” The MCEA (teachers’ union) contract provided seven hours per week of planning time, which was time enough for teachers to collaborate and prepare for lessons and receive this sort of named support (and even have time to spare for other critical tasks - grading, communicating with families, etc.)

Then, a contract change introduced new constraints on how principals could structure collaborative preparation time.

What changed in MCPS about planning time?

In March 2025, MCPS amended the contract with MCEA. The changes had significant implications for teacher preparation time. Teachers still have planning time (and the same total amount!), and schools still have instructional experts—reading specialists, department chairs, and content leads—whose roles include supporting teacher development.The big shift is that the amendment introduced – without a definition – the concept of “directed” planning time. In elementary schools, principals now can only direct teachers’ use of planning time twice per month and cannot use the entire planning block. Before the amendment, there was no such distinction or limit. The shift is smaller for middle and high schools, where the administrator can “direct” four planning periods a month instead of two.

What does this mean in practice? Principals can require collaborative preparation far less frequently than before. How much collaborative preparation time depends on a few things:

• How do principals interpret “directed?” In some schools, leaders have interpreted the change conservatively to avoid running afoul of the contract. The result is that collaborative preparation is now far more dependent on local decisions than on a consistent district-wide expectation.

• How long is a planning block? It isn’t specified in the contract, and likely varies by school; if it is 45 minutes, that means only 70 minutes/month can be directed, and if it is 60 minutes, then the principal can direct 100 minutes/month.

• What other “directed” activities are competing with collaborative planning for those two precious blocks? E.g., mandatory compliance training, administrative matters, required school initiatives, etc.

Why did the contract change? I think the idea was that teachers should have more freedom over their planning time. And that is a noble ideal. The rationale behind the change is understandable. Teachers are professionals. They need time to grade, contact families, prepare materials, reflect on student work, and respond to the realities of their own classrooms. No one wants planning time to become a series of compliance exercises or meetings that don’t improve instruction.

The question is whether, in restructuring how teacher planning blocks can be used, we’ve accidentally made it harder to provide the kind of collaborative support that research suggests supports teachers to implement high-quality instruction – and the kind of development that MCPS agreed (above) teachers need.

What should MCPS, MCEA, and the Board of Education be doing next about helping teachers improve their practice?

My hope is that the BOE and MCPS and the MCEA shift away from thinking about how much planning time exists and how it is directed to whether MCPS has a coherent theory of how teacher development happens and, then, whether the current contract terms support that theory. I’ve posited a theory here that I’ve seen work and is replicated across the country: give teachers strong curriculum and meaningful time to prepare together, and they’re more likely to improve their practice—which is how students learn more.

In the immediate future, there isn’t much to be done. The amended contract goes through June 30, 2027. There will be a chance to negotiate something different next year. In the meantime, principals and school-based subject experts (reading specialists, department chairs) are continuing to get development and guidelines for how to maximize teacher collaborative preparation time to impact student achievement.

If I were on the board, here is what I’d be asking:

• What are the three most important ways teacher practice in MCPS needs support? What is MCPS doing to support each of those needs? Who is responsible for overseeing these support efforts? What systems are in place to provide it consistently?

• How do we know how the “directed” planning time is being spent in schools? What evidence do we collect at the school level? How would MCPS know if collaborative preparation was happening, and if it was, if it was effective? What indicators would tell us that?

• If I sat in on ten grade-level planning meetings next week, how many would be focused on preparing upcoming lessons from our adopted curriculum?

Pop quiz

A district adopts a world-class curriculum. What is the next most important question?

a. What font should we use on the pacing guide?

b. How should we organize the shared drive for most efficient teacher access to shared resources?

c. How will teachers be supported to learn and implement it well?

d. By how many standard deviations will average test scores rise the next year?

Answer key

Correct answer: C. If curriculum alone improved instruction, school improvement would be easy. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), teachers are still the most important in-school factor shaping students’ daily experiences. Strong curriculum creates the opportunity; teacher learning and implementation determine whether that opportunity translates into better outcomes for kids.

Extra credit

At your next PTA meeting, principal meet and greet, Board of Education event, or candidate forum, ask one question:

How much protected time do teachers have to improve instruction together, and what does that time actually look like?

Then listen carefully to the answer. If the response focuses only on how many minutes teachers receive, ask a follow-up:

How is that time used to help teachers improve instruction for students?

The goal isn’t more meetings. The goal is helping great teachers get even better.

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it (social media, listserv, group chat, etc.).

This post is about what to expect from the new elementary math curriculum. MCPS is preparing to launch it next month by providing teachers with six hours of training before school starts, followed by (an unspecified amount of) support, coaching, and observations, as described in their table below (emphasis added).

Source: 11.1 ADOPTED Math Curriculum Approval Memorandum. https://go.boarddocs.com/mabe/mcpsmd/Board.nsf/files/DTVSR773E3A0/$file/11.01%20ADOPTED%20Math%20Curriculum%20Approval%20260430.pdf accessed 7/25/26.

I’m grateful that curriculum and instruction expert Emily Appel is here to help us understand what’s going on and what to look for as changes roll out starting next month. Emily is a parent to MCPS 4th and 6th graders and CEO of Made by Change, a social impact consulting firm.

Q: When you advise districts how to roll out a new curriculum, what training and support do you recommend?

A: In my work, I support districts and schools in adopting and rolling out curriculum. After adopting strong materials, districts typically spend time in the summer providing curriculum training for all teachers and leaders.

Trainings are ideally at least three days long, with the first day focused on the overall design of the curriculum, the pedagogical principles that informed its design, and key components. The second day focuses on specific components of the materials, identifying key features, and walking through how to use them. The third day builds on day two by diving deeper into grade-level-specific groups, where teachers have time to examine the first unit of the curriculum. Unit planning should also include a review of the assessment and lesson rehearsal, so that teachers can practice the key lesson routines in the first unit. Leaders also need this training! Ideally, they would be getting in alongside their teachers.

Following the initial rollout training, leaders should regularly observe teachers and instruction (weekly/biweekly) to monitor the implementation of the curriculum. This is crucial to any rollout. After the first 6 weeks, the district should be able to report on implementation. Following a focus on implementation fidelity, the district and its leaders should shift to focusing more intentionally on the quality of instruction. Coaching and feedback should focus on instructional effectiveness and student outcomes. Data during the next three 8-week cycles should focus on how student outcomes are improving. Conversations in teacher planning should center around lesson specifics and ways to support increasing student outcomes. Leaders should be shadowed by experts in Amplify to ensure that they are being supported in their coaching and development towards strong implementation.

Q: How could the new curriculum help teachers and students?

A: When I taught 4th-grade math, I didn’t have a great curriculum. I also had a class of students who were performing at varying levels. Every day, I had to plan lessons on grade level and then plan for all the levels my students were on. The new curriculum has built-in support for multiple levels in every single lesson. There are problems and instructions for students who are behind, on grade level, and above. As a teacher, this is huge! Not having to go find or build that content out for every lesson is a win. I am also excited about the materials for centers included at each grade level. This isn’t something teachers have had before, and again, they won’t have to go do the work to create them themselves.

As someone who knows instructional design, I see the value in creating this for teachers and aligning it with the daily lesson. This not only means that the teacher doesn’t have to do the work to create these materials. We also know that the materials are consistent and each teacher isn’t creating materials that might be inequitable. It isn’t just content on the computer; it’s actual paper-and-pencil problems that students can work through. This is invaluable.

Q: One of the most robust research findings about curriculum is that it doesn’t get implemented. What’s a best practice workflow for monitoring that implementation?

A: This is my favorite part of supporting districts that have adopted a new curriculum. The beginning of implementation should focus on ensuring that teachers use the curriculum with fidelity, meaning they use the materials as designed and do not skip or reorder them. The curriculum is designed by experts who ensure that the materials are at the right rigor, that the concepts, vocabulary, and routines spiral within and throughout the grades, and that the principles of cognitive learning science are at the basis of design. Implementing with fidelity means teachers uphold those design principles. Leadership should be regularly in classrooms, ensuring that teachers use the materials as designed, as closely as possible to the original design.

The first six weeks are critical. Every teacher needs to be observed regularly, at least four times in the first six weeks, to look for implementation fidelity. After six to eight weeks, leaders can start to look more closely at the effectiveness of instruction and ensure it is having the impact we want. Effectiveness data can be collected by building leaders and cross-functional specialists. The data should be reviewed regularly so that professional development and coaching can be planned to support teachers in achieving stronger implementation. At the district level, implementation data should be shared regularly so that system shifts can be planned and implemented, and resources can be redirected to strengthen impact.

Q: MCPS talks a lot about “cross-functional teams.” What they are and how could they help?

A: Cross-functional teams are groups of school-focused, subject-specific experts who work directly with schools to provide targeted support to improve/strengthen teaching and learning. In MCPS, these teams exist for each region.

Ideally, the math cross-functional specialist would work in partnership with Amplify (the curriculum vendor) to help leaders gain a deep understanding of the math curriculum, enabling them to support teachers in strengthening their instruction. The challenge is that teachers can only be required to meet with leadership for two hours a MONTH total – these two hours cover all subjects, not just math, and there is no extra added for a year with new curriculum. This is nowhere near enough time to support the rollout of a new curriculum. There should be weekly meetings focused on the math curriculum with additional time for unit preparation and lesson rehearsal.

Q: Many (organized!) MCPS parents want less instructional screen time for their kids. Does this new curriculum include it? Does it require it?

A: While Amplify Desmos does have some digital components, MCPS has purchased the paper-and-pencil version of this product. Teachers will have the option to use digital components for some parts of instruction; it shouldn’t be a regular component. In K-5, approximately 10% to 20% of lessons feature digital or interactive screen activities, while 80% to 90% are designed to be print-based or hands-on.

Q: MCPS also plans to implement “cluster grouping” for math. What should that look like?

A: Cluster grouping is an instructional approach in which students with similar academic needs, whether below grade level, on grade level, or above grade level, are intentionally placed together in heterogeneous classrooms. The goal is not to track students but to make it easier for teachers to provide instruction that matches students’ current learning needs. Think of cluster grouping as giving teachers the ability to meet students where they are without separating children into entirely different classrooms. Instead of having one or two advanced learners spread across every class, or one or two students needing significant intervention in every class, students with similar learning needs are grouped together so teachers can more effectively tailor instruction.

Students should move between groups and even between classrooms as their academic needs change. Sometimes students may need more support in a particular area of math instruction, so they might be a better fit for a different cluster. Sometimes they may be really strong in a particular area, so they would move clusters again. These are meant to be flexible groups that students can shift in and out of, not on a daily basis, but more unit to unit.

In the 2026-27 school year, only the 4th grade will participate in math cluster grouping. In the following school year, additional grades will adopt the cluster grouping approach. All grade levels K-8 will be using Amplify Desmos next school year.

Q: How can families know if kids are struggling with math, and if so, what should they do? What help can they expect from MCPS?

A: Right now, there is no real-time way for families to know if their student is struggling in math. Grades, unit tests, and MCAP (state) and MAP standardized test scores are all information that parents have access to, but some come very delayed. MCAP scores have come months after it has been administered; next year Maryland is switching to a new state test, the MSTAR, and those results will be available to parents in late June. MCPS does provide twice-yearly letters to notify families about a student being below grade level based on MAP scores, but twice a year isn’t timely enough for parents to take action. The notices are designed to provide families with an early warning about their child. There are no additional supports or services that are provided with the notice letter. I’d recommend families who receive these letters reach out to their child’s teacher and schedule a conference to discuss a plan to bring their student back up to grade level.

IXL Math is an adaptive learning platform that provides immediate feedback on a student’s math skills. The diagnostic assessment and subsequent lessons help provide families a clearer look at where a student is and what areas they might need additional practice. This is an entirely supplemental program that families can access outside of school via the MCPS subscription. This can be used in addition to all the regular data that families get about their child.

Q: Five years from now, it will be time to request math curriculum proposals again. How should MCPS judge how well they did with Amplify Desmos?

A: Our current MCAP proficiency rates for 3rd-5th grade are just barely at 50%, with Grade 3 at 50.4% proficiency, Grade 4 at 43.1%, and Grade 5 at 40.8% (scores from the 2024-2025 SY). Honestly, if we haven’t improved proficiency to above 65% in all grades 3 and above within 5 years, we all need to be deeply alarmed. We are armed with an incredibly strong curriculum that is well-positioned to improve outcomes for all students. There is no reason that this shouldn’t happen. There are many ways it might not, and that would fall to leadership at the district and school levels.

Adopting new curriculum can have a learning curve, so while there may be some stagnation in the first year, we should expect to see around 5% growth in each grade level each year. This is typical for curricular materials and is around what other districts have seen when implementing Amplify Desmos.

Q: Is there a built-in process for Maryland to assess how the new standards are working out?

A: I assume MSDE plans to use the new MSTAR assessment to measure this. At the state level, this is the right place for them to evaluate the effectiveness of the new standards. At the MCPS level, we should be able to use other assessments like MAP and Desmos benchmark assessments to determine how students are doing with the new standards.

Pop quiz

What information should the Board of Education ask MCPS to report about the new curriculum?

a. What does regular professional development look like for teachers and leaders? How often are teachers meeting with a math specialist specifically focused on Amplify Desmos? How often are leaders discussing math in their leadership meetings?

b. In October of 2026, how many classroom observations will have happened? What percentage of those observations showed implementation with fidelity? What percentage of 3rd through 5th grade teachers have been observed? What % of classrooms showed strong implementation, i.e. were on pace with the pacing guide, were observed using all parts of lesson materials, were observed asking questions from the lesson materials?

c. In December of 2026, how has the percentage of classroom teachers implementing with fidelity improved?

d. By the mid-year assessment administered in early January and reported by the end of January, what percentage of students are demonstrating growth from the beginning-of-year assessment on the mid-year assessment?

e. By the end of the SY, what percentage of students demonstrated growth from the mid-year assessment to the end-of-year assessment and met proficiency on MCAP?

f. All of the above

Answer key

f. All of the above. The plan MCPS presented this spring is a high-level summary of what should happen: things like “continued coaching and professional learning” and “classroom visits.” If the Board were to ask MCPS staff if those things are actually happening, it seems likely the answer would be yes. But how intensive, and how effective, is the coaching and learning? What information is being gathered from how many classroom visits – and what is MCPS doing with that information? The Board should hold MCPS accountable to the public by asking specific questions.

Extra credit

• Ariel Kalil and Derek Rury argue in the NY Times that It’s Becoming Impossible to Know How Your Kid Is Doing in School. You need a subscription for the op-ed but I’ll give you the punchline for free:

“When grades and [standardized] test scores diverge, that gap is information: perhaps the most important information you will receive about your children’s education that year.”

• Curious about what your child is supposed to be learning in math – and other subjects – each quarter? Check out the MCPS refrigerator curriculum (to be updated for 2026-2027).

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it (social media, listserv, group chat, etc.).

What is the proposed change to the rules for publicly posting meeting materials?

To date, MCPS has been supposed to normally release meeting materials to the public online days ahead of Board meetings; the proposed change sets the expectation of simply releasing materials “prior” to meetings, which could mean hours or minutes in advance. This change matters because it would reduce chances for members of the public to contact Board members in advance with questions or concerns, to sign up to testify at the meeting, and to mobilize others.

Section 11 of the Handbook is Board of Education Meetings. Part H of that section is Preparation of Meeting Materials. Here’s the proposed change (see red strike-through):

Source: Board Handbook 2026-27 (Redline) Accessed July 13, 2026

There’s a lot of passive voice going on in this passage, but of course materials don’t prepare and release themselves. The people who prepare and release the materials work for MCPS and the superintendent; they are not Board staff.

So, the old Handbook said that MCPS staff would “normally” make those materials “available online to the public on the Friday prior to business meetings and regular work sessions.” Such meetings and regular work sessions are held on weekdays, and not generally on Fridays, so this means at most a week in advance. The “normally” is doing important work here: I had not been aware of it until reading the redlined Handbook text, and in fact I’d been somewhat annoyed in the past when materials were not made available four business days in advance, as the Board of Education meetings website says below, with no “normally” caveat. The Handbook says Board members get materials first so they can review before meetings, but I have no idea how far in advance that happens. There’s no change proposed there.

Source: https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/boe/meetings/ Accessed 7/13/26.

The Handbook and the website should say the same thing, whatever the thing turns out to be.

Why does it matter if the public sees meeting materials “before” the meeting, vs. the Friday before, vs. four days before?

Two reasons: communicating with Board members, and giving public testimony at the meeting. These matter for individuals, and especially for anyone trying to mobilize a larger group.

You can communicate with a Board member before the meeting. There’s often a closed Board session immediately before the public session, and Board members get a lot of email. So you wouldn’t want to send your email just hours ahead of the meeting.

But if you want to give public testimony, you need to snag one of the 20 slots per meeting, which often means signing up as soon as permitted.

Source: Board of Education Public Participation, https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/boe/community/participation/ Accessed 7/14/26.

The public therefore needs to see MCPS materials in time for these deadlines:

• one week prior to the meeting at six p.m. if you want the best chances of getting a slot,

• three days before the meeting (when sign-up closes), or

• however long it takes you to read the materials and drive to Rockville, to take your chances showing up in person the day of.

If materials are posted just minutes ahead of the meeting, the public is out of options.

Why this proposed change?

I hope we’ll learn more from Thursday’s meeting. There are ten minutes allotted for this on the agenda, but it is lodged between two big issues: the “Previous New Business” of the K-8 Instructional Screen Time Audit and a preview of the countywide elementary boundary study.

Source: BoardDocs (navigate to Business Meeting Agenda for July 16, 2026, then click agenda)

In the BoardDocs agenda above, I’ve circled in pink the attachment with the redlined Handbook. Clicking on that paper icon is how you would find it in advance of the meeting if I didn’t give you the URL, or you didn’t get an email from the MCCPTA flagging the change (I did because I’m an MCCPTA delegate, but they weren’t sent to everyone), or you missed the anonymous post on DC Urban Moms. (I don’t want to quote an anonymous source at length, and I never thought I’d write these words here, but the DCUM post is worth reading.) These BoardDocs attachments are the subject of the change: how far in advance will they be uploaded?

Sometimes, agenda items like approving the new Handbook are introduced by the Board President and there is little to no discussion before they are moved, seconded, and voted upon. There might be no discussion because they are pro forma and not interesting or worth the Board’s time. Or there could be no discussion if they don’t want to publicly discuss the issue. With ten minutes, a Board member who is concerned about what this change – and it is a change, even if a change in formal expectations more than practice, which is why they are bothering to make it – means for public engagement could start a real discussion.

I have my own guesses as to why this change is proposed. I’ve observed the Board members often ask what seem to be first-order questions that MCPS staff should have anticipated and do not have the data prepared to answer. I suppose this could be part of political machinations, where they guess the answer is going to hurt the superintendent’s agenda, and so they don’t prepare the data that would hurt the case. I can’t rule this out, but I’m guessing a less nefarious reason is far more typical: they don’t have time. Or more precisely, they prioritize other tasks above preparing materials for Board meetings – and those other tasks probably involve putting out fires related to running schools.

But why have Board meetings, if the Board doesn’t have the information they need to make decisions?

Is public engagement good?

I personally quite enjoy engaging, and giving others the information they need to engage is a big part of why I write this newsletter. I want to believe in local democracy. I am opposed to this Handbook change.

One pro-engagement anecdote: open lunch. More here, but in brief: MCPS pitched the Policy Management Committee on getting rid of their open lunch policy without making a specific case for it; the committee voted to rescind it with very little information; the public, especially the B-CC HS community, affected students, engaged by e-mailing Board members and testifying; the full Board had an active discussion; and ultimately the policy was not eliminated, clearly going against the superintendent’s wishes. Board members expressed that they wanted more information, and the whole thing felt rushed. My take is that this public engagement likely delayed a longer process that could require the superintendent to introduce a resolution and provide more reasoning and data. As much as I like open lunch, I really like the superintendent to share his reasoning and data.

But it’s not totally straightforward. Here’s a counterpoint anecdote, from June 4, 2026 when the Board asked MCPS athletics director Jeff Sullivan about whether he followed protocol in his consultations with the girls’ gymnastics community before cutting the sport. He explained: “It was very clear from the coaches that they wanted the gymnastics program to stay and we knew that the gymnasts wanted the program to stay. We were doing a data analysis of the program and I will own the fact that we did not go back in that process to the gymnasts and to the gymnastics coaches again and ask through that process.” The Board was glad he “owned it” but still mad. They wanted him to follow the rules, which required another round of listening. And as Board member Rita Montoya explained, “whether it’s gymnastics or something else… it’s not just about finding out whether or not they want the program to continue,” but about the fact that the Board doesn’t have the “lived experience” of the gymnastics community. She’s basically arguing that Sullivan has his data about how much different sports cost and how many students do them, but he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and the only way to find out is through engaging with the gymnastics community. Yet if he had gone back to listen again, it’s likely the gymnastics community would have (rightly) said he listened but it was performative because his mind was already made up – something that likely many people who receive so many survey notifications from MCPS can relate to. In this case, there’s a limited athletic budget, and the fight seemed to be over retaining girls’ gymnastics or adding the new sport of stunt. Many people would be upset either way. It is simply not possible to engage your way to consensus.

So, do we want to bury MCPS in public engagement, requiring them to make a public case for everything when they have so much other pressing work to do? It depends on how much we trust not only the people leading (superintendent) and governing (Board) the system, but the system itself.

Do MoCo voters trust their leaders and the system?

The June primary results for the at-large school board position suggest MoCo voters are short on trust in MCPS and the Board.

Brenda Diaz, a former MCPS teacher who left after violating a mask mandate and now homeschools one of her children, advanced to the general election with 30 percent of the vote.

Source: Maryland State Board of Elections Accessed July 13, 2026.

This is a huge deal. The local Democratic party had just adopted a new policy allowing them to negatively endorse non-partisan school board candidates they deem opposed to their values, and used it for Diaz. Their website says they’ve “asked our volunteers to share this statement with voters during the election, and they may do so proactively even if the voter has not requested information about school board races.” The primary gives anyone other than registered Democrats little incentive to turn out, and three out of 10 voters still chose Diaz. Her opponent in the general election will be Omar Lazo, who was endorsed by the teachers’ union, with its members handing out Apple Ballot endorsements at polling places. I’m guessing many people were voting against the union and “the system” rather than for Diaz or against Lazo, if only because most people have little information about candidates. (In the other June Board race, in District 3, Sally McCarthy won 61,000 votes with the union endorsement, but unlike Lazo, she is an established leader in the countywide PTA.)

Should local public schools be democratic? How?

This post is getting heavier than I’d planned for summer, but here we are. Nationally, this is up for debate. Strong mayors, appointed boards, vouchers, charters – there are lots of widely-used ways for systems to have less democratic or less public local schools than we have in MoCo.

Not all school districts have publicly elected boards. DC, for example, has a strong mayor system. The elected school board is primarily advisory, with limited power; the Mayor, not the Board, appoints the key leaders in the school system; and the DC Council – not the school board – is responsible for oversight. That last one is a big difference, and there was a lot of discussion among County Council and Executive candidates this election about how MCPS needs better oversight. County Council member and former Executive candidate Evan Glass recently called for a County Executive appointee to serve on the school board.

It’s hard to pay attention in Montgomery County in 2026 and not have sympathy for Abundance-type arguments about the possibility of too many checks and balances. But it’s also hard to support reducing those checks and balances when you don’t trust the system. Voters just said they don’t, and that means it’s not time to reduce transparency with the proposed Handbook change.

Pop quiz

Which of the following might you send to your Board member TODAY Wed. 7/15?

a. Please explain why you don’t want MCPS to post materials for the public in advance. I thought you ♥️public engagement?! I’m sorry some of my fellow residents are such a pain, but please, don’t let them spoil it for the rest of us.

b. I support the Handbook change. Everything is going great at my kid’s school and with my property taxes/rent, so I have no reason to question this whole governance setup.

c. I’m opposed to the Handbook change. I elect you to represent me, but how can I share my views with you if I don’t know what’s on the agenda? (And no, the agenda item like “approve 2026-2027 Handbook” is not enough!)

d. Is this Handbook change because you’re afraid of the countywide school closure and consolidation studies? Fair!

Answer key

c. My pick would be some version of c, though I included a for anyone who is still feeling very polite. I doubt anyone would bother sending b. And I didn’t have time to get into d today, but it’s going to be quite a year ahead.

Extra credit

If you care about this change, let the Board know what you think TODAY Wed. 7/15 before they vote on 7/16. The districts for Board members just mean they live in that district, but you vote for all members, and all members represent you. E-mail all members, and the main e-mail address boe@mcpsmd.org: Graciela_Rivera-oven@mcpsmd.org, Brenda_Wolff@mcpsmd.org, Rita_M_Montoya@mcpsmd.org, Karla_Silvestre@mcpsmd.org, Laura_M_Stewart@mcpsmd.org, Julie_Yang@mcpsmd.org, natalie_zimmerman@mcpsmd.org, and welcome to the new student member of the Board Leul.Dawit@mcpsmd.org!

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it (social media, listserv, group chat, etc.).

Graphic courtesy of Wendi Ling.

On June 16, Dr. Taylor replied to their petition, nicely saying they wouldn’t be changing anything. At the Board of Education’s June 25 meeting, four student MCPS journalists testified publicly, as did an attorney from the Student Press Law Center and a program officer from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Dr. Taylor stood by the MCPS memo, saying it “is in relation to prior review, not prior restraint.” Prior review is examining content before it’s published; prior restraint is the subject of the New Voices Act.

I’m happy to introduce hopefully the first of many student journalist guest posters, Ian Chen. Ian is an editor at The Tide of Richard Montgomery and led the countywide coalition of students fighting the policy. He was the primary author of the open letter from MCPS student journalists to MCPS, a comprehensive explainer. For today’s post, I’ve asked him to describe what’s happened since they wrote that letter. I recommend reading the letter for the legal history and more details on prior review and prior restraint.

Given today’s topic, I’ll be clear on who did what in this post: I posed questions for Ian to address in his post, and reviewed his work before publishing to ensure readers could fact-check it themselves. I’m not a lawyer and did not consult legal counsel. Ian also wrote the pop quiz and extra credit. Welcome, Ian! Tell us what happened after the letter.

Four days after the open letter was published, MCPS superintendent Dr. Taylor responded (below) in the comments of the Change.org petition. The prior Friday, an MCPS spokesperson had sent the media brief comments, but did not directly respond to our request for revocation.

Dr. Taylor’s written response to our open letter

In his response (below), Dr. Taylor more or less echoed the spokesperson’s language and tone, but now made his position clear: MCPS would not be revoking the memo.

Source: ​​https://www.change.org/p/stop-mcps-from-censoring-student-journalists-fd94e230-b95c-440d-917b-76596895e941/responses/46915

His primary argument was based on what he called the district’s “fiduciary responsibility to spare the taxpayers by insulating the school system from lawsuits.” According to the spokesperson in a comment sent to Bethesda Magazine, there had been instances “where inappropriate content was printed, but not reviewed first, in school yearbooks and other publications, resulting in substantial disruption to school operations and community hurt.”

The liability in a lawsuit argument was debunked at Thursday’s Board meeting by Jonathan Gaston-Falk, who is an attorney at the Student Press Law Center. “Across all eighteen states with similar scholastic press freedom laws, we are aware of no published court decision imposing liability on a school district for school-sponsored student journalism,” he said in video testimony.

In addition to avoiding “lawsuits and liability,” Dr. Taylor argued that according to the law, it was the district’s “responsibility to review for any [censorable] content.” But nothing in the law mandates a school district to engage in prior review. The New Voices Act limits what can be censored, and does not obligate that school districts preemptively review for such content.

It’s curious that Dr. Taylor agreed with us that the district should be only reviewing for content that falls into the four exceptions under the law—he says “MCPS remains committed to the legal protections under the Maryland New Voices Act, which is codified by MCPS in Regulation JFA-RA”—but he ignored our concerns that the memo allows censorship that strays beyond what is legal. Administrators are instructed to censor journalism that falls into vague categories, including “embarrassing or private moments,” “ridicule of individuals or groups,” and “sarcasm or teasing that could be interpreted as bullying.” This amounts to a blank check for administrators to kill any story that is controversial, even if it is necessary and legitimate journalism.

Dr. Taylor ends by saying: “I get the kids don’t like it and want free reign.” But, “as responsible adults and educational leaders,” it is MCPS’ responsibility to monitor student publications. This is belittling language that completely misses our ask and undermines the professionalism, rigor, and impact of our work. We are not asking for “free reign,”—we completely agree that libel and illegal content have no place in our newspapers—but for the district to follow the law.

What we testified on at the June 25 meeting

I testified first, introducing myself and the coalition. I made it clear that the experts in the broader journalism and press rights community are on our side, listing out our endorsements which include the Society of Professional Journalists, the Journalism Education Association, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (as well as all the candidates for the district three Board of Education seat).

I asked for two things. First, I reiterated the need for the revocation of the memo and a return to the existing MCPS framework. Second, understanding that the Board could not take a vote that very night, simply a date by which they would formally respond to our concerns.

Aditi Iyer, one of two editor-in-chiefs of The Tide, testified right after me. She continued where I had left off, explaining the legal reasoning behind our ask, and also gave an example of the danger of having such vague censorship standards.

Third was Juveria Asad, a staff writer for The Tide. She gave examples of the important journalism the new memo would now be suppressing. For example, an annual school-sponsored event at Walt Whitman High School was exposed by the school newspaper as having a toxic culture of alcohol abuse and sexual harassment. The event was cancelled after the story broke. An article that would embarrass administrators like that could certainly be censored under the “embarrassing or private moments” standard. Perhaps, it wouldn’t even have been attempted because of the fear that arises when you know your work is completely subject to an administrator who has the power to censor anything controversial that you write.

In a pre-recorded video testimony, Jason Makstein, a local journalist and publisher of Moderately MOCO, testified on the mastery and professionalism of the many high school journalists he has worked with.

Dominic Coletti of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a national nonprofit dedicated to defending First Amendment rights, offered his perspective as an expert in student press law.

Attorney Jonathon Gaston-Falk of the Student Press Law Center debunked Dr. Taylor’s argument that prior review is necessary to minimize liability. Across all eighteen states with similar scholastic press freedom laws, the SPLC is aware of no published court decision imposing liability on a school district for school-sponsored student journalism. In fact, he said, the memo creates new risk. MCPS is requiring administrators to become participants in the publication process, which makes them responsible for speech that “Maryland law deliberately places in student hands.” Lastly, he raised the possibility of a lawsuit brought to enforce the Maryland New Voices law. He stated that if we the students choose to do so, the “Student Press Law Center and the broader scholastic journalism community will stand ready to support them.”

What MCPS and the Board said at the June 25 meeting

Dr. Taylor did not revoke the March memo, and the Board ignored our request for a date by which they would formally respond to our concerns.

Dr. Taylor repeated the arguments he laid out in his written response, and once again publicly ignored our concerns that the censorship standards of the memo exceed what is legal. He repeated the argument that “We also do have a responsibility [to engage in prior review]. And that responsibility we are going to follow as adults, and in compliance with the Maryland New Voices Act.” As I’ve previously said, nowhere in the law is prior review mandated as the school district’s “responsibility.”

At the meeting, the Board president Grace Rivera-Oven publicly mentioned that she already had a conversation with Dr. Taylor after the open letter, so it seems that the Board is sided with Dr. Taylor.

Dr. Taylor added that, “Our intent is not to censor your work, not one bit. And I hope that we make that abundantly clear to you over and over again.” Obviously, intent doesn’t matter if censorship is the practical reality. As Juveria noted in her testimony, beyond the censorship inherent to the memo, systematic prior review can chill and suppress the topics we are willing to cover.

Next steps

School is out, but we will not stop fighting this dangerous censorship memo. Press freedom in America has already been in decline, and we cannot afford to lose more ground. For the freedom of the press enshrined in the First Amendment to remain sacred, it must be sacred, respected, and upheld in every single jurisdiction.

Pop quiz

Which of the following best describes the relationship between the New Voices Act and school district policy?

a. Under the law, prior review is mandated to ensure schools are not liable for student speech.

b. The law mandates that all student journalism must be reviewed by an administrator to protect against illegal content.

c. Prior review is not inherently required by law and using it to censor legitimate journalism based on vague standards like “sarcasm” creates legal risk rather than reducing it.

d. Student journalists have “free reign” to publish anything without administrator interference, including libelous or illegal content, but will be held responsible for it under the law.

Answer key

c. The New Voices Act was designed to limit censorship, not mandate a review process. The SPLC is not aware of schools in other states with similar student press freedom laws being held liable for student journalism. Also, by inserting themselves into the review process, administrators may inadvertently assume responsibility for content that the law intended to remain in student hands.

Extra credit (still by Ian)

• Sign our petition and share it with your friends and family, and neighbors.

• Email the school Board expressing your concern, and feel free to use this template (which includes all the relevant email addresses)

• Read the letter from the lawyers at FIRE, which thoroughly explains the legal and technical side of our arguments.

• Listen to our feature on the I Hate Politics podcast

Exit ticket (back to Nora)

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it (social media, listserv, group chat, etc.).

The first request I received to write on ed tech came just after I started this newsletter from Esme, a DCPS fourth grade student. She and her mom wrote:

We are writing to kindly request a blog on Ed Tech. [REDACTED] in particular is so, so unproductive and it makes you dread math! Math is an essential skill, but when it’s being taught wrong, there is no point in it being taught at all.

Esme isn’t the only one with questions about ed tech. At the June 4 MCPS Board of Education meeting, member Julie Yang introduced a resolution to audit student screen time in grades K-8. The Board is scheduled to vote on it July 16; expect public testimony on it at their June 25 meeting.

What is ed tech?

Ed tech includes hardware and software meant to support instruction and learning, generally sold to schools by for-profit vendors. (Tech-free educational materials like textbooks are also sold by for-profit vendors.) The quality of any given product isn’t just determined by its developer, but depends on how it is used. Both sides in this debate acknowledge this nuance as fundamental.

Off the top of my head as a high school parent, MCPS examples include: IXL, Canvas (myMCPS), Delta Math, lots of Google stuff, Chromebooks, and online textbook licenses. MCPS maintains an online digital tools database which is pretty interesting to get a sense of the scope of it (e.g., Office365, a protractor app, encyclopedias–no Delta Math?).

The database refers people to a vetting page where they can submit new tools for review if they can’t find something in there. They are reviewed for how they handle student data privacy.

What do educators think about ed tech?

Given that it depends on how it’s being used, it’s not surprising that it’s all over the map. Results from an Education Week national educator survey released yesterday:

• 62 percent of respondents said ed tech has negative impacts on students’ “social-emotional skills development,” and 55 percent said it has positive effects on “learning and mastering academic content and skills.”

• 36 percent agreed that at their schools, “students’ use of technology for school-related purposes does more to decrease than increase learning;” 29 percent agreed with the opposite statement, that it does more to increase than decrease learning, and 36 percent thought it was equally likely to increase and decrease learning.

So maybe the revolt isn’t surprising.

What is the revolt against ed tech?

Schools Beyond Screens is a national parent-led advocacy group for less ed tech.

Montgomery County Council of PTAs Technology Committee chair Betsy Tao started an MCPS chapter of Schools Beyond Screens this spring; over 900 members joined the Google group its first month. Their policy asks include a revised Board policy, a technology audit, minimal tech use in elementary school, no generative AI for student use, a process for parents to formally opt their kids out of instructional tech use, and a media and AI literacy curriculum.

What does it mean to introduce a resolution?

It means a member introduced a discussion draft at one meeting to get a topic onto the agenda for the next one meeting. (If you’re ever trying to figure out this type of detail, check out the MCPS Board of Education Handbook.) It takes a motion and a second, not a vote, to get it on the next meeting’s agenda.

What happened on June 4?

After Julie Yang read the resolution, Laura Stewart seconded it. The discussion lasted about one minute. Karla Silvestre asked how much staff time it would take MCPS to do the audit, and Dr. Taylor said MCPS would provide that information at the next meeting.

Board President Grace Rivera-Oven then mentioned that MCPS has already started this planning and referenced slide 33 of their Levelling Up In 2026-2027 and Beyond presentation from earlier in the June 4 marathon meeting.

So, MCPS has signaled its interest in next year conducting a survey of screen time use and developing “an action plan with measurable goals,” to be implemented and assessed the following year. Keep an eye out to see if the plan specifies what will happen if the check-in reveals goals aren’t being met.

The resolution before the Board is a bigger ask than what’s on this slide.

What’s in the screen time resolution?

Resolutions have two types of statements: whereas, and resolved. There are usually multiple of each. The whereases are like the objective, “given” part of a math problem – though they actually may be contested interpretations. The author of the resolution chooses the whereases strategically, to support the values statements or recommendations that follow.

WHEREAS, the Board is committed to ensuring everyone in our schools experiences physical and psychological safety within an inclusive and welcoming learning environment, which includes ensuring that children cannot access harmful or inappropriate material using school-issued devices; and

WHEREAS, screentime is defined as students accessing digital media on a school-issued device, including but not limited to computers and tablets, on a one-to-one basis expressly for educational purposes, such as learning, studying, or completing schoolwork; and

WHEREAS, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry states that on average, children ages 8-18 in the United States spend 7 1/2 hours a day watching or using screens; and

WHEREAS, excessive screen use has been linked to increased eye strain, reduced attention spans, sleep disturbances, and negative effects on mental health, particularly in children and adolescents; and

WHEREAS, screen time particularly impacts younger children, for whom screen exposure could replace foundational activities such as play, movement, fine motor building activities, peer interaction, and self-regulation, and

WHEREAS, research indicates that children 8 to 11 years old who exceed screen time recommendations are at higher risk for obesity and depressive symptoms and have scored lower on cognitive assessments; and

WHEREAS, the Board recognizes that technology plays an essential role in modern education, including for remote learning days and digital curriculum components that are delivered exclusively through online platforms;

WHEREAS, while digital tools have an appropriate place in modern education, their use must be balanced with proven traditional methods to best support student achievement and well-being;

After all the whereases, we get to the meat: the resolveds. This resolution has two. The first one is general:

now be it

RESOLVED, that the Board encourages the responsible use of digital devices, reserving screen time for activities where technology offers clear, independent evidence-based instructional advantages;

The second resolved is where the action is.

RESOLVED, that MCPS will conduct a comprehensive review of student screen time and digital tool use, and prepare and deliver to the Board, no later than March, 2027, a report that:

1) Quantifies average daily and weekly screen time for students in elementary and middle school, during the school day, distinguishing between instructional and non-instructional use, and including program-specific caveats and assessments where appropriate;

2) Assesses whether there are opportunities to reduce screen-time exposure in age-appropriate ways;

3) Assesses the effectiveness of content filters and blocks to protect students from using school-issued devices to access harmful or inappropriate content;

4) Provides a recommendation regarding district-wide guidance for age-appropriate screen time; and

5) Outlines the anticipated costs, benefits, and operational impacts of any proposed changes.

Member Karla Silvestre already teed up one way to frame opposition to this resolution: around the resource demands the audit would place on the district in an already highly constrained situation. One counterargument is that the district might more than make up for those resources through savings on future licenses.

Where does technology offer “clear, independent evidence-based instructional advantages?”

Esme, if you’re waiting for the part where I say that the math product I redacted from your email actually has been proven to be expensive garbage, sorry. Your example is interesting, because they’ve done a good job evaluating it and found positive results (though “results” tend to focus on math test scores, not dread).

There are more and less convincing ways to evaluate programs. A randomized control trial is the most convincing. But even then, the issue is that a program doesn’t always look the same in every district, school, or even classroom. Does the teacher even use it at all? Different teachers teaching the same class in the same school in MCPS can use different ed tech. (I don’t know how common this is but I saw it myself when my child’s schedule switched at the semester.) And is the content in the tech the thing each student needs?

The program evaluation results are going to be averages from many classrooms, but there is enormous variability behind them. Scale is a major challenge in education: why does something that worked well in one place not work in others? That’s why whoever is selecting curricular materials, with or without tech, should first consider the existing research evidence, and then keep evaluating results locally after adoption, down to the classroom level. They might be able to suggest adjustments to how it’s being used, or decide it isn’t a fit and to try something else.

How is the resolution asking for more than what MCPS is planning to do anyway?

First, the resolution asks for a comprehensive review, which is more than a survey (see #1 above). Second, numbers 2-5 above go beyond quantifying the screen time, to making a normative recommendation. Anyone opposed to that recommendation, or to laying out the costs and benefits – say, an ed-tech vendor – might oppose the resolution for where it is headed, not for the short-term cost it imposes on the central office in conducting the audit and writing the report.

What happens next procedurally?

The resolution “sits” for public comment before discussion and potential vote at the next Board business meeting. The idea is that when they discuss it further, they will have the resolution as defended by the member who introduced it and obviously supports it and any feedback from the public.

But the public won’t know that the resolution is sitting if they weren’t watching the very end of the June 4 meeting or reading every line of BoardDocs. I did watch the meeting and I do hang out on BoardDocs, and I couldn’t find anything directing the public specifically how to submit a comment on a resolution. This is why people organize.

Pop quiz

Fill in the blank, WHEREAS or RESOLVED:

WHEREAS, it was super hot last week; and

WHEREAS, air conditioning lowers indoor temperatures; and

WHEREAS, air conditioning requires maintenance which costs money [no punctuation clue here]

____________, the Board is committed to ensuring everyone in our schools experiences physical and psychological safety within an inclusive and welcoming learning environment, which includes not passing out from the heat [no punctuation clue here]

RESOLVED, the capital improvement plan must provide resources for school air conditioning maintenance.

Answer key

I’d go with WHEREAS on this. It’s mostly from the strategic plan, which is already done, and it’s not such a leap to say passing out from the heat isn’t physically safe. (The part from the strategic plan may look familiar — it was a WHEREAS on the screentime audit resolution.)

Too bad money doesn’t grow on resolutions.

Extra credit

• Read the Board of Education screen time audit resolution. I asked Tao what interested readers should do, and she suggested emailing all members of the Board individually, as well as the boe@ and boetestimony@ addresses (all @mcpsmd.org). (This is a correction to earlier address.)

• If you want to advocate with the Schools Beyond Screens (SBS) campaign, join their MCPS chapter. If you want to advocate for less regulation on ed-tech, you could start your own campaign — or just free ride on the advocacy vendors are buying.

• The revised MCPS cell phone regulation says high school students can have phones in class, they just can’t use them. That’s hard to enforce. Would this “airplane mode for schools” tech help? How much would it cost?

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it (social media, listserv, group chat – or face to face!).

And yet, I just got my (second) mail-in ballot, and early voting begins June 11. It’s time to talk about voting.

The 2026 election cycle is a big one in Montgomery County politics: the County Executive and all County Council seats are on the ballot, along with more than half the school board seats. Many of these races have crowded fields without incumbents, and the June primaries narrow those fields.

It’s a big ballot. A registered Democrat at my address would have 18 races, a registered Republican 14, and any other voter, only two. Those two are for school board.

Who can vote for whom?

Vote411.org is the League of Women Voters’ non-partisan one-stop shop for election information. If you enter your home address, choose a language, and select a party, it will show you all the primary races you are eligible to vote in. You don’t need to know what district you live in (handy, because the County Council districts and Board of Education districts have different boundaries and numbers), or the rules in the table below.

Why should I bother figuring out who to vote for?

These offices are important. The MCPS Board of Education hires and fires the superintendent, sets policy, and approves the MCPS budget. The County Executive and County Council govern the entire county, and while they can’t directly control MCPS policy or personnel, they do have power over the MCPS and county budgets—oh, and your taxes and property values.

Sometimes every vote actually matters. Marc Elrich, the current County Executive who is term-limited this year, retained his seat in the 2022 Democratic primary by just 32 votes. That race has three front-runners this time around, and it’s anything but settled.

How can I learn more about the candidates?

Vote411.org provides campaign websites, social media accounts, and candidate responses to a few questions. They ask each candidate to answer the same set of questions, including candidate qualifications, and policy questions on housing, budget, safety net, and public safety. The responses to each of these are a few sentences. Anyone on the ballot for any race has the opportunity to provide their information here.

Montgomery Perspective has its own candidate questionnaires posted for at-large County Council, districted County Council, and County Executive, but not for Board of Education. While the League of Women Voters asks each candidate what they would do around specific policy areas, this questionnaire asks each candidate to describe “three things you would like to accomplish.” Together, the two formats provide a more complete picture of candidate positions and priorities. Montgomery Perspective also has candidate biographies that are longer than the League of Women Voters guide. And this gets into the weeds on how the County Executive front-runners have voted as council members.

For County Executive, the I Hate Politics Podcast has interviews with front-runners (alphabetically) Friedson, Glass, and Jawando.

A Google search like “Candidate Name MCPS” still works well. Even if the race isn’t Board of Education, many candidates have voting or advocacy records that show up. (Also: why I don’t bother with the teachers’ union endorsements on the Apple Ballot.)

If I really care about education, do I need to research all the races or just the Board?

Sorry. You need to research the County Council, County Executive, and Board of Education, because they all matter. (See who does what for more.)

Why does MoCo have closed primaries?

That is, why can you only vote in the primary of the party with which you’re registered? 59 percent of MoCo voters are registered Democrats, so that primary is all but certain to deliver the winner of the general election. With three front-runners splitting the vote in this close race, just over one in five county voters could end up choosing the County Executive.

As with many things, MoCo law is the way it is because of Maryland law. And the Maryland law has been resistant to change. Governor Wes Moore recently said on HBO that closed primaries have run their course, but his office quickly walked it back.

Why doesn’t MoCo have ranked choice voting?

I’ve heard Ralph Nader’s name more in the past month than the past few years. People are talking about what can go wrong with plurality voting (what we have, one vote per voter, candidate with most votes wins) with three major candidates. Ranked choice voting can reduce this risk. Our neighbors in DC voted in 2024 to adopt ranked choice voting and are about to have their first primary with it. But again, Montgomery County voters can’t make that choice for themselves, because of Maryland state law.

