By Adam Pagnucco.
One of the most influential institutions in our county is the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA), which represents more than 14,000 classroom teachers, guidance counselors, speech pathologists, media specialists, and other non-supervisory certified educators in MCPS. MCEA is not only a very large labor union; it is also very active in state and local politics. Its Apple Ballot is a prized endorsement in county elections and was the subject of my very first post way back in 2006.
MCEA, like its parent affiliate, the National Education Association, is unusual in the labor movement because it imposes term limits for its elected leadership. Its current president is Jennifer Martin, an English teacher who worked in MCPS for 20 years. Taking office in August 2021, Martin has had to deal with the pandemic, teacher shortages, ups and downs with management and the 2022 elections – and that’s just so far. I knew three of her predecessors – Bonnie Cullison, Doug Prouty and Chris Lloyd – and none of them had such a dramatic introduction to the job.
MCPS is at a critical point in its history and that makes MCEA more important than ever. President Martin has graciously agreed to the following interview. Let’s get to our questions and her answers!
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Q: Let’s start with your career in education. Why did you become a teacher and why did you become active in MCEA?
My career path is not a straight one, and I’m deeply grateful for the twists and turns it took to get me here. Every part of the journey has helped prepare for my current role as a union president.
I’m a Takoma Park girl, a Blair graduate who went first to Montgomery College, then finished with a BA in English from Goucher (when it was still a women’s college). At Goucher I had the chance to really find my voice and gain confidence to step up for leadership roles.
Before graduate school I had a variety of jobs, including as a research associate for the U.S. Congress and Polaroid Corporation. I had shied away from teaching as being too predictable a choice for a woman with a liberal arts degree.
My parents were both artists and educators, so my first major act of rebellion was to apply to graduate business programs. At Wharton I got to use the non-dominant side of my brain to develop an understanding of finance and economics. Along the way I was really drawn to public policy—especially regarding public education.
My story of becoming a teacher is a common one: as my three children started school, I began volunteering in the classroom. This led me to take a job as a teacher’s aide and within a few months, at the urging of a veteran teacher, I was enrolled in a master’s program sponsored by MCPS at Johns Hopkins for mid-career folks.
My years in the classroom as an English teacher were exhilarating and exhausting. In the classroom you are in sales every day, pitching something you know is of priceless value to a group of often skeptical or uninterested customers, your students. The skill of the teacher is to infect them with your own enthusiasm for the subject, to make them understand how much you care about them and respect them as individuals, and to get them to recognize the effort to learn is worth it.
I’ve taught English in every grade 6-12, from special education inclusion classes to Advanced Placement, and there are joys and struggles at every level. When my own energy has flagged, I am buoyed by the amazing teaching talent around me. My colleagues’ humor, dedication and creativity are inspiring.
As soon as I became a teacher, I helped when it was time to hand out Apple Ballots at the polls on Election Day, but it was only about ten years ago that I decided to take a more active role in MCEA. Each school and worksite in MCPS has union representatives, and when no one was stepping up to serve at my high school, I volunteered.
At my first representative assembly, I was thrilled to see that the union really empowered educators to be heard by the policy makers in our county and state. At the end of the meeting a union staffer, who knew I was an English teacher, tapped me to help with some community messaging. From that time on I was all in.
Q: COVID imposed huge strains on public schools all over the nation. Now that vaccinations are widespread (at least in our county) and in-person instruction has resumed, what is the current state of education in MCPS?
Educators and students have learned to live with COVID as background noise, especially at school. While there is still anxiety about the risks of severe illness or “long COVID,” most educators and students I speak with are grateful that we are returning to something that feels close to the school experience before the pandemic. Some students and staff still mask routinely, and the overwhelming majority of MCEA members have received at least the initial recommended vaccinations. The union encourages everyone who is eligible for vaccination or boosters to get the doses most recently recommended by the CDC and local health officials.
Experts are warning it will take years for students to recover from the learning disruption caused by the pandemic. We certainly have seen troubling setbacks in math and literacy scores here, especially for our students in poverty, those receiving special education services, and Black and Latinx students. But these problems are not new or unique to Montgomery County. COVID has simply brought existing problems into higher relief. And MCEA members are working diligently to close opportunity gaps and bring our students back on track for academic success.
There was a report issued recently from the National Center for Educational Statistics, which administers the National Assessment of Academic Progress (NAEP) and it found student test scores declined significantly across the country due to COVID, especially in math. And while some complain that moving to virtual learning during the worst of the pandemic exacerbated learning disruptions, the NAEP scores showed that school systems that moved on-line did not necessarily have worse scores than schools in states like Florida or Texas that remained open.
COVID was the straw that broke the camel’s back for many educators. The difficult and dangerous working conditions caused a record number of educators in MCPS to choose to retire or resign in 2022. And the pipeline of aspiring educators in college programs has been drying up as young people see the profession as less appealing due to crushing workloads and lack of respect.
We’re hiring more and more people as educators who have no education coursework or training in the classroom. Some classes are being taught by long-term substitutes who may not have a background in the subject area. For example, parents recently complained to the Board of Education that the long-term substitutes in the math department at one high school are not able to teach effectively because they lack content knowledge.
There is some good news, however, and reason to remain hopeful. The state has passed the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, which calls for significant reinvestment in our public schools. MCPS has shown courage in conducting the anti-racist audit of the school system, with the goal of addressing institutional barriers and lingering biases. And this year we have the opportunity to negotiate a new agreement between MCPS and MCEA. A good contract will go a long way in boosting morale of MCPS educators.
