An Open Letter to MCPS Teachers

From Julie Greenberg
Member, MCEA and MCFT
 Teacher, Blair High School Math Department
Chair, Sheldon Fishman for BoE Steering Committee

I am an MCEA member working to elect a Board of Education candidate who did not receive MCEA's endorsement. Why am I supporting Sheldon Fishman and even chairing his campaign steering committee? The reason has nothing to do with which candidate, Sheldon Fishman or Valerie Ervin-MCEA's choice-would support a fair contract, since both would do so. Rather, it relates to these candidates' contrasting perceptions of teachers and the work that we do, as well as major policy differences based on those perceptions.

Sheldon has many ideas about how to improve educational outcomes, but I do not think he has made a single public statement in his twenty-plus years as an MCPS parent, PTA officer, and civic activist that isn't flattering to teachers and their work.  

This is not the case with Ms. Ervin, who has frequently made public statements that hold teachers and principals individually and collectively responsible for the minority underachievement problem that we call the "achievement gap."

In fact, you and I know that this difficult and multi-faceted problem is one we've been working hard to solve for many years. But Ms. Ervin has repeatedly criticized elementary schools for "sorting" students in a way that she claims destroys the educational futures of many:  "I think there is a correlation between the growing achievement gap and the grouping practices we have in Montgomery County," she has stated. "Once a child is put in a group in second grade, they have no chance to move out" (Gazette, Feb. 18, 2004). Moreover, she has apparently convinced her employer, County Council member George Leventhal, that teachers are sorting students by color, because Mr. Leventhal sent a March 1, 2004 email to the Takoma Voice newpaper's discussion list stating, "[Ms. Ervin] is an effective advocate for those children who are stereotyped and tracked by the school system as 'low achievers' as early as second grade because of their ethnicity."

Many elementary school teachers would paint a different picture, one much closer to that described by Marc Elrich of Rolling Terrrace Elementary School in An MCPS Elementary School Teacher’s Perspective on “Tracking”.

Ms. Ervin testified before the Board of Education several years ago on the alleged "tracking" of minority students into classes that deny them good instruction. Frustrating as it is for parents if student placement decisions are inappropriate (and I've felt this frustration myself), I do not believe that more than a tiny percentage of MCPS teachers are acting with racist intent or assumptions in making such decisions. My perception is supported by nationwide research  indicating that teachers rely above all on information on past performance to place students (see The Black White Test Score Gap, published by The Brookings Institution).

Several years ago Ms. Ervin co-founded a group called the Montgomery County Education Forum (MCEF), which she co-chaired until this past spring. A 2002 MCEF report on "tracking" that was still being distributed at a spring 2004 MCEF meeting (at which Ms. Ervin was an active participant) can reasonably be regarded as expressing her own views-views which may not have come out during the endorsement process. In a typically radical statement, the report comments, "Sadly, African American, Latino and low-income students being assigned to the 'general prison population' has not outraged our school system or the community as a whole" (p. 3). Elsewhere the report claims that a substantial number of honors classes have exactly the same content as grade-level classes and exist merely to separate students "for the sake of separation" (page 20), and calls for their abolition.

In a more recent statement (April 2004), MCEF says that "While some students have access to the best programs, instruction and resources, about 70 to 75 percent of MCPS students are being 'tracked out' of [the best] programs, instruction, and resources, and into academic failure."
 
This simply does not describe my teaching or the school system in which I have taught for the past decade. While our success in boosting minority achievement has certainly not been what we hoped, it is manifestly unfair to assert that we are depriving 70 to 75 per cent of our students of a good education through tracking.

Although Ms. Ervin has not been very explicit recently about her remedies for the problem of minority underachievement-the focus of her campaign-she appears to advocate that all classes be taught at the same level, presumably the highest level currently taught. She strongly endorsed this model of instruction when it was tried at Silver Spring International Middle School before the school imploded in the CTBS cheating scandal.  MCEF has brought administrators from a very small, very affluent, and relatively homogenous school district that has adopted such a policy to speak in Montgomery County twice in the last year.

Ms. Ervin's theory is that once we offer underachieving minority students the instruction which she alleges has been withheld from them and reserved for white and Asian students, the achievement gap will close. If only it were this easy! The achievement gap is a nationwide problem that has proved very resistant to quick fixes. The "leveling up" model has been tried in many schools throughout the U.S. for almost 20 years now and has failed in all but a few very special settings. It does not work in very diverse, often very crowded classrooms like ours. (If I thought it could work in MCPS classrooms, I would not have spent countless hours of personal time on the Escalante Charter School applications, which proposed "leveling up" in a very small and supportive learning community.)  

Sheldon is very explicit about how he wants to raise the academic performance of all students, and particularly underperforming minorities. Please refer to "Sheldon Fishman and Valerie Ervin: A Comparison" and "My Principled Vision of Our Public Schools" to judge for yourself whether his recommendations aren't the kind of reforms you've thought of yourself.

Ms. Ervin is of course welcome to run for the school board and advance her arguments about racism and "leveling up." Teachers, and the community as a whole, must be sensitive to perceptions of racism to ensure that genuine racism does not have an opportunity to raise its head. But as an MCEA member, I am frankly sorry that the union endorsed a candidate who unfairly holds teachers responsible for minority underachievement, and I do not see why teachers should campaign for that candidate. Sheldon Fishman was endorsed by MCEA in the 1992 Board of Education race, and he has only improved since. If he is elected, teachers and the MCEA will have a steadfast friend on the Board.