By Adam Pagