mcps-harvard-transcript.pdf

MR. FERGUSON: It's about 1:30 and we've got a packed

agenda this afternoon, so in the interest of staying on

time, we want to get started.

The first session is Montgomery County,

they have five presenters who come from the district,

representing different roles that they play. They are

going to go for about 45 minutes, as a group, and then

we'll have the discussants and the discussion.

So, I guess Frieda Lacey, are you going to

go first? You can introduce the others.

MS. LACEY: All right, thank you.

Good afternoon. I'm Frieda Lacey, Deputy

Superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools and

we are just delighted to be here with you this

afternoon. You are going to hear from me first, then

you are going to hear from Dr. Heath Morrison, a

Community Superintendent. Dr. Morrison has 36 schools

that he is charged with oversight for. After that, you

are going to hear from Mr. Adrian Talley, he has 39

schools in our district.

You are going to hear from Mr. Jamie Virga. We were tal

we think it's critical, as was stated this morning, that

we have that in place in any school district. And then

you are going to hear from Mrs. Carole Working, one of

our stellar principals, high school principals, in

Montgomery County Public Schools.

I'm going to rush through this because I

have a lot of say and a short period of time.

Montgomery County has 200 schools, we have approximately

138,000 students and it's the sixth largest district in

the country, the sixth largest. Now, a lot of people

think that we are a wealthy school district, and yes, we

are, but we also have a lot of poverty and a lot of

diversity. I came to Montgomery County in 1971, so you

look up there, you can see what it looked like in 1971

and you can see how it's changed over a period of time.

So what do you do when you have something

that looks like this and it's changing rapidly? When

you see that the poverty is increasing? That you are

seeing that you are getting more African American and

Hispanic students? You can't do the status quo, you

have to do something drastically different, and so what

we did was to divide up our district into the red and

green zones. Take a look at that, that's reflective of

our elementary schools. In the red zone you see

approximately 29,000 kids, 80 percent minority, 50

percent FARMs, 28 percent ESL. The green zone, you can

see what's on the chart.

So we knew we had to do something

differently, if we were going to make a difference, it

was like we had two districts in one.

FROM THE FLOOR: Can you tell us what the

FARLs is?

MS. LACEY: Free and reduced lunch, sorry

about that. You can see, from 1990 to 2007, what the

free and reduced price meals program looked like, what

it looked like then and what it looks like now. When

you look at our ESL enrollment, when you look at where

it was in 1990 and where it is today, looking at our

elementary schools because we have a lot of youngsters

coming into Montgomery County that don't speak English

or English isn't spoken in their homes, so you can see

how that has changed over a period of time.

One of the things in any school district,

you want to have a very tight strategic plan and we have

just that. We have a strategic plan, we have

initiatives, we have data points, we have milestones.

We have so much data that you have to have some type of

coherence as it relates to the data because we give it

to our principals, they get the strategic plan, what do

they know to really concentrate on? So our

superintendent, I'm sorry he isn't here because he is

quite a unique individual.

(Laughter)

MS. LACEY: If you haven't met him, you are

in for an experience. He said we have to, we owe our

schools some way of letting them know what's important.

How we are college ready, how we shoot for the North

Star, so he started with seven key data points and

you'll see them reflected here. I'm going to rush

through this very quickly because I really want you to

hear from the folks that have come with me, but we

started with the reading bench marks in grades K through

two, and one of the things Dr. Weist did was he put all

the energy in the red zone. How do you do that?

When I say he put the energy in the red

zone, we went from half day kindergarten to full day

kindergarten, in the red zone. We went from a class

size of 28 to a class size of 15. We phased in 15

schools and we put the energy there, that's where we

started. Did it make a difference? Yes, it did. Look

at the data. We heard Tom Payzant talking about

standards-based reform and we said that we wanted kids

to read in kindergarten. That was unheard of in

Montgomery County in 1999.

Kindergartners are supposed to develop

social skills, social skills, and Jerry Weist said they

will learn to read, so 93 percent of our kids are

engaged in text reading, they are reading books. We

talked about the achievement gap, 87 percent of our

kindergartners that are engaged in text reading are

Hispanics, 90 percent for African American and 93

percent for the district. We call it level three

benchmark reading, we are so high that we have to change

the benchmark this fall to level four because one of the

things we have found out is that you always have to

push, not over the brink, but you can never be

satisfied.

We also, one of the data points you saw

listed was rigorous math, fifth grade. A couple of

years ago we had 196 kids taking higher level math,

today we have close to 5,000. We had to train the

teachers because they didn't know how to do it. And if

you look at this, we disaggregate a lot by race and

ethnicity but we also do it by red zone/green zone,

because we have a benchmark and we want to at least get

all kids to a standard, but we have to also have the

rigor there.

We have a benchmark, by 2010, 80 percent of

our kids will be successful in Algebra I at the eighth

grade. You see where we were in 2000-2001 and you see

where we are today, 2007-2008, that is, 68 percent of

our kids are taking Algebra I or higher and they are

being successful.

Here it is disaggregated and you see the

gap. What we look for are incremental gains over a

period of time and when we see it leveling off or

starting to go down, what do we do? We have to do

something different, we have to diagnose and problem

solve, we have to have a strategy. So as long as we see

the incremental gains, we are reasonably comfortable

with what we are doing. Our superintendent likes to say

we are the cream of the crap.

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