MCEA’s endorsements in county and school board races in the 2022 general election.
Q: Twenty years ago, MCEA was building a strong, collaborative relationship with MCPS Superintendent Jerry Weast. That is no longer the case with today’s management. Take us through the history here and tell us what went wrong.
Back then MCPS was willing to take the risk of sharing power with the union, and together we created truly innovative structures for teacher professional standards, support, professional development and evaluation. The Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) Program is the last element of those structures that is still operating in true collaboration at this point.
PAR is co-managed by MCPS, MCAAP (the principals’ union) and MCEA. A panel of eight teachers and eight principals are selected separately by each union and approved by the superintendent to serve on her behalf in deciding whether a new, or previously underperforming, teacher is meeting standard following a year of support from a consulting teacher. MCEA’s vice president serves as the panel’s co-chair and is responsible for making the initial communication of a panel decision to the teacher. MCEA is proud to take ownership for setting and upholding high standards for our profession.
I’m reluctant to opine as to why the relationship between MCPS and MCEA has frayed in recent years. Many factors are no doubt in play. I will observe, however, that the people in MCPS who built the collaborative structures twenty years ago are no longer in the system. Those folks understood that power sharing is actually a way to gain power rather than lose it. Jerry Weast recognized that if he worked with us as a trusted partner rather than an obstacle, he could avoid public fights by working through trouble spots with us before launching a new initiative. And because he made sure teachers economic needs were reflected in his asks, we would have his back when he fought the county council to fully fund his budget.
In addition, MCEA is not interested in the cozy backroom dealing that was perhaps suitable to a service-model union but is not consistent with the kind of union we seek to be today: member-led and more fully democratic (with a small D). Many of us feel that in the Weast years in exchange for promises of wage increases (sometimes unfulfilled) we sacrificed professional autonomy, and the effects of that bad deal have reverberated so that today we are suffering from the worst morale the profession has ever experienced.
All that said, MCEA remains hopeful that we can build a relationship with MCPS where we are truly partners in ensuring the excellence of working conditions and learning conditions in our public schools. This year’s contract negotiations are a chance to develop an agreement that lifts employee morale, improves teacher retention, and addresses the need to attract a new generation of educators. If we achieve such an agreement, that will go a long way to re-establishing trust and true collaboration.
Q: Speak to MCPS parents. Why should we care that MCPS and its employees are having disagreements over labor issues and what can we do about it?
Employees’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions. When teachers are harried, overworked, and forced to focus more on data collection than student engagement in learning, our students suffer. The overwhelming focus on standardized testing has led to increasingly standardized, lock-step curriculum. That has sucked a lot of the joy and creativity out of teaching and learning. It also means that students who need more enrichment opportunities, or more time to master a skill or content, don’t get the differentiation they deserve.
Students benefit from stability. When employee morale is low and turnover is high, both students and parents lose the ability to form lasting and deep relationships with school staff. Students also need to be known by their teachers so that their individual needs and interests are addressed. Classes that are too large, courses that are taught by long-term substitutes who lack subject proficiency, and classrooms filled by provisionally contracted teachers who have no experience with young learners—all these conditions lessen the opportunities for student success and are a growing concern in MCPS.
Parents are a powerful voice in moving education policy in MCPS. MCEA members appreciate having parents who support educators and are willing to speak up for the changes that are needed to address working and learning conditions in schools. We also appreciate it when parents engage with us in conversation so that we know their priorities and can work to include their ideas in our contract negotiations.
Jennifer Martin, right, with MCEA Member Organizer Kember Kane. Credit: MCEA’s Facebook page.
Q: On a grading scale of A to F, give a grade to Montgomery County’s state and county-level politicians on school funding. Do they pass or do they flunk?
I hated grading my students’ work; grades are such a blunt instrument and often don’t reflect what really matters in learning. So, you’ll pardon me if I respond to you in a more nuanced way than the pass/fail approach you suggest.
Our Montgomery delegation to the state has been diligent and successful in passing the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, a law that promises to bring renewed investment to public education with the goal of lifting up the teaching profession and improving student achievement. There will be refinements needed in the Blueprint to ensure effective implementation, and we will be relying on our representation in Annapolis to help iron out some of the wrinkles along the way.
MCEA appreciates that the county executive and every member of the current council –and every new council candidate we’ve endorsed—has been quick to connect with us when education issues are being considered, including school funding. Where we’ve been disappointed over the past decade or more is in their willingness to fully fund our schools. Too often the council has used increased state funding to supplant rather than supplement county funding for our schools. As a result, in inflation-adjusted dollars, per pupil spending by the county falls below the level it was in 2002.
Meanwhile, the needs of our students have grown. The effort to keep the same level of excellence for our schools then must be carried by our overburdened educators, in the face of diminishing resources. This underfunding has also resulted in a reduction in real wages for educators in that same period. Novice teachers in MCPS today earn 15% less in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars than they did in 2002. And a recent study by the Economics Policy Institute shows that in Maryland teachers now pay a 20% wage penalty over other professions requiring similar levels of education and training.
While the teacher shortage is a national problem, the solutions must be found at the local level. The members of MCEA are counting on our county officials to step up and invest in our schools so that MCPS becomes a destination employer known for providing educational excellence for every student.
Q: Last question. You were once an English teacher and I could use help with grammar. Do you have any spare time to be an editor for certain wayward bloggers?
Ask me later, Adam– after I retire!