Why does MoCo have public financing?

Here’s something encouraging democratic participation–the public financing option. The County adopted this after a state law permitted counties to do so. The voter guides above don’t include whether candidates are using it, but this does.

Pop quiz

In the 2022 Democratic primary, incumbent Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich defended his office by a margin of:

a. 2 percent of votes cast

b. 0.2 percent of votes cast

c. 0.02 percent of votes cast

d. 0.002 percent of votes cast

Answer key

c. Elrich received 55,504 of the 145,762 votes cast by Democrats in the 2022 primary, and runner-up David Blair received 55,472. That means Elrich won the primary by 32 votes, or 0.02 percent of votes cast. 36 percent of Democrats voted in that primary, with a hotly contested gubernatorial race and a term-limited outgoing Republican governor.

Extra credit

• Replace one hour of doomscrolling with active research on local candidates. Okay, half an hour!

• Think about those 32 votes when you make your voting plan.

Source and more voting info: https://elections.maryland.gov/elections/2026/vote2026/

• Volunteer for a candidate you support in this home stretch, especially at the polls on Election Day. If you’re torn about which of your preferred candidates most needs your help, it’s whoever isn’t on the Apple Ballot.

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it (social media, listserv, group chat, etc.).

As always, I’m writing here in my personal capacity. I’ll be posting my statement as the Bethesda-Chevy Chase HS cluster representative in my public testimony for the May 21 Board business meeting over on BoardDocs.

Why are we even talking about open lunch? Isn’t the district on fire?

The Board and Dr. Taylor are facing extremely difficult and urgent budget decisions. Nonetheless, MCPS has chosen this month to prompt the Board to introduce last-minute policy changes around open lunch.

Open lunch is highly valued at the schools that have it, for substantive reasons that aren’t obvious, like facilitating academic support and robust clubs. I’m not opposed to an informed discussion of any tradeoffs associated with open lunch. But the process by which MCPS and the Board are going about this change is a clear illustration of a problem far bigger than whatever happens with open lunch: things aren’t set up for the Board to make considered decisions, leaving them to govern on vibes.

What happened at the May 13 Policy Management Committee meeting?

On May 13, MCPS senior staff presented to the Board’s Policy Management Committee about open lunch. Open lunch was not in the committee’s work plan for the year established in the fall. According to committee chair Brenda Wolff, it was a special addition, single-agenda-item meeting because “it became apparent that we had an item that we needed to address sooner rather than later.” Why they needed to address it at all, much less quickly, was never explained.

It was such a strange meeting that I recommend you watch it (only 40 minutes), as it’s hard to fully convey the “what’s really going on here?” vibe. I watch a lot of these meetings, and often the stated topic isn’t the real issue. When there are references to state law or guidance or union contracts, you can look those up and they can help you figure it out. But this meeting was different. They were talking about undoing something already in place, with no precipitating event. It seems that Dr. Taylor feels strongly that no MCPS high schools should have open lunch — otherwise he could handle things through revising the regulation, without needing the Board to change the policy — but it was completely unclear from the discussion why he wants that.

At the meeting, MCPS framed a question for the Board: do you want to weigh in on the merits of the open lunch policy, or do you think open lunch is not within your purview and wish to cede this authority to the superintendent?

For the discussion of the Board’s role, MCPS staff and committee members leaned into the characterization of open lunch as “operational.” No one explained or questioned why open lunch is operational, nor did anyone explain or question why the Board should not be involved in operational things. But as the committee batted around possible “considerations” around the policy, the thing that seemed to stick was that the Board should let the superintendent take care of operations.

The content of the Board’s policy under discussion is literally one sentence long:

“Students are required to remain on campus at lunch time unless a high school has already implemented an open lunch at the date of adoption of this policy or adopts an open lunch policy in accordance with Montgomery County Public Schools regulation.”

This is not micro-managing. The details are handled in the MCPS regulation describing how schools can switch their open or closed lunch programs.

Should the Board involve itself with open lunch?

Maryland law says boards set educational policies. I don’t see Maryland law making any distinction about “operational” matters. The MCPS Board of Education Handbook lists “formulating and interpreting policies” as one of the Board’s “primary responsibilities.” It doesn’t qualify the types of policies. Nonetheless, from the May 13 meeting it’s clear that MCPS and the Board have some understanding about the Board staying out of operational policies.

Even so, in this case, operations matter for education. B-CC and higher-enrollment high schools with open lunch often have small cafeterias and limited capacity to serve meals relative to enrollment. Some of these schools, including B-CC, have a single common hour-long lunch period. Lunch hour is a time for students to get extra help from teachers, for students with legally required accommodations to receive extended time on assessments, and for clubs to meet. All of these things can happen because all students and teachers have the same lunch period; after school is not an easy substitute for lunch for students who have jobs or caregiving responsibilities after school, student athletes, or those who ride the school bus. And the benefits of the common lunch period are possible because lunch is open, reducing crowding in the school’s limited physical space and time spent waiting in line for school meals.

All this means that if schools have to set up multiple periods of lunch to accommodate demand on a closed campus, they lose important educational benefits. Lunch isn’t just “operational.”

We’re then left with the question of whether the Board wishes to cede their authority to the superintendent on education policy. The Board does not have a ton of power, given many constraints beyond their control. Much of the power they do have involves setting educational policy. If they aren’t going to use it, why are they there?

Should the County Council involve itself with open lunch?

The Council’s role with MCPS is budgetary, not policy. But there are financial costs associated with closing lunch – for example, MCPS loses money on each lunch they sell – and such costs have not been included in the MCPS budget request. Costs to student well-being, school climate, and academic progress are probably more important, but the only costs that County Council can weigh in on are the budgetary ones.

What about the merits of closing lunch?

Let’s say the Board wants to retain its authority over this educational issue. What should they consider as they research any possible amendments? Here are some “considerations” presented by MCPS.

This single slide was the entirety of MCPS’ presentation to the Board on the substance of the open lunch policy. No data. There was a discussion of the intuition of how open lunch might relate to these issues, with no reference to data or research, or the practical details and costs of changing the policy. The Board should want answers, with dollar amounts where relevant, before they vote.

My concern here isn’t just the missing evidence. If closing lunch becomes a claimed win on important issues like safety or equity, it relieves pressure to address those problems through more targeted approaches.

What’s next for open lunch?

At the conclusion of their presentation on May 13, MCPS staff framed the following options to the committee members: modify, suspend, rescind, or other. Maintaining the status quo would fall under other.

The Policy Management Committee voted 3-1 to rescind the policy, with members Brenda Wolff, Natalie Zimmerman, and student member of the Board Anuva Maloo in the majority. Member Julie Yang asked basic questions about the motivation and how it would work, got no answers, and absent such fundamental information, cast the lone dissenting vote. The full Board will discuss and potentially vote on rescission—meaning, eliminating the policy, and transferring discretion over open lunch from principals and student governments to the superintendent—on Thursday May 21.

If the Board chooses not to rescind the policy but still wants to think about modifying it, they could ask next year’s Policy Management Committee to include it in their work plan. If they rescind the policy, they will have permanently ceded their authority on this issue–and sent a signal to Dr. Taylor that they may be willing to willingly silence themselves on other issues.

Does it matter that the policy is old?

It wasn’t one of the “considerations” on the slide, but MCPS staff and committee members pointed to the age of the policy, which was established in 1978 and amended in 1995, as a reason for its review. I support thoughtfully reviewing old rules and policies. It all builds up and leads to a bunch of restrictions that may no longer have a good reason to exist but limit how MCPS can best serve kids anyway.

The argument for urgency is completely at odds with the notion of thoughtful review. If the policy is old enough to deserve scrutiny, it’s old enough to deserve a real process — one that includes the public, examines costs and benefits, and considers modification rather than elimination.

Just because something is old doesn’t make it bad, and I’m not just saying this because I’m older than this policy. Our country and our county are both turning 250. Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School is preparing to celebrate its 100th anniversary. And the Maryland law establishing county school boards dates back to 1916.

Pop quiz

If you are showing up in the audience at a Board meeting on an issue you care about, you should bring:

a. snacks and water

b. your friends

c. a handle-free sign, no larger than 8.5 x 11”

d. all of the above

Answer key

d. Board meetings are long. For this one, public testimony is from 4:15-5:15, and the open lunch policy (JEF) is scheduled for Board tentative action from 7:05-7:25. You’ll want snacks and water to carry you through. It is useful for the Board to see their constituents watching them take action, so bring your friends. If you want the Board to know what you want, make a sign and sit in the front row for the cameras.

Extra credit

• Read Robert Pondiscio’s Why is Education So Damn Fad-Prone? Here’s one of his four explanations:

“Leadership legitimacy requires visible change. School systems churn through leaders with striking regularity. Superintendents, principals, and state chiefs shouldn’t buy green bananas. The onus is on each new leader to demonstrate that he or she is, in fact, leading. Many will come to the unfortunate conclusion that leadership is signaled not through stewardship, but through action: launching initiatives, unveiling strategic plans, introducing new frameworks, reorganizing priorities.”

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it (social media, listserv, group chat, etc.).

[If you’re curious about the budget situation I described last time, it’s still a nail biter.]

What’s the Apple Ballot?

The Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) is the local teachers’ union, and for every election, they consider candidate responses to their questionnaire, interview candidates, and choose whom to endorse. They release their endorsements on the “Apple Ballot.”

Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples and Pears. ca. 1891-92.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960

Why are teachers’ union endorsements important?

“Board of Education candidates just can’t win in MoCo without the Apple Ballot endorsement.” People say this all the time. It isn’t always true, but it doesn’t feel like a reach when the MCEA itself calls the Apple Ballot “successful.” Beyond MCPS, research finds teachers’ union endorsements matter – a lot – in determining the outcomes of school board elections.

Part of why the Apple Ballot matters is a resource story. Consider its reach:

• MCEA mobilizes volunteers to hand out physical sample ballots indicating who is endorsed at polling sites.

• MCEA can communicate its recommendations even more strongly to its own large membership. MCEA has over 14,000 members; in the 2022 primary, about 140,000 votes were cast for Board of Education.

• In the 2024 election, the Maryland state teachers’ union gave $134,995 to a PAC supporting Apple Ballot candidates in Montgomery County. That’s more than the sum of individual contributions to all Board of Education candidates who ran.

But there’s more to it. The endorsement sends a signal to voters. I know and respect people who care about public education and use the Apple Ballot as a shortcut for how a candidate will govern – in both directions. Some vote the Apple Ballot because they interpret the endorsement as a signal that candidates will be good for students. Others use the Apple Ballot to know who not to vote for, because they interpret the endorsement as a signal that candidates will prioritize keeping the union happy over what’s best for students.

How does MCEA decide whom to endorse?

The MCEA does their own research, but unfortunately they don’t share any of it with the public in a way that could help you judge for yourself.

Source: MCEA.

What’s on the candidate questionnaire?

There are two questionnaires, one for Board of Education and one for County Council.

I’d be interested in candidate answers to most of these questions, though many of them are quite leading and probably yield a bunch of similar answers. For example, see bolded #18 about loyalty to the Apple Ballot. (It also appears on the County Council questionnaire.)

I asked Claude to answer the Apple Ballot loyalty question in a way likely to please MCEA. Here’s what he gave me:

“Yes. I respect the Apple Ballot process and the trust the community places in MCEA’s judgment about who will best represent educators and students. I will not undermine that by endorsing candidates who haven’t earned that trust.”

I then asked him for an answer unlikely to get the endorsement, and he wrote this:

“I can’t make that commitment in advance. I’ll vote my own judgment about who will serve students well. If that occasionally differs from MCEA’s judgment, I think voters are better served by my honesty about that than by a pledge I might not be able to keep.”

However much I might prefer to have board members who vote their own judgment once elected, I also want board members who are strategic enough to get elected, so I don’t hold it against candidates who answer… strategically. But still, this question (which seems new this year) gives me the ick.

What information does the MCEA share with the public about their endorsements?

A list of names and offices and the blank questionnaires. That’s it. MCEA does not release the completed questionnaires. This leaves voters to infer that the MCEA endorses candidates who share MCEA’s positions. The questions alone, even without any answers, are one source of information on MCEA’s priorities. Let’s turn to some other sources on their website.

What are the 3 B’s?

MCEA says 2026 is all about the B’s: bargaining, budget, and ballots. It’s a very big year for MCEA and the county on these fronts.

• Bargaining doesn’t happen every year–the current contract is for 2023-2027, and negotiations for the next one must start at least nine months before it expires June 30, 2027.

• The operating budget is an annual process but is more of (or just more visibly?) a nightmare than usual this year (rapidly changing story, but here’s a recent update).

• Board of Education seats are up for election in staggered four-year terms, always in even years. All County Council seats are open every four years, including 2026, and three incumbents are stepping down as members to run for County Executive, making races especially competitive. The County Executive term is also four years, and there’s no incumbent due to term limits.

The three B’s are deeply intertwined.

• Ballots matter for bargaining, because the elected Board of Education must sign the contract, and what they are willing to sign may affect whether they get endorsed when they run for re-election. If the interests of the public diverge from the interests of the union, this would put electeds in a bind.

• Bargaining matters for budget, because the terms of the collectively bargained contract drive the amount in the MCPS operating budget request (more in my post on why the County Council is facing such bad budget options). And the budget could matter for future bargaining – or even revisiting past agreements.

• Will the budget matter at the ballot box? The MCPS budget affects not just its own spend (which most visibly translates to staffing), but also the whole County budget, including spending on other public services, taxes, and how soon structural deficits will strike. Some of these things are more salient to voters, and some are more salient to the union. This year, there’s very little time for voters to forget the budget (and which electeds voted for what) before the June primaries. Organizations who make endorsements in the future will have no trouble remembering.

MCEA also posts some local advocacy priorities. The four currently listed local priorities all involve state legislative advocacy. One of these was to allow counties to charge different residential and commercial property tax rates, presumably to make it politically feasible to collect more property tax revenue. It didn’t make it through the legislative session. The remaining three priorities asked state legislators to make rules applying only to MCPS:

• to pay Board of Education members the same salaries as state delegates (which I explained my support for earlier, and did not become law);

• to set special local food procurement reporting requirements for MCPS, with increasing targets over time (status as of publication: this had passed the legislature but hadn’t been signed by the governor); and

• to allow MCPS (only, not other Maryland school districts) to avoid the requirement of at least 180 instructional days of school (this didn’t become law; see my calendar post).

Why did the MCEA want the potential for fewer days of school in the year? To prioritize the interests of its members. The public’s interests are far broader and often in conflict: enhancing the student experience, strengthening democracy and the future workforce, minimizing income and property tax payments, maintaining the County’s creditworthiness, and ensuring quality provision of public services beyond education.

Does the Apple Ballot help or hurt?

I’ve been voting in Montgomery County for a decade. I do my own candidate research, and I’ve supported candidates with and without the MCEA endorsement. I choose based on whatever signal I can derive about their competence and values, looking to their records over their messaging. Over time, the Apple Ballot hasn’t reliably predicted who I think is the best pick for a given position, but it also hasn’t reliably predicted who I think is worst. For my own vote, the Apple Ballot is irrelevant.

The MCEA’s Apple Ballot should represent the interests of its members. The unreleased questionnaire answers and the loyalty oath are clearly part of their strategy for doing so, which prompts some questions.

Do voters understand MCEA’s interests and candidates’ positions? And do they have access to other signals they trust about candidates? While other organizations make endorsements, none rival the Apple Ballot in their reach, especially since The Washington Post no longer makes endorsements.

