Original Source | The Register Guard
Monday October 3, 2011

A Maryland school district lights the path to reform

The Pew Charitable Trusts has spent 10 years and $100 million studying preschool education and is spearheading a campaign to get more states to offer it - as Time magazine says in its Sept. 26 issue - "in smarter ways." The initiative, dubbed "Pre-K Now," has helped double preschool spending in the past decade and increase enrollment of 4-year-olds to more than a million children, from 700,000 when the campaign started.

In writing about Pew's report on its campaign, "Rethinking Pre-K: 5 Ways to Fix Preschool," released this month, the magazine begins its article with an arresting assertion: Research shows, it says, that children from low-income households will be as much as 18 months behind their grade level in language, "prereading" and "premath" skills when they enter kindergarten, whereas children from middle-class families may be as much as 18 months ahead of their grade level. That means, Time says, that the "achievement gap" between the two groups of 5-year-olds can be as much as three years. And, the writer continues, recent studies have shown that if students from low-income families haven't caught up to their grade level by the third grade, "they may never catch up."

The 32-page report talks about "envisioning the future of "pre-K" (pre-kindergarten) education and offers "pathways" to get there, but its basic conclusion is this: America's education system has to start educating the nation's children at an earlier age in a thoughtful, coordinated way.

One way to do that is described in an earlier Pew report that is linked to the new report and bears the unfortunately cumbersome title, "Lessons in Early Learning: Building an Integrated Pre-K-12 System in Montgomery County Public Schools." That 24-page report, released in August 2010, is a revelation - a detailed "road map," as one person described it - for overhauling, refocusing and kick-starting America's ailing public school system into the 21st century.

Montgomery County is in Maryland and is north of Washington, D.C., and southwest of Baltimore. It has the country's highest percentage of residents with post-graduate degrees and has a median annual income of more than $91,000 but is only 52 percent white, with African-Americans, Asians and Latinos/Hispanics making up most of the rest. Montgomery County Public Schools, which enrolls 140,000 students representing more than 164 countries, is the county's second-largest employer with nearly 21,000 employees (the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services employs nearly twice that number).

Blessed in 1999 by the arrival of a dynamic superintendent named Jerry Weast, the school district set about integrating a high-quality early learning program into the school system with the goal of creating an integrated, comprehensive "pre-K-12" plan. The result? Almost 90 percent of kindergartners now enter first grade with "essential early literacy skills." Nearly 88 percent of third-graders read proficiently. And about 90 percent of high school seniors graduate from high school, with about 77 percent going on to enroll in college.

Perhaps most markedly, achievement gaps between different ethnic and racial groups declined by double digits across all grade levels - and that at a time when the number of "English language-learners" more than doubled and the number of students eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches increased by 44 percent.

There are a number of keys to how Weast and his staff were able to achieve those accomplishments, including assuming that all children can succeed academically; setting ambitious goals (such as having 80 percent of all students "ready for college" by 2014); aligning everything from pre-kindergarten through grade 12 with "Seven Keys to College Readiness" by working backward from that goal, and certifying, training and paying early education teachers the same as other teachers in the district.

Weast's pithy summation of their success: "Once we fixed the system, the kids were suddenly OK. Same kids, just a different system."

At a time when serious education reform has taken a back seat in most parts of the country to hand-wringing about shrinking taxpayer support, stagnating test scores, teacher layoffs and student dropouts, the Montgomery County story is a huge breath of fresh air. It's one that should be repeated in other school districts in other states, including Oregon.