by Will Gavett ’12

On October 18, the new superintendent of MCPS, Joshua Starr, held a press conference at the MCPS Board of Education with the student press concerning his new role and how he plans to improve the county’s academic performance. Starr particularly addressed the problem of too much variability amongst schools and how he plans to alleviate this issue.

“Variability is probably the biggest challenge before us … There are differences within and between schools and in performance and access and things like that, and not every school should look and be exactly the same, but at the same time there needs to a kind of level of excellence,” explained Starr.

This issue of inconsistency mostly has to do with the large disparity in achievement between certain schools in MCPS. Starr plans to solve this question of differences in excellence amongst schools by comparing the student performance at each school and seeing how some schools in the county are doing really well while other schools in the country aren’t doing so well.

“[One objective I’m working on] goes back to the notion of variability and low performance differentiation. Are the schools that really need the support to get better really getting the support in they way they need it … Does everyone understand how schools that are struggling are getting supported?” asked Starr as he elaborated on the importance of visiting schools around MCPS to find out their particular needs.

When Starr visits schools, he is not concerned with what is being taught but how it is being taught. He believes that there is not a student-learning problem in MCPS, but a teacher-learning problem, which is where the idea of professional development comes into play.

“Educators need to get better at their jobs, I need to get better at my job. Everybody needs to get better at what they are doing, which doesn’t mean they’re bad. They just need to get better. So how do we do that? How do we learn? And that’s what professional development is,” Starr clarified.

However, teacher improvement is not the only aspect Starr planned to work on to lower variability among schools. He also expressed a desire to increase the school system’s “say-do ratio.” The say-do ratio compares a school’s administration and staff saying they are going to do something to how often they actually follow through, and if they can’t then they must be able to explain why. Starr believes it is really easy for a school or a county to say they are going to accomplish a lot of things, but it is more difficult to implement them.

“For the school system, it’s important that we follow through on what we say we’re going to do, and the way to do that is to make sure expectations are really clear,” Starr said as he reiterated his desire for MCPS to follow through on their policies more often.