Pop quiz

If you were intrigued by MCEA’s support for state legislation on how MCPS (only) procures local food, here’s a chance to dig in. Here’s the bill and the fiscal and policy note.

​​How much would this law cost MCPS?

a. One full-time staff position to oversee (no dollar estimate provided)

b. One-time contractual services to establish tracking system (no dollar estimate provided)

c. Unspecified increased costs from increased purchasing from certified vendors

d. All of the above, and state funds may appear to offset some of these

e. All of the above, conditional on state funds provided to fully offset these

Answer key

d. See page 3 of the fiscal and policy note under Local Expenditures. One full-time position in MCPS probably sounded like a lighter lift back when MCEA posted these priorities than it does this week.

Extra credit

• Adam Pagnucco speculated on the origins of the Apple Ballot loyalty oath question this fall at Montgomery Perspectives.

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it (social media, listserv, group chat, etc.).

While MCPS needs the County Council to approve their budget, that approval comes at the end of a long process the Council doesn’t control. Most of the MCPS budget is determined by collective bargaining and the staffing model — two processes in which the County Executive and Council have no say. Now the Council risks being called anti-teacher, anti-union, and anti-kid if they vote against the budget those processes produced. But voting for the fully requested MCPS budget would mean raising taxes, and elections are June 23. Three Council members are running for County Executive, and five others are defending their seats.

For more background, including explanation of the table below, see my earlier posts on who does what in MoCo education and how the operating budget process works.

Why is most of the budget not discussed in the budget process?

Nearly nine of every ten dollars in the MCPS operating budget goes to spending on staff salaries and benefits. The district’s staffing model determines the amount of staffing, by type of position, based on enrollment. Staff salaries and benefits are determined in collective bargaining, which is totally separate from the budget process. The whole discussion, as framed by MCPS staff, takes prices and quantities of staff, and therefore the vast majority of the operating budget, as fixed.

Much of the extensive public engagement in the Board of Education’s budget process is then about the sliver of the budget that is independent of the staffing model and contract terms because, as Dr. Taylor repeatedly emphasized, most of the budget is “required non-discretionary spending.” This logic leans heavily on short-run thinking, to view the prices and quantities as outside of MCPS’s immediate discretion. This was a particularly tough assumption to swallow this year, as MCPS changed the staffing model during the operating budget process. (Due to falling enrollment, they still requested fewer staff positions than this year, but the decline in requested staffing was smaller than it would have been due to the more generous new staffing model.)

In practice, the majority of the increase in MCPS’s requested budget is due to previously promised compensation increases. The County Council’s staff report finds the MCPS requested budget is based on pay increases for MCPS employees ranging from 3.25 to 8.75%, totaling $133.8 million of the $192.3 million requested increase. MCPS appoints the lead negotiator in collective bargaining and the Board votes to approve the contract without knowing how much the County Council ultimately will appropriate to fund it. Years ago, the Board of Education promised particular salaries and benefits – the current MCEA contract covers 2023-2027 – so it’s no surprise that they’re now asking the Council for the money to pay for them.

Is the County Council absolved?

The County Council didn’t have a say in setting compensation levels for MCPS employees, and they’re the ones who now must balance the anti-school/tax hike optics. It feels kind of unfair. But this is a repeated game.

Legally and politically, it’s extremely hard for the County to do anything other than keep increasing the MCPS budget, even as enrollment falls. While the $192 million incremental increase in this year’s ask is due mainly to negotiated compensation increases, the overall ask of $3.8 billion is the accumulation of years of budgets that the County has approved. (To be clear: MCPS needs a large budget to run schools for 155,000 students. But practically speaking, the total spending in any given year is based primarily on last year’s budget and the contracts.)

The County’s short-term incentive, unfortunately, is to go look for money under the couch cushions—like in forgone contributions to retiree benefits funds—to minimize the political pain. But this is not a long-term plan, and makes next year’s process worse. Plus, the MCEA contract is almost up. Will the County Council’s choices on budget now affect what gets negotiated in the next contract?

Pop quiz

True/false/uncertain, explain: The County Council now faces a bunch of budget options they hate because they have no say over MCPS collective bargaining, policy, or personnel.

Credit depends entirely on explanation.

Answer key

Full credit is possible beginning with true, false, or uncertain.

It’s true that the County Council has no say over MCPS collective bargaining, policy, or personnel. However, had they spent less on MCPS in prior budgets, they would have had a lower starting point in this cycle.

Extra credit

• Read the staff report to County Council on County Executive Marc Elrich’s FY2027 Operating Budget, which highlights the likelihood of a structural deficit by FY2028 and estimates the property tax impacts below.

• Check out highlights below from the April 26 County Executive candidate forum at the Leland Center in Chevy Chase, moderated by Lyric Winik. Candidates mostly stuck to their education talking points (as summarized at a prior forum). Winik structured the forum around questions submitted in advance by residents. Watch candidates weigh on education questions.

  • Question on progressivism and county government structure.

  • Question on BOE supervision of MCPS and its spending, and what the oversight role of the county executive should be.

  • Lightning rounds: candidates each have a card with only two sides, yes or no, and a single “pass” per round. Sometimes candidates held the yes/no card sideways. But no one was allowed to speak and explain their “it depends” reasoning.

    • “Is the MCPS budget too big? Yes or no.” [Yes: Bannerjee, Friedson, James; No: Glass, Jawando]

    • “Do you support putting police school resource officers in county high schools if the principal wants and requests an SRO?” ” [Yes: Bannerjee, Friedson, Glass; No: James, Jawando]

• Follow Adam Pagnucco at Montgomery Perspective for real-time updates on the County operating budget.

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it (social media, listserv, group chat, etc.).

MCPS provides information about the candidates, including written responses and a video candidate forum. The forum is polished and high-production value–and doesn’t really get into it. It’s political. They’ll watch it at school before they vote.

For more substance, I recommend the hard-hitting interviews from Rockville HS 9th grader Tula Dasgupta with candidates Leul Dawit and Reemey Ghermay on the I Hate Politics Podcast.

Depending on your teenager(s), you could all listen together, then engage in a robust discussion of the candidates, the issues, democracy, and the importance of independent local journalism. Or you could text them the I Hate Politics links and some emojis, listen on your own, and never speak of it again.

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections, including from students. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it (social media, listserv, group chat, etc.).

The D.C. Policy Center is an independent, nonpartisan research organization focused specifically on DC policy; Montgomery County has no comparable independent body. To see why this matters, compare the Education Policy Initiative’s 2024-25 State of D.C. Schools report, which presents accomplishments and areas for growth, with the 2024-25 MCPS Annual Report, which frames its reporting around progress, with far less discussion of remaining challenges. When the D.C. Policy Center is writing about the state of the schools, they are shining a light for the public, without needing to defend their own actions or jobs. This is not true for the Superintendent or Board of Education. Thank you, Chelsea, for using your independent voice to explain how DC works.

Governance in public education in DC does not follow the structure seen in most states in four key ways: it combines state, local, and district functions; operates two publicly-funded systems; has mayoral control; and funds education through general funds, not property taxes.

1. DC is a jurisdiction that combines state, local, and district level education functions.

DC is technically a district, not a state—but its government fulfills many state-level functions including setting education policy, managing federal programs, and overseeing statewide standards. The city also operates its own local school system, District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), and has oversight of public charter schools. The result is a single jurisdiction that handles responsibilities most places divide across multiple levels of government.

2. Two publicly-funded school systems— traditional and charter—operate side by side at comparable scale.

A little more than half of students attend DCPS, the traditional public school system, while just under half attend public charter schools operated by independent nonprofit organizations. Charter schools are authorized and overseen by the DC Public Charter School Board (DC PCSB), not by DCPS, creating separate lines of accountability within the same public education system.

DC PCSB is 7-member volunteer body appointed by the mayor, responsible for approving new public charter schools, monitoring public charter schools while in operation, and closing low-performing public charter schools. DC PCSB oversees 66 Local Education Agencies (LEAs) as of school year 2025-26. The LEAs are nonprofit organizations that collectively run 133 public charter schools, and are held accountable directly by their own boards. This arrangement makes DC one of the few jurisdictions in the country where two publicly funded systems operate side by side at comparable scale.

3. The Mayor controls education, with oversight from DC Council.

Since the Public Education Reform Act of 2007, the Mayor appoints key education leaders, including the Chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), the State Superintendent of Education, the Deputy Mayor for Education, and members of the DC Public Charter School Board.

Mayoral Control Structure in DC

Source: DC Kids and Schools (https://dckidsandschools.org/our-work/). Used with permission.

Via the Deputy Mayor for Education, the mayor’s team oversees DCPS and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE).

DCPS Central Office manages and provides services to DC’s traditional public schools. It creates district policy, determines school budgets, manages hiring and other human resources functions, and provides other operational services like procurement and financial administration.

OSSE is DC’s state education agency; its functions matter for all public schools in DC, including traditional public schools in DCPS, and public charter schools. OSSE oversees federal education programs, manages statewide assessments and data collection, provides school transportation to students with identified special education needs, and supports other initiatives such as early learning and Career and Technical Education (CTE).

Traditional school districts have boards that legislate, within the confines of state and federal law. DC legislates education at the city level, within the confines of “state” oversight by OSSE, federal laws and rules that apply nationally, and DC-specific federal rules (federal approval of budgets and legislation).

The DC State Board of Education (DC SBOE) is a 9-member elected body with one member from each of DC’s 8 wards and one at-large member. Its role is primarily advisory and regulatory, not managerial. DC SBOE advises OSSE on state standards, state policies, state objectives, and state regulations, and is responsible for approving state-level policies such as state academic standards, high school graduation requirements, and the state accountability plan.

DC Council, a 13-member body with one elected official from each of DC’s 8 wards and 5 at-large members, provides oversight of education—and other government functions—in DC This falls under the Council’s Committee of the Whole, chaired by the Chairman of the DC Council and inclusive of all 13 members. Oversight occurs formally every spring with hearings for each education agency, and other public roundtables occur throughout the year. In addition to authorizing the budget, DC Council passes legislation that impacts education, for example limiting out-of-school suspensions and creating a preference in the common lottery for students who are at-risk.

Without a traditional school board, most aspects of education are legislated at the city level. DC’s home rule status also shapes education in a unique way because the city has local control but Congressional oversight. That creates a system where decisions are made locally, but with federal approval, usually through a 30-day passive process and other requirements such as a multi-year balanced financial plan.

4. DC schools are funded through general funds, per pupil.

Unlike most jurisdictions, school funding in DC follows the same process as other city functions — mostly through general funds. General funds are comprised of all DC’s revenue sources, with 88 percent from local funds (property, individual income, sales taxes, lottery revenue, and other sources), 6 percent from dedicated taxes, and 6 percent from special purpose revenue in the Fiscal Year 2026 budget.

Most school money flows through the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula (UPSFF), following students to their schools through weights (by grade band; individual student populations such as English learner, student with disability, or academically at-risk; and school characteristics such as high concentration of at-risk students). Public charter schools receive a per-pupil facilities allotment, and DCPS receives resources for facilities and capital projects through a separate funding stream.

For DC’s budget formulation, the Mayor initiates the appropriations process for all spending, including education and any change to the base level of the UPSFF, and DC Council authorizes the budget. Formal public engagement in DC’s budget process begins with Mayor’s Budget Engagement Forums, which are citywide meetings for the public to share their perspectives on the budget. Further public engagement primarily takes place after the Mayor’s proposed budget is released, through agency performance and budget hearings, public roundtables, and committee mark-ups. In a typical year, the Mayor releases the proposed budget in late March or early April, Council budget hearings take place in April and May, committee mark-ups take place in May, a Council vote occurs in June, and the budget is submitted to the President and Congress in June or July. This DC government budget cycle precedes school budget cycles, in which local educational agencies (DCPS and public charter schools) don’t know for sure what they are getting until June—just a few months ahead of the next school year.

Influencing funding levels, the Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU) represents over 5,000 DCPS teachers and negotiates their contracts with DCPS and their Labor Management and Employee Relations team, with the most recent contract extending five years. Advocacy groups, including Ward Educational Councils and a wide array of nonprofit organizations, provide additional avenues for community members to engage.

A small share of funding comes from the federal government and other sources. DCPS, for example, receives an estimated 4 percent of funding from the federal government. Federal funding for schools includes typical federal grants (Title I, Title II, Title III, Medicaid for IEP services with a higher match rate than the formula), as well as some federal funding that is specific to DC, such as “tri-sector” SOAR Act funds to support DCPS, public charter schools, and vouchers to attend private schools. And funding intermediaries like the DC Public Education Fund and Education Forward DC provide important resources outside of local and federal dollars.

Summary

These governance features concentrate education authority at the city level with the Mayor, while distributing responsibility across multiple actors and sectors. Knowing who is responsible for what is essential for engaging effectively in decisions about policy, funding, and accountability.

Pop quiz

What makes public education in DC different from most states?
a. It is under mayoral control
b. It has no public charter schools
c. The federal government runs DCPS
d. All of the above

Answer key

a is correct: public education in DC is under mayoral control. This is true in some other cities, but not in entire states. b is false: just under half of public school students in DC are enrolled in charter schools (this is far more than other states). c is also false: while Congress treats DC differently than other states and districts in a few high-profile ways (budget and legislation approval), it does not run DCPS: the Chancellor, appointed by the Deputy Mayor for Education, appointed by the elected Mayor, does.

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it, however you share (social media, listserv, group chat, etc.).

These facilities processes are substantial, diverting time and attention from what’s going on inside schools, yet still seems to erode public trust. But boundary changes may need to accelerate as enrollment shrinks, and MCPS will face even harder choices around school closures or consolidations. Will a new vendor help?

What’s up with the new vendor?

MCPS has signed a $1.5 million contract with Rockville start-up WIN-WIN AI. Their website describes the company’s premier product, No Losers Mapping, as “delivering AI-powered automatic, systematic, hydromatic, geographic, demographic infrastructure solutions. No Losers Mapping leaves all your stakeholders feeling seen, heard, and happy with their new home schools. We’ve been helping school board members get a good night’s sleep since 2025.”

April Fool’s! WIN-WIN AI is not real. The rest of this post, including FLO Analytics, is.

What’s the boundary change policy?

The Board sets policy (broad direction), and MCPS regulates (specific direction) and implements.

The MCPS Board of Education’s Educational Facilities Planning Policy FAA was last amended on September 25, 2025 and is 9 pages long. MCPS regulated that policy in Regulation FAA-RA, last updated on October 8, 2025 at 22 pages.

The most recent update to Board policy introduced a new Facilities Conditions Index (FCI), and replaced old language about Key Facilities Indicators with the FCI. The FCI is based on a narrower set of indicators about the building’s primary systems, including roofs, walls, windows, and HVAC. This conforms with the reasoning Dr. Taylor laid out when launching the Capital Improvement Plan this fall: rather than patching things here and there, his strategy is to invest in big projects with longevity.

Regulation FAA-RA lays out the guidelines for stakeholder engagement around decisions including boundary changes and school closures or consolidations. It specifies a lot about how MCPS must try to engage the public (such as through surveys or public meetings), but doesn’t include anything about how successful they must be (like what type of participation or response rates these attempts yield).

MCPS keeps saying how there were many opportunities to engage around the Wootton decision, and the community keeps saying they didn’t see it coming: both can be true.

The policy and regulation set out four factors to be considered, summarized in the table below from the Nov. 4, 2025 Board of Education meeting.

