By Kira Yates ’16

A report from Montgomery County’s Office of Legislative Oversight (OLO) released on April 8 highlights MCPS’s widening achievement gap, prompted Superintendent Joshua Starr to address the report after the issue received a lot of media attention, including coverage in the Washington Post.

On April 27, the Minority Scholars Program, currently implemented in 10 high schools, marched into downtown Rockville to protest the MCPS’ widening achievement gap.

The OLO report broke down MCPS high schools into two categories.  The first is consortia and consortia-like schools, which are high-poverty schools.  The Northeast Consortium consists of Blake, Paint Branch and Springbrook, while the Downcounty Consortium includes Blair, Northwood, Kennedy, Einstein and Wheaton.  The consortia-like schools are Gaithersburg, Watkins Mill and Seneca Valley.  The other category, non-consortia schools, is considered low-poverty.

The report highlighted two main issues the county should focus on the most.  The first issue was integrating Montgomery County’s high schools.  One table provided in the report shows the distribution of High School students by race.  White enrollment in 2013 in consortia and consortia like schools was only 19.7 percent, but was 80.3 percent in non-consortia schools.  In the same year, Black enrollment in consortia and consortia-like high schools was 64.3 percent and only 37.5 percent in non- consortia schools.   The report concluded, “These finding suggest that MCPS’ high-poverty and low-poverty high schools are increasingly becoming segregated by race and ethnicity.”

The second main issue addressed in the report is the need to narrow the achievement gap between low and high poverty schools.  According to the report’s “Trends in the MCPS High School Achievement Gap,” only 34.7 percent of students who take an AP exam in a consortia or consortia-like school receive a grade of three of high.  In non- consortia schools, however, 62.6 percent of students who take an AP exam score a three or higher.  This 27.9 percent difference led to the conclusion that “these stark difference in performance by school type suggest stark differences in the high school experiences of students by school type.”

In a letter responding to the OLO report, Starr defended MCPS stating, “We do not take any issue with the facts as presented in the report, but we have strong reservations that the overall findings and outcomes presented in the follow-up report lack proper context.”  Starr then offered some context that he felt would have more fairly portrayed the information such as the uneven distribution of wealth in Montgomery County and the limited geographic area of consortia high schools.