District Administration - April 2011 - (Page 26)

Conversations Jerry Weast A legacy of Systemic Change Jerry Weast is the superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools, the largest and most diverse school system in Maryland and the 16th largest district in the nation. For the past 12 years, Weast has navigated the district through a comprehensive school reform effort that has improved student achievement and narrowed racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps. The district’s 25 high schools are all in the top 3 percent in the country, according to Newsweek. In November, MCPS received the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the highest Presidential honor a school district can receive for performance excellence. Weast has served as superintendent for 30 years, overseeing eight school districts in five states. He has been in public education since 1969 and also has been a professor and instructor at several universities. Over the last eleven years as superintendent, you have become known for your wholedistrict transformation of the Montgomery County (Md.) Public Schools, included raising academic standards and narrowing the achievement gap for over 145,000 students. How were you able to accomplish this? Weast: In America, our blessing is diver- Q: sity. And we have children here in our county from 164 countries, who speak 123 different languages. The largest group that we have is only 35 percent, and that’s our Caucasian group. The question becomes not blaming or pointing out those differences but saying, “Under what conditions can we get these children college-and-career ready?” What we found was the key to helping the child was supporting the people who work with the children—giving parents clarity about what children ought to know and be able to do and how to check for that. And that’s why we developed a value chain that keeps track of our kids all the way through college, beginning in preschool. You do that best when you get the child engaged and the teacher engaged. When you open up school the first day and see the kindergartners come in, they’ve got a twinkle in their eyes and they think they all can be President of the United States or do anything. And when you open the year and you visit with all those new, young teachers, they have a twinkle in their eye and believe they are going to change the world. Organizationally, you have to channel that energy in such a way that it uplifts people. And so organizations that involve their employees build a great deal of trust. That trust is translated into compassion. The compassion is understanding the difficulties between the jobs. And that’s why we have differentiated staffing, differentiated kinds of funding, differentiated kinds of training—because that shows that we do understand. The district’s gains in student achievement, including having the highest graduation rates of any large district in the nation, provide evidence in support of your vision that academic achievement is not limited by family income, race, or ethnicity. What have you done to make the difference? Weast: Everybody who has a yard under- children who were affected by moving around, and children who were affected by poverty. We did not say those were bad things; rather, we believed those were conditions that we could create remedies for that would help those children grow at the same rate, or even at a more accelerated rate, so our grass would be green all over the district. And that’s what educators have to do. They’ve got to look at where they’re having their problems and then do like you do with a lawn. That’s what we did, and it worked. How has the repositioning of resources to where they are needed most impacted test scores across the district? Weast: We have 12 years of data to show stands that there may be areas of the yard that don’t grow green grass as well. And so if you get areas that aren’t growing as well, or where it doesn’t look as pretty, you try to green those areas, and you don’t take that away from the other areas. That’s where we got the idea of Raise the Bar and Close the Gap in 1999. Our original idea was a call to action. Part of our district was doing very well, and part of it wasn’t doing as well, and the part that wasn’t doing as well tended to be heavily populated with children of color, that we have not only raised the bar, because we set the highest SAT scores in the history of the district this year, but we have done that in spite of more poverty, more diversity, more mobility, more growth. For example, we went up over 57 percent in the number of kids on free lunch, doubled the number of kids that don’t speak English, and increased the system by more than 15,000 students. And all the time that we’ve done those things, we’ve set higher scores every year. Last year we had our highest SAT scores, highest ACT scores, and had the most Advanced Placement Exam scores of 3 or above. In addition, our students took nearly 30,000 26 April 2011 District Administration

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - April 2011

District Administration - April 2011
Contents
From the Editor
Letters
News Update
Labor Relations
Administrator Profile
District Profile
Conversations
Superintendent Staying Power
Helping STEM Take Route
High-Stakes Cheating
Are Your Graduates Succeeding in College?
Problem/Solution
New Products
Product Focus
Online Edge
Going Mobile
Professional Opinion

District Administration - April 2011