What does the process look like in practice?

The process is so detailed that it’s hard to summarize. The superintendent’s website for Wootton relocation and Damascus expansion includes a 24-page process report going back to 2005, an 18-page recommendation, maps, articulation patterns, and data tables. MCPS shows with exhaustive detail how the process and decision conform to policy.

Here’s a tidbit from the process report that caught my eye:

“This resolution also included hiring a consultant to support Montgomery County Public Schools staff with the boundary study process. On September 9, 2024, a request for proposals was issued, with a deadline of October 31, 2024. The initial solicitation did not result in any proposals being submitted, and the timeline was subsequently extended. Following the extension, MCPS received one proposal. A review committee reviewed the proposal in accordance with Montgomery County Public Schools’ standard procurement procedures. On December 5, 2024, following successful contract negotiations, the Board of Education approved the contract with FLO Analytics.”

That seems weird, right?

The base contract amount was $1,120,683, with authority to spend up to $1,300,000. MCPS had revised its initial scope of work to expand community engagement.

Do boundaries really have to change?

Yes. There’s no way around it: enrollment changes and facilities depreciate, and these things don’t happen uniformly across the county’s 500 square miles. If you’re going to have residentially-based school assignment—that’s a really important “if” with lots of national discussion—boundaries will sometimes need to respond to those changes.

How is enrollment changing?

Enrollment is now declining in MCPS: from its 2019 peak, it is predicted to fall by 9 percent, or over 15,000 students, by 2031. Some of this is a national story about birth rates. Also, immigration is down, and homeschooling is up. Meanwhile, high-income school districts nationally are experiencing disproportionately greater enrollment decline post-COVID: there aren’t just fewer school-aged kids, but fewer of them are enrolled in public schools, as families who can leave public systems are doing so.

Since enrollment is declining, why don’t we just have smaller schools?

We could have smaller schools, but they would have higher per-pupil costs. How much higher would depend on operational costs and staffing models. For an extreme case, read about small public high schools in Chicago, some with per pupil costs double or triple the district’s average, despite limited offerings–and the “lack of political courage” to discuss closures.

What’s best practice for boundary changes and school closures?

Few districts are lauded for how they handle these processes–unsurprisingly, given that attendance zones feel zero-sum. Experts recommend that districts have plenty of time for engagement (though this can be in the eye of the beholder), and that they share clear criteria for decisions and related data in advance.

Just how clear could criteria be in advance, in a way that makes sense to apply to all boundary studies? MCPS Regulation FAA-RA specifies criteria but doesn’t fully operationalize or put numeric weights on the four policy factors: student demographics (to promote diversity within schools), geography, stability of school assignments over time, and facility utilization. This preserves flexibility for MCPS to incorporate other factors as they affect specific cases, but leaves lots of room for communities to feel wronged.

Is this policy and process working for MCPS?

I haven’t followed the Wootton and Woodward plans that just concluded enough to have an opinion about the outcomes, but the processes seem to hurt trust and take up a lot of time.

First, trust. When you ask for so much feedback, you inevitably can’t act on all of it–and that’s awkward. MCPS takes care to point out how they adjust plans based on community and Board feedback. They’ve also been clear that voice is not a vote (below from slides presented at the March 3, 2026 work session).

This slide surprised me. In the work session, Adnan Mamoom, Chief of District Operations, somehow managed to present it in an entirely professional manner.

Next, time. Who knows how many days or what share of Board, MCPS leadership, or advocacy time was spent on boundaries (which are tied up with the capital budget and academic programs) this year, but it was a lot. If people weren’t organizing and contacting their Board members about boundaries, might they be advocating on other educational issues? If we keep doing boundary changes the same way, will we ever have enough energy for real “stakeholder engagement” on anything besides boundary changes?

I don’t have a great feasible alternative. My dream would be something like the Base Realignment and Closure process, but I’m not optimistic that we have the trust needed to enter into such an agreement.

Ready or not, more is coming: at the March 26 meeting, the Board approved this Scope for School Consolidations and Closures Study for Elementary and Middle Schools and Countywide Elementary and Middle School Boundary Study. This year might look relaxing in hindsight.

Pop quiz

MCPS could improve its stakeholder engagement strategy for future boundary changes by:

a. Providing complete details about how the decision would be made

b. Contacting families about everything else less often so they might actually read some communications

c. Figuring out why only one contractor submitted a proposal and addressing that issue

d. b and c

e. All of the above

f. None of the above - it followed policy and that’s all that matters

Answer key

d. I support b, less frequent comms from MCPS, much of which seems like marketing rather than anything actionable. I also like c, and want to learn why only one contractor wanted this job (and only with an extension): is the job specified in an untenable way or with inadequate compensation, or did they not publicize it? But I’m not sure about option a: what complete contract could MCPS write about the various policy factors that wouldn’t lead to some dumb required decisions in the future?

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it, however you share (social media, listserv, group chat, etc.).

“The Eureka Day School in Berkeley, California, is a bastion of progressive ideals: representation, acceptance, social justice. In weekly meetings Eureka Day’s five board members develop and update policy to preserve this culture of inclusivity, reaching decisions only by consensus. But when a mumps outbreak threatens the Eureka community, facts become subjective and every solution divisive, leaving the school’s leadership to confront the central question of our time: How do you build consensus when no one can agree on truth?” -Theater J

Eureka Day won a Tony for Best Revival in 2025 and is the fourth most produced play in the US this season.

I loved the play, the cast, and the production in Theater J’s intimate setting. So did my husband, mother, and 13, 16, and 19 year-olds. It’s hilarious. For the Broadway production, they had to rewrite a scene to be less funny because the audience was laughing so hard no one could hear dialog or cues. If you’ve ever been a part of a progressive private school, a community that can’t shut up about its sense of community, a non-profit board, or a big Zoom with an open chat, you’ll feel seen.

The play is also serious. No spoilers–see it yourself.

Eureka Day is in many ways–process, communications, scale, revenue streams, preciousness–the opposite of MCPS. But I’ll be thinking about it while I watch MCPS politics unfold, because it left me with the hope that most people are trying to do the right thing. Even when I can’t imagine why they think what they think, they probably have their reasons. Tickets here.

Who makes the MCPS calendar?

The superintendent makes and recommends the calendar to the Board of Education, who must approve it. It’s like the budget process, but with no County Executive or County Council involvement.

What must the Board consider as it sets the calendar?

As usual, there’s a policy for this. According to MCPS Board of Education Policy IDA (that’s not an acronym, Board policies are named with letters), the Board must:

• Meet state requirements for instructional days and hours.

• Schedule non-instructional days protected by collectively bargained contracts. These include days for teacher training, and grading and reporting.

• Align instructional days with standardized testing where MCPS can’t just change the dates.

• Consider “Other Operational Needs and Educational Interests,” which could include days with high absenteeism rates for staff and/or students. Religious holidays are not explicitly named in Policy IDA. Policy IDA only uses the word “religious” to state, “A student’s observance of a religious holiday is an excused absence under Maryland law.”

• Not schedule school on days prohibited by state law (e.g., state and federal holidays) or Inauguration Day.

• Schedule breaks: winter break and spring break are named as times with multiple (unspecified) days off.

• Leave wiggle room (Contingencies for Inclement Weather and Other Emergencies).

How many days and hours does the state require?

Under Maryland state law, public schools “Shall be open for pupil attendance for at least 180 actual school days and a minimum of 1,080 school hours during a 10-month period in each school year.”

What’s the waiver option in current law?

The current law allows districts to apply for waivers of the 180 days requirement, by showing they “demonstrated effort” to meet it but can’t due to events including severe weather, and that they have the 1,080 hours. Severe weather isn’t defined in the law; the legislative intent may have been more like unusually and unpredictably severe weather.

If the state approves the waiver, the district is in compliance with the law by meeting the hours requirement alone for that school year. If the state denies the waiver, the regular law applies and the district must meet the requirements for hours and days.

What’s going on this school year?

The Board of Education approved the original 2025-26 school year calendar with 181 instructional days and 11 make-up days.

MCPS was closed six days due to weather in January and February in the 2025-26 school year. Five of them were from the “snowcrete” and the sixth was in late February. After the snowcrete, it was clear MCPS needed to use some make-up days. Two of the days had already passed, in October and November. One was January 26, as everything that fell January 25 froze into snowcrete. Six others extended the school year further into June.

Two make-up days fell after the snow and before June. (These two dates also fell before AP and IB testing in May. Most other testing falls before June as well.) These were March 20 (a staff professional development day scheduled on Eid al-Fitr) and April 15 (a grading and reporting day for staff). After the snow, MCPS stated it couldn’t hold school on April 15 because the grading and reporting day was contractually obligated, and that it would have school on March 20. People protested having school on Eid al-Fitr, and the Board reversed its decision and returned March 20 to a professional development day. MCPS seems to have worked something out with the union for April 15, and reversed that decision so it’s now an early-release day, and teachers may submit their grades later than originally planned.

That still leaves MCPS short, with the remaining days pushed to late June. Families and staff still aren’t sure when school will end, and MCPS is trying to get excused from the 180-day state requirement.

How is MCPS trying to get around the 180 days?

MCPS has been working both administrative and legislative channels to get permission for holding fewer than 180 days of school. The administrative approach is to ask the Maryland State Department of Education for a waiver, as outlined under state law. The legislative approach is advocating for a new state law that gives MCPS (and not other Maryland districts) a 175 rather than 180-day minimum.

What happened with the waiver request?

MCPS first requested a waiver without scheduling school on all the make-up days it had on its calendar. Recall the waiver requires the district to “demonstrate effort;” the state denied the request. MCPS added a short day for April 15, and is trying again for a waiver.

What about MCPS’ legislative strategy?

Though this winter’s snowcrete was atypical, the problem of coming up short on the 180 days is not. This fall (yes, before the snow fell), Dr. Taylor and the Board of Education asked for state legislative help. District 17 Delegate Julie Palakovich Carr introduced emergency legislation HB1084 that would hold MCPS–but not other Maryland districts–to a lower, 175-day minimum, conditional on meeting the 1,080 hours. In February, County Executive Marc Elrich, Palakovich Carr, and the Board of Education submitted testimony in favor of the bill, which passed the House of Delegates and is now in the Senate, with a hearing scheduled for March 24. You can track its progress here. The current legislation applies to this year and next. Some advocates are asking for an amendment so the law would apply to this year but not next.

What’s moral hazard?

Moral hazard is when you know someone will bail you out if something bad happens, and that makes you less careful to prevent the bad thing from happening. It’s a big issue in designing insurance policies. My favorite example is from one of my students, who told the class that after she got her engagement ring insured, she stopped taking it off to wash the dishes.

MCPS exhibited moral hazard by creating a calendar with a substantial chance of failing to get to 180 days (without unpopular and likely unproductive late June make-up days), because it knew there were ways out of the requirement.

The “moral” in moral hazard sounds a bit judgier than it is. Just like my student wasn’t “immoral” for keeping her ring on while washing the dishes, MCPS wasn’t immoral in its planning. The district, with its knowledge of the waiver option and a state legislative advocacy strategy in place, made a reasoned decision.

MCPS prides itself on its compliance, and if there were real consequences to designing a calendar like this year’s, I bet they would have made a different calendar. The ways to get to 180 days without last-minute late June additions are all financially or politically costly—which is precisely why MCPS isn’t doing them already. Options include starting earlier, ending later (though that wouldn’t work well with testing), having shorter breaks, and negotiating different terms around when non-instructional staff activities take place.

The elephant in the room: instructional days cost money

There’s not much talk about the cost of planning more instructional days from the start, but it seems a pretty obvious reason why the superintendent and Board aren’t just building a calendar that’s more likely to meet state requirements. If MCPS schedules more instructional days in the year, or makes other changes involving staff time, the contracts would have to change, and so would the operating budget.

If instead MCPS continues as it has been, scheduling only 181 instructional days, it continues to face the risk of needing to add low attendance, post-testing days in late June. MCPS estimates that each late June day added (that is, not in the original calendar) costs $1.9 million in operational costs. But these costs don’t include any teacher salaries; the make-up days are already reflected in their contracts and pay. And they don’t show up in the operating budget that the Board and County Executive and County Council approve in advance.

The financial argument for fewer actual days of school (i.e., the status quo with expectations of waivers, or a permanent version of HB1084) is a slippery slope. The number one value in the strategic plan is learning, and research shows days in school matter for learning. But as we saw in the operating budget process, people love to add and hate to cut. And Dr. Taylor–who recommends the calendar to the Board in the first place–wants to be sure the budget supports his own initiatives, like the regional secondary programs and the non-instructional Transition Day that started in fall 2025.

I wanted a back-of-the envelope estimate of how much it would cost MCPS per regularly-scheduled (not make-up) instructional day added. I asked Claude to use instructional salaries in the operating budget and the existing calendar to figure this out. Claude told me there’s a lot of uncertainty in this estimate and came to what it characterized as a conservative estimate of $9.3 million per day. We had some back and forth about benefits and types of positions, and you and your AI BFF will likely find different numbers. Neither Claude nor I are saying $9.3m per day is the number, or how off it might be. But there is a number, MCPS knows it, and leaving it out of the discussion–when other debated budget items are priced out–is not transparent.

Questions for MCPS

These are questions for the Board to ask Dr. Taylor, who recommends the calendar, as they weigh any 2026-27 calendar amendments, or lack thereof.

• How much would each additional regularly-scheduled instructional day in the 2026-27 calendar add to the operating budget? The Board’s tentatively approved budget includes $34.8 million for class size reduction: how many instructional days would that fund?

• Why did you include April 15 as a contingency instructional day in the calendar when it was contractually obligated for grading and reporting? What is the process for ensuring such conflicts are not present in the calendar before the superintendent recommends the calendar to the Board? How do we know this will not happen in the future?

• What metrics and standards do you use in determining which religious holidays affect operational needs or educational interests sufficiently to be non-instructional days?

• What’s the status of the possible new extended closure learning plan MCPS floated on Feb. 4? How would it affect the need for changes in the 2026-27 calendar?

Pop quiz

Which message would you most like to send your state senator?

1. I don’t support HB1084. I want MCPS to be held to the same 180-day standard as the rest of the state, even though this year it will cost $2 million per make-up day and likely provide little instructional value. I think this is the only way they’ll get the message. Vote no.

2. I support HB1084. I want MCPS, and no other districts, to be held to 175 minimum days, this year and next year. Vote yes.

3. I support an amendment to HB1084. I want MCPS and no other districts, to be held to 175 minimum days, for this year only. This way MCPS can avoid spending $2 million a day for little instructional value this year, but still get the message that they need more realistic calendars going forward. Amend HB1084 to expire as of July 2026, not 2027.

Answer key

There is no right or wrong answer. Your view is your view, and you could come up with different amendments to match it. Option 3 reflects my own view. But I was pretty tempted by option 1 as well, because I’m not certain MCPS will learn its lesson.

I found my district on this map and clicked on it. It brought up my state senator’s name and a link to her webpage, which has contact information. Then I e-mailed her.

Extra credit

• Listen to a comprehensive and nuanced telling of the saga, as Sunil Dasgupta interviews Evelyn Chung on the I Hate Politics podcast.

• Read MCPS’ account of the calendar upheaval. Compare and contrast with my account, and with Chung’s.

• Let me know if you contact your state senator. My contact info is always in the exit ticket below.

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it.

I’m mixing up the format today. The script is fictionalized but based on real conversations I’ve had over the years with friends, journalists, researchers, and myself.

