“[Wefound that] if we created the right wraparound programs, the right preschoolprograms that were strong enough and rigorous enough, that fed into a rigorouspre-K through 3 program that fed into a middle school and a high school thatactually works and inspired as well as prepared the child, you could havemarvelous things happening ... It all starts in the first 720 days -- pre-K, K,1, and 2. If you don’t get those right, the last 720 days -- grades 9, 10, 11,12 -- won’t be right.”
--Dr. JerryWeast
In2011, Dr. Jerry Weast retired after serving for twelve years as Superintendentof the Montgomery County Public Schools, a district just outside Washington,D.C. that was the largest and most diverse school system in Maryland and the 16thlargest district in the nation. During Dr. Weast’s time as Superintendent thecounty underwent a large demographic change, with growing numbers of students ofcolor and students living in poverty. The district adapted by doubling down on strategiesfor helping all of its childrensucceed. Narrowing the achievement gap for the district’s nearly 145,000students during his tenure was a key priority for Dr. Weast, and during thesame time Montgomery County also earned national recognition for achieving thehighest student graduation rate among the nation’s 50 largest school systems. Severalof its high schools consistently rank among the best in the country. As Dr.Weast recently explained in an interview with the Children’s Defense Fund,Montgomery County achieved many of its successful outcomes for its graduatingseniors by deciding from the beginning where they wanted their students to endup as they entered adulthood, and working backwards to build the right path fromtheir earliest years to get them there.
Dr.Weast said he sees children’s education as a chain that begins at birth, includesquality preschool, continues with a quality K-12 school experience, and is thenconnected to college and career training. The county wanted a clearerunderstanding of what links they needed to build at the start so children wouldhave the most success at the end, so they did careful research. They workedclosely with the business community both to determine what kind of educationwould prepare students for the jobs the county’s business leaders wanted tocreate in the future, and to see what the school system could learn from bestpractices in business about successful problem-solving. They obtained data fromthe Department of Labor and the National Student Clearinghouse andcross-matched their graduates against it to identify the children who had goneon to become the most successful adults, and then studied the paths those studentshad followed during school. “And what we found is that there were actuallymilestones that those children all hit, regardless of race or ethnicity orpoverty. For example, we found that they needed to be able to read at somelevel in kindergarten. Well, that demanded that we have an early childhood program.”
Whenthe county began setting goals for kindergarten readiness, only about 30percent of kindergarteners met the standards. The schools shared their newstandards for school readiness with everyone in the county from Head Startprograms to private preschools and child care providers and offered early careproviders curriculum materials and training. A decade into their efforts, even withlarge increases in the number of children living in poverty and children whodidn’t speak English at home, 90 percent of incoming students were ready forkindergarten and 90 percent were leaving kindergarten with the right readingskills -- “and then bingo. They were on a track for success.”
Thedistrict also developed new ways to engage parents and serve families, creating“parent academies” to teach parents how to access school services, arrangingfor local doctors and counselors to volunteer services at trailers stationed atschools, and providing summer feeding programs -- “anything we could do to makethe school the hub.” Eventually parents, educators, business leaders, and evenstudents themselves were all on the same page about where they wanted thecounty’s children to be: “We all worked together as a team, kind of like theold game of Tug the Rope. We all got on the same rope, and we all pulled ... Thesuccess that Montgomery had was due in a major part to listening to theMontgomery County employees, the Montgomery County parents, and putting it in aparticular perspective [so] people could see that we weren’t doing this just tobe do-gooders, but it was an economic imperative. It was an imperative to bringjobs into the community. It was an imperative to help those who are here andwho are about to come.”
It’sa strategy for getting it right right from the start that has had great resultsfor Montgomery County’s children. And as Dr. Weast emphasized, what MontgomeryCounty has done could and should be happening all across the nation: “Everythingthat we did could actually easily be replicated anywhere in the country. Allyou have to do is learn to work together. All you have to do is ask under whatconditions can we get these outcomes. All you have to do is to quit talkingabout it and start doing it, because if you start doing it, you will learn fromyour mistakes ... We have to do this, and it’s going to take every one of uspulling together.”