ACT ONE

Scene 1

Nora and Friend are talking on the phone. Friend is folding laundry. Nora is walking dog.

FRIEND

I’m getting tripped up looking for school test scores at the MCPS website. I found a bunch of data dashboards, but they give me errors.

NORA

Huh, I’m not sure if MCPS is still using them. I’ll take a look later.

The last time I looked at one of their dashboards was years ago. As I recall, they combine so much stuff that it’s hard to figure out what they mean.

FRIEND

Well, I can’t get into them anyway. Then I found some stuff in the district’s annual report. They have this whole strategic planning scorecard, with baseline data from 2024-2025, and empty spaces for the 2025-2026 targets and levels. Are they even going to fill out the targets before they see the levels?

NORA

I think so. The Board of Education has a strategic planning committee that sets the targets. It’s not straightforward, but the process is underway. They met in December and you can watch the meeting if you want to get a sense of what they’re thinking. They’re meeting again tomorrow, March 5, at 10:00. If you search for MCPS Board of Education meetings it takes you to the calendar and livestream.

FRIEND

Well, the scorecard was for the whole district, not school by school, anyway.

NORA

Yeah, you have to look for the Maryland School Report Card if you want to see achievement by school.

FRIEND

Is that on the school’s website? Or the MCPS website?

NORA

Neither, it’s at the Maryland State Department of Education website. Legally the state has to post it. The district and the school aren’t required by law to post it.

FRIEND

I wouldn’t think to look for it at the state. What’s the rationale for that law?

NORA

It’s a federal law. Congress wants accountability for federal money. So when public schools in a state get federal money, the state has to post information on test scores.

FRIEND

Oh, right, No Child Left Behind? That’s why kids have to take so many tests?

NORA

Sort of. No Child Left Behind got reauthorized as the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. People call it ESSA. Under ESSA, the states have to give tests and make the results public. But the state gets to choose the test so it matches their curricular goals, and choose what score on the test counts as “proficient.”

FRIEND

So what happens if students aren’t proficient?

NORA

It’s pretty tedious, but hardly anything.

FRIEND

How is that accountability?

NORA

The idea is that voters in the district hold the schools accountable–by making the test scores publicly available, we can vote out the district’s Board of Ed if we’re unhappy.

FRIEND

But you told me before that the Board doesn’t really run the schools.

NORA

Right. But they can fire the superintendent. That’s really a last resort though, because it doesn’t make sense to be constantly churning through superintendents and it’s hard to find great ones for a big district like MCPS. The idea is more that the superintendent knows the Board cares about voters being happy, so if he knows we care about student achievement and can see how the district is doing, he’ll respond to that incentive by prioritizing academics.

FRIEND

Democracy.

NORA

That’s the idea.

FRIEND

But if the whole theory relies on being able to see the test scores, why doesn’t ESSA require the scores to be easier to find?

NORA

ESSA is designed to give states a lot of discretion. It requires each state to submit a plan, to be approved by the U.S. Department of Education. Then–

FRIEND

Interrupting

I thought the U.S. Department of Education was closed.

NORA

It’s not. That would be illegal. But the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education moved to the Department of Labor. So maybe now they’ll review the plans? Maybe they already are. Thankfully I’m not responsible for submitting an ESSA plan so I’m not really keeping up. Even Claude didn’t know the last time I asked.

But as I was saying, the states have a lot of discretion. Maryland’s plan describes the Maryland School Report Card, which lives at the Maryland State Department of Education website, and it doesn’t say that districts or schools need to post test data. So MCPS supplies whatever data is needed for that to the state and therefore is in compliance with the law.

FRIEND

Okay, so I get that the state has to post it. But would it be illegal for MCPS to put the information on their website too?

NORA

I don’t think so, but you never know. The Maryland General Assembly sometimes makes special laws for MCPS.

FRIEND

It just seems it would be easier to find the information from the school or MCPS than from the state.

NORA

In Kentucky, each public school has to put proficiency rates right at the top of its website!

But we live in Maryland, so you should go to the Maryland School Report Card.

FRIEND

Stops walking to type on phone.

Okay, I’m pulling it up. There’s a lot. What does this mean?

NORA

Waving to neighbor.

Hi!

Sorry, Friend, I need to run.

CURTAIN

Scene 2

Nora, alone at her desk, typing on computer, talking to herself.

NORA

I really need to find those data dashboards for my post. Let me go look at the MCPS Office of Shared Accountability data dashboards site.

I see three. Evidence of Learning, Equity Accountability Model, and Individual Measures. I guess I’ll look at each of them…

Yeah, like she said, it’s an error. Let me try on my phone, maybe that’ll work.

iDashboards login? What’s that? Another login? Is it just for staff? I’m pretty sure I don’t have one of those accounts, I just have ParentVue, and myMCPS, and ParentSquare... Is there another one? I guess I could try one of those logins here, but I’m so tired.…

She slowly slumps over the desk, then falls to the floor.

CURTAIN

Questions for MCPS

The Board of Education doesn’t run schools, but they can ask MCPS questions.

• If these data are supposed to hold schools publicly accountable, the information should be easy to find. Would you please post a link from each school’s website to its Maryland School Report Card? (It’s not my favorite either, but it’s what we’ve got at the moment.) While there is no legal requirement to do so, this would not require much work from the district and would help direct the public to relevant data.

• Would you please fix or remove the data dashboards from the MCPS website?

Pop quiz

Where can you find school-level data on academic achievement in MCPS?

a. The school website

b. The district website

c. The state website

d. The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University

e. The Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University

f. c and e

Answer key

f is correct: both the Maryland State Department of Education and the Edunomics Lab publicly post school-level achievement data. In fact, they are the same data, just shared with different formats. The other sources listed present different types of data.

Extra credit

• Try finding your child’s school on the Maryland School Report Card. If you’re in another state, your state also has a school report card; the key is to look for it at the website for the state education department rather than the school district’s website.

• Try reading the school report card. Do you understand what it means? Does it give you any sense of whether the school is doing well or not? If you look up a few other schools, is it clear how they compare to one another?

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it.

Calendar

I wanted to know one thing from this item: which days have school. To find that, I needed to click Read more. The link doesn’t work from e-mail. It turns out none of the links work from e-mail this week. (I know, I’ve just guaranteed there will be a broken link in this newsletter soon. Apologies in advance.)

I’m 52 years old and I sit at a computer all day, so I read this type of content in my e-mail, not from texts on my phone. If you read from a text message, it takes you to the web version, and the links work. (It is possible to get to the web version from the e-mail, if you choose your language and click on it.)

Ultimately I made it to the link, Important Update to the 2025–2026 School Calendar. That message explains what’s in the Code of Maryland Regulations, then describes why school wasn’t, then was, scheduled for March 20, Eid al-Fitr. Scroll down and you can find what you’re likely looking for:

• There will not be school on March 20.

• The last day of school is now June 25.

I’m using “school” where MCPS uses “instructional days.”

This is followed by an explanation of why they can’t find other days before late June (federal requirements, state requirements, contractual requirements—which MCPS agreed to during collective bargaining, holidays), and then a section putting pressure on the General Assembly to pass a bill to let school end earlier based on hours vs. days of instruction.

MCPS, we get that you don’t control the weather, Montgomery County’s snow removal, or state law. But you do control your own comms.

Budget

It’s true they have reduced the request from the county by $331,161, but that alone is not meaningful. The reader needs context. The request has gone from the original $2,518,569,521 to the amended $2,518,238,360. More interpretable ways to think about it: it’s a reduction of 0.01 percent (that is, 0.0001) of the existing county revenue level, and of about $2 per pupil.

To know that, you would need more information than the e-mail provides, and a calculator. The amended budget is hard to find. I did click on Read more, and followed its link to the operating budget page, but couldn’t find the amended budget there, just things with December dates. I eventually found the changes summarized in BoardDocs under the Feb. 19 business meeting agenda.

The website says materials will be available four days in advance. I haven’t tracked this systematically but in the past I’ve generally been able to find materials when I’ve looked the day before or morning of a meeting. There are now materials in BoardDocs but they weren’t there the morning of Feb. 19, even though the Board was starting their session at noon and voting on it that afternoon/evening. Perhaps Board members have some other way of reviewing materials in advance of their meetings, but it seems pretty last minute.

More things to know

There were 20+ things to know this week, so I’ll let interested readers go straight to the source rather than go on. A few to look out for: upcoming state changes to math standards, public hearings on boundary study recommendations, and an AI security pilot about to start in three high schools.

There’s also info for registration for next year, for kindergarten, pre-K and Head Start. Kindergarten registration is the ninth item of 20 that seem like the main Things to Know (note the header in larger blue font).

After the 20 items with the large blue font subject headers, there’s some extra stuff at the bottom including the program registration for pre-K and Head Start for income-eligible families. It’s noticeably less eye-catching. I’m sure Things to Know is not their main channel for any of these recruitment efforts, as many families eligible to register will not already be in the system to receive these communications.

Friday’s update

As I’m proofreading this post on Feb. 20, I received text and e-mail notifications with the calendar update. Good move to send that as its own clearly labeled e-mail.

E-mail review: You do need to scroll down in the e-mail to find the dates, but you don’t need to click.

Text review: You still have to click to see the dates, but they at least note families need to know these updates, which could encourage the click.

Their text has 189 characters:

The Montgomery County Board of Education adopted technical changes to the 2025-2026 school-year calendar. These changes include updates that families need to know: https://psqr.iomK1BtNM5Gr

The text I wrote (below) does not require clicking and has 176 characters:

IMPORTANT changes to the MCPS calendar: no school Fri Mar 20; full days added Thurs June 18 & Mon June 22; early release days added Wed/Th June 24-25. https://psqr.iomK1BtNM5Gr

There may be a reason why they need to share that “The Montgomery County Board of Education adopted technical changes to the 2025-2026 school-year calendar.” If so, I’d love to learn.

Inbox recommendation

Delete.

First, a general critique. Things to Know mixes Things You Might Want to Know with Things You Actually Have to Know. I get e-mails in this format from lots of organizations, and I despise them all. It feels like they are taking advantage of their captive audience seeking logistics to market themselves. It’s clearly intentional, but I also imagine it makes lots of people miss out on content they need because there is so much gratuitous text in there that they just skip the whole thing. Case in point: I never read this e-mail until I started this newsletter and was looking for things to analyze.

This particular Things to Know was more annoying than usual to me, probably because there were Things You Actually Have to Know (the calendar dates) inside it. We started off on the wrong foot with all the clicking for dates. When I did get to the full calendar information, the end crushed me.

We understand these changes may affect family schedules, childcare arrangements, and summer plans. While extending the school year right now can present challenges, MCPS must meet the state’s mandated instructional time requirements. We wish this year’s calendar saga was less complicated and less uncertain - unfortunately, it is not. Stand by for more soon…

P.S. - Yes, we’re looking at this weekend’s weather.

It’s not just the upcoming weather (though that did hurt) but the passivity. We wish things were different but they aren’t. No “we will plan differently for next year with this experience in mind,” no nothing.

Again, however, I didn’t find inaccuracies, and it did contain information, so I wouldn’t mark as spam or block sender.

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it.

This has troubling implications for the Board’s ability to represent its constituents, and to get the job—let’s be clear, a really hard job—done well. These compensation levels aren’t in the best interests of MoCo residents, but we aren’t allowed to change it locally, even though the county generates two-thirds of the MCPS budget that pays the Board. School board compensation, even county by county, is a matter of state law, so it’s up to the Maryland General Assembly.

How do other school boards pay their members?

Most school boards do not pay their members anything. Nationally, only Los Angeles Unified School District pays a full-time salary. They started paying their board members $125,000 in 2017, with an option to keep another job and earn $50,000. Elsewhere, the few paid board members earn a nominal stipend more like a (sometimes very) part-time job. Even among large districts, it’s unusual to pay as much as MCPS already does.

But just because everyone else is doing something (paying zilch) doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Especially when we’re in a decades-long national debate about whether school board governance has any hope of yielding effective public schools.

How big is MCPS?

Very. MCPS has about 156,000 students, 211 schools, nearly 26,000 employees, and a $3.6 billion operating budget. It’s the 15th largest district in the US in terms of enrollment. MCPS is organized into 25 “clusters,” with each cluster composed of one high school and the middle and elementary schools that feed into it. I grew up in a New Jersey district that was like one of these 25 clusters.

While many Board tasks don’t scale (there’s one operating budget process, and one superintendent to hire or fire regardless of district size), many do. Board members are supposed to be the link between the community and the district, and they have a lot of community to represent. And the chances of a crisis any given week are a lot higher in a huge district like MCPS.

How much do–or should–MCPS board members work?

These are two different questions. The surprisingly interesting 2024 122-page report of the Montgomery County Board of Education Compensation Commission (BECC) tackles both. After reading, it’s hard to imagine doing a decent job in less than 30-40 (highly irregular) hours per week, with some weeks coming in substantially above that. You can read all about their duties in the Board handbook.

Why is the current model a problem for MCPS?

Two reasons: representation and effectiveness.

First, representation. Not everyone can afford the time Board service takes. The job requires many hours, which are irregular and span days, nights, and weekends. It interferes with paid work and caregiving. Perhaps the biggest representation problem this yields is that only one (Rita Montoya) of the seven adult Board members currently has kids enrolled in MCPS. Montoya often offers insights based on granular details of the parent and student experience that no amount of constituent relations can yield. The student member is, of course, currently an MCPS student, with a unique perspective. But most members have grown children, which is likely a big part of why they have the time for Board service now.

Next, effectiveness. How much time does it take to do a good job on the Board? There’s the amount of time physically in Board and committee meetings (and in transit, and preparing in advance), and that is the absolute minimum. Time spent in schools and in the community, hearing from constituents, matters. And many matters the Board votes on are super detailed and require lots of prep time to fully engage (think school facilities, operating budget, collective bargaining, boundary studies, program analyses…). If you watch a work session, you will realize that while it’s possible to roll into such a meeting cold, to really ask good questions you would need background knowledge, which takes time to gather, especially for newer members. The whole point of having a Board as a legislative body to represent the residents in dealings with the executive (the superintendent) is to have a Board that is knowledgeable and can advocate effectively for us, not just to show up and do the minimum.

Economists often model a labor/leisure trade-off. Let’s instead consider three options for time use: paid labor (employment), unpaid labor (caregiving and other household or volunteer work), and everything else (leisure, sleep, personal care, etc.). If the Board paid a living wage, it could be a closer substitute for paid work (still imperfect, as it would pay less than many jobs and disrupt career ladders) and unpaid household work (again imperfect, but you could use your after-tax Board earnings towards paying someone else). These options would help free up hours for everything else (sleep likely coming in at the top of this list) and make Board service appealing to more, and more sustainable for those already serving at great personal cost. The sustainability piece is key: there is a lot to figure out, and churning through single-term Board members who don’t come in ready to go does not serve the public.

It surely takes less time to do a good job in smaller districts. But MCPS is a behemoth and this needs to be a full-time job. Cutting corners on legislative pay for oversight of a $3.6 (soon to be $3.8?) billion budget doesn’t make sense.

Of course, compensation is only part of the solution. Even if Board members were paid full-time salaries, they would still need substantial staff support with technical expertise in areas like budget, contracts, and evaluation. Currently, Board members rely heavily on MCPS staff for information about MCPS, which creates an inherent tension given their oversight role. This is worth examining separately, but it compounds the compensation problem: without adequate independent staff support, Board members need even more time to do the job well.

What do other MoCo/Maryland legislative positions pay?

The BECC report provides 2024 details below.

The Maryland General Assembly is in session only three months per year. The County Councilmember position is likely the most analogous–and they earn over $150k.

What’s going on politically with MCPS BOE salaries?

On January 29, the Montgomery County state delegation voted in favor of a raise for the BOE. At the time of this writing, HB 764 was in the House, with a hearing scheduled for 2/25 (track its status). The bill must pass the House of Delegates, and then the Senate, in order for the governor to be able to sign it into law.

The bill sets compensation for MCPS BOE members–to be paid from the MCPS budget, not from any dedicated state funding source–at the salary for members of the Maryland General Assembly, which has built-in cost-of-living adjustments and would be $56,635 next year. The President’s salary would be $10,000 more. Benefits wouldn’t change. The student member compensation was updated last year and would not be affected by the current legislation. The change wouldn’t affect BOE members already in office.

The biggest drawback of the bill, in my opinion, is that the salary is still low for the amount of time and skill required, but that appears to be a political necessity. Last year, Del. Lorig Charkoudian proposed a Los Angeles-like level of compensation, $124,000 per year, and could not get the support of the Montgomery County delegation needed to move forward in the House. This year she made a far more modest proposal, and the delegation did support it.

How much would HB 764 cost Montgomery County?

In the coming year, Maryland delegates and state senators will be paid $56,635. The bill does not make any changes to benefits.The bill more than doubles pay for all members other than the student member. Because pay is still so law, and there are only seven non-student members, the overall increase in compensation would be negligible–$226,445 total. To put this into context, even the “smaller” contentious issues in the operating budget are about changes in excess of a million dollars per year–and the whole budget is closing in on $4 billion.

Questions for the General Assembly

• What does the state have to lose by allowing Montgomery County residents to choose to spend their own tax dollars on this?

• Who do you think can serve when pay is so low and cost of living is so high and these meetings happen during the work day and evenings?

• Is $226k towards professionalizing oversight really the place to cheap out in our $3.6+ billion operating budget?

Pop quiz

Which of the following would be a good email to send to your state legislators in Annapolis?

a. I am writing to urge you to support HB-764. MCPS is a huge district with a $3.6 billion budget and 26,000 employees. Oversight of MCPS should be a full-time job. Please allow Montgomery County voters to use our own tax dollars to compensate it as such. The stakes for our children and our county’s economic future couldn’t be higher.

b. I am writing to urge you to support HB-764. MCPS is a huge district with a $3.6 billion budget and 26,000 employees. Oversight of MCPS should be a full-time job. Please take all the tax dollars in the state and give more of them to MCPS Board members than other Board members because we are a big district. The stakes for our children and our county’s economic future couldn’t be higher.

c. I am writing to urge you to oppose HB-764. It’s not enough money to make a difference. In fact, why do we pay Board members at all? We should rely on unpaid volunteers because {INSERT YOUR OWN REASON HERE}. The stakes for our children and our county’s economic future couldn’t be higher.

d. I am writing to urge you to oppose HB-764. It’s not enough money to make a difference. Let’s pay $124,000 instead! The stakes for our children and our county’s economic future couldn’t be higher.

Answer key

There’s no single right answer here. I’m going with option a, but reasonable minds could differ. If there were a lot more skilled staff support maybe this could be a part-time job. c depends on how you fill in the blank.

There are, however, wrong answers. b is incorrect because this bill would not direct additional state resources to Montgomery County. And d couldn’t even pass the MoCo delegation last year so it seems pretty fruitless.

Extra credit

• For MoCo readers:

  • Find your Maryland legislative district.

  • Figure out who represents you in the House of Delegates. Let them know your views on HB 764.

  • Track HB 764 in the Maryland General Assembly here.

  • If/when the bill passes the House of Delegates, figure out who represents you in the Senate and let them know your views.

• For other US readers:

  • Find how much your Board members are paid.

  • Figure out that political history. Have people tried to change it? Locally or at the state level?

Next up: tracking MCPS performance

Posting every other Wednesday.

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it.

Alexander Russo’s The Grade Substack newsletter and video podcast “provides independent analysis of media coverage of education, helping to promote and improve the quality of that coverage.” I’ve learned a ton from it over the years, and highly recommend it. I talked with Russo recently on his podcast, and am so grateful for all his ideas and inspiration. At 42 minutes, it’s a long-ish interview (for you, and maybe for him, but not for me). Here’s what I’m reflecting on after listening.

Stephen Covey talks about putting the big rocks into a metaphorical jar first, because they won’t fit in later as it gets filled with other stuff. Russo and I talked about how there’s always so much high-visibility stuff going on (I talked about boundary studies in the interview, but this week we could talk about school security) that it sucks up all the air, leaving no time or energy for the important stuff that isn’t urgent.

I see the newsletter as a place to dig into those big rocks, that don’t get covered elsewhere with the analytic depth we need. I’ll be adding more big rocks, and more pieces on a subset of the other stuff (pebbles, sand) that is fascinating but just relentless and impossible to keep up with. But I only know what I’m curious about, and I want to hear more from readers.

Russo shared how back when he wrote a blog on Chicago Public Schools, he’d get central office staff going back and forth in the comments. I haven’t wanted to deal with moderating comments because, you know, the internet, but I’d love to have information flowing from reader to reader.

I will never ask you for money, but I do have two asks today.

1. Please be in touch. Tell me what you want me to write about, and what my writing gets wrong or leaves out. All the “regular” (every other Wednesday) posts end with an exit ticket section that tells you how you can reach me. If you are reading in your e-mail, you can just reply to any of my e-mails and I’ll get it. Or, I have a Google form where you can send me a note, anonymously or with your contact info. I really appreciate contact info if you’re willing to share it (it helps me know you are not a troll). I will not publish your name or any identifying details without checking with you in advance. I don’t get a lot of newsletter-related e-mail now, and I write back.

2. Please spread the word. Whenever someone tells me they saw this on a neighborhood listserv, I see a bump in subscribers. If there’s a place you go that regularly talks MCPS (listserv, book club group chat, soccer WhatsApp, whatever) I’d really appreciate your word-of-mouth endorsement. Tell them why you read. Or just tell them that I’m an MCPS parent, economist, and Georgetown professor asking questions that matter for public education–especially in MCPS. They can subscribe (always for free) at https://noraegordon.substack.com/.

Thank you for reading and for caring about public education.

The operating budget was $3.6 billion this year and Dr. Taylor’s opening bid for next year is a five percent increase to $3.8 billion. That comes out to $22,979 per pupil–an 8 percent increase over FY2026’s $21,196. The per-pupil growth is greater than the total growth because of shrinking enrollment.

How intentional is the budget?

Some people say a budget is a moral document. As I’ve been watching this year’s process, there are moments where that rings true, especially when you get to hear first-person testimony about how MCPS teachers and staff are helping kids.

For the budget to be a moral document, though, it would need to feel like MCPS leadership and the Board are actively making choices that align with the district’s values. Watching the budget process, it often feels like there are not a lot of choices to be made. Dr. Taylor is really leaning into a “our hands are tied” vibe, in keeping with what Marguerite Roza calls the budget dance.

Exhibit A1: The budget is like a salad because we have to eat our veggies.

Exhibit A2: Only veggies, no cake for us this year!

Exhibit B: The recommended changes from last year’s budget are classified by whether they are discretionary (a choice) or not (required).

Not all budgets are organized in this way; this framing is discretionary. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Exhibit C: Those “non-discretionary requirements” are the absolute barest minimum.

How does the budget process work in MCPS?

Before the externally-facing process kicks off, MCPS leadership prepares the superintendent’s recommended budget. They adjust prices and compensation to current (or contractually-obligated future) levels, update state and federal revenue estimates, update projected enrollment and what that means for staffing, add in what they need to meet any new requirements (like for the Blueprint), and add in new stuff they want (like the regional programs). They adjust old and new discretionary spending (non-discretionary is by definition not up for grabs) until expenditures and revenues balance out, as required by law. This is less precise than it sounds, because local revenue is to be determined.

MCPS submits the superintendent’s recommended budget to the Board of Education. Dr. Taylor is recommending that the Board adopt it as their budget, and he keeps telling the Board it’s their budget (true)–so the hard choices are their hard choices. The Board learns more in work sessions, where MCPS leadership explains its request, and hears from community members when they testify at public hearings. During work sessions and hearings, the Board can ask MCPS leadership questions and request further information. The public may attend work sessions and hearings in person or watch live or recorded video.

This is all about changes from last year’s budget–it’s not examining how the overall budget, which is largely based on the status quo, aligns with any values or strategies.

Once the Board signs off, the action then moves over to the County. The County Executive recommends a budget to the County Council for its adjustment and approval, before returning to the Board for a final vote. Key dates are on the operating budget website. Confused? There’s more background in Who does what in public education? (MCPS version).

What are the big revenue issues this budget cycle?

MCPS’ revenue comes from local, state, and federal sources, in that order of magnitude. State and federal revenue depend on enrollment, which is declining. Fall enrollment for FY2026 was 155,595; the projection for FY2027 is down three percent, to 150,671.

Local: MCPS gets two-thirds of its budget from the County. This makes recent projected declines in county revenue bad news. It also means the County Council is a key player as the process unfolds.

State: MCPS initially estimated constant state funding for next year. The governor’s Jan. 21 budget request included a small increase for MCPS. In the longer run, constant funding seems optimistic in the context of declining enrollment and the overall (bad) state budget situation.

Federal: MCPS gets less than 3 percent of its budget from federal funds. As Dr. Taylor explained in the Jan. 6 work session, they are moving some stuff around within the budget to make it more robust to federal uncertainty. Luckily for MCPS, the two biggest federal programs, Title I and special education, are still popular in Congress–but their funding will decline with enrollment.

What are the big spending issues this budget cycle?

We’re only partway through the process, but here’s what people are talking about so far.

Very few cuts have been recommended, and people are turning out to fight them. These include eliminating $1.4 million for the year-round calendar at Arcola Elementary and another $1.4 million from cutting positions for 10 pupil personnel workers (PPWs), who advocate for vulnerable students. (It’s a coincidence that both round to $1.4 million. It’s $1,416,560 for the PPWs and $1,433,483 for Arcola.) Board President Grace Rivera-Oven already told MCPS she wants the PPWs back in the next budget she sees.

There’s a range of relatively small increases in the budget, and board members are doing their due diligence trying to understand them. For example, board members have asked questions about outcomes for dual enrollment students, due to projected growth in spending on their tuition, and how Blueprint-mandated career ladder positions will interact with existing positions.

These examples reveal two big issues to watch going forward.

• How does MCPS incorporate program evaluation results into funding decisions?

• How does MCPS respond to Blueprint requirements in ways that align efficiently and legally with existing structures and positions?

The budget also has some really big increases. There’s $190 million for contractually-obligated compensation increases, and $40 million for the ominous “employee health benefits, deficit recovery” (and Dr. Taylor reminds us that is less than we need).

There’s also a $35 million increase for implementing proposed new staffing standards. While lower enrollment means less state and federal revenue, two-thirds of MCPS’ revenue comes from local sources not directly linked to enrollment. Declining enrollment means lower total staffing costs under any given staffing model, and Dr. Taylor proposes taking advantage of this moment to lower class sizes with the new standards presented at the Feb. 2 work session below.

These are slightly altered from the proposal first published in Appendix C of the recommended budget, below, and subject to continued revision. I include the table below to show the comparison between the current guidelines and proposed standards.

It’s hard to compare current to proposed ratios in the table for two reasons. First, Dr. Taylor explained that what looks like an increase for the highest poverty schools isn’t really an increase, because the current guidelines aren’t binding and actual class sizes (which weren’t shared at the work session) are larger; in contrast, the new standards would have hard and fast class caps. Second, the current guidelines depend on whether schools are Title I, Focus, or non-Focus, while the proposed standards are framed (in a way I find more transparent) around school free- or reduced-priced meals (FARMS) rates. MCPS currently sets the school Title I threshold at 40% FARMS. Board member Laura Stewart asked at the Feb. 2 work sessions what the FARMS cutoff is currently for Focus schools and MCPS leadership said they would find out and report back. I tried to look it up: the MCPS website explains that schools ineligible for Title I are Focus schools, but doesn’t give any numeric cutpoints.

Questions for MCPS

• Many things are not discretionary in the short run relevant for the budget process, but they aren’t actually set in stone. How do MCPS and the Board compare costs and gains when making decisions about collective bargaining and procurement? How are costs and gains considered in the strategic planning process and decisions around translating values into resource allocation?

• MCPS is proposing switching from staffing guidelines to binding staffing standards. Even when staffing ratios are “all over the place,” it’s still possible to describe the data. To better show what these changes would mean in practice, please share actual current staffing ratios (under, or despite, the guidelines). For each school, please publish the number of staff by position, the number of students (relevant to each position), and the ratio.

• Has MCPS tried to compare (research-based estimates of) gains from the proposed staffing standards, which cost $35 million, to those of the $6 million recommended for curriculum, instruction, and development? Do you anticipate the average estimated reduction of one student per elementary class will be nearly six times as effective as the curriculum and instruction investments?

• In the Feb. 2 work session, Dr. Taylor noted that while research doesn’t tie class size reduction directly to improvements in student achievement, class size reduction would help students by reducing staff turnover. Please:
  (1) share research estimates of how much class size affects staff turnover, with citations;
  (2) using (1), estimate staff turnover impacts of the proposed class size reductions (not from current guidelines to proposed standards, but from current actual levels to projected levels under the proposed standards);
  (3) recall that these proposed class size reductions are estimated to cost about $35 million next year;
  (4) share research estimates (direct or indirect) of how much staff turnover affects student achievement, with citations; and
  (5) using (4), estimate achievement impacts of the predicted improvement in MCPS staff retention.

• Board members have asked for information on how MCPS dual enrollment students fare, trying to understand how spending on the program relates to student outcomes. This relates to objective 6 under goal 2 of the strategic plan. But the scorecard for goal 2 reports only the percentage of all students who graduate from MCPS with an associate’s degree. How many dual enrollment participants graduate from MCPS with an associate’s degree? Can this metric be added to the scorecard, so the Board can track this information independently of the budget process? How does it vary by high school? By college program?

Pop quiz

The additional cost of the proposed staffing standards are:

1. Discretionary increases.

2. Non-discretionary increases.

3. Required non-discretionary increases.

4. Discretionary increases in required non-discretionary increases’ clothing.

Answer key

d. See line 22 of Table 1A of the budget worksheet. “Schools: Staffing Standards” is listed in the non-discretionary requirements section. But adopting a new staffing standard is still a choice. If MCPS adopts the standard before considering the budget, yes, the $35 million would technically be non-discretionary and in the correct category. Dr. Taylor has noted the staffing standards are consistent with strategic planning goals, which makes me curious about the strategic plan and the process that produces it.

Extra credit

• Watch 10 minutes of any budget work session or public hearing.

• Open the MCPS recommended budget. Skim. Choose any other school district, and find and skim their budget. Compare and contrast.

• Choose a few recommended budgetary changes. For each, tally the minutes of discussion in all the work sessions and hearings to date. Calculate the recommended dollars (whether cuts or increases) per minute of Board of Education attention. Discuss. If you do this, please let me know what you find!

Next up

Why are Board members paid like this?

I’ll be posting every other Wednesday.

Exit ticket

Share your frequent, low-stakes feedback with me, either by replying to this email or submitting anonymously. I always welcome your story ideas, questions, suggestions, and corrections. And if you enjoyed this post, I’d be grateful if you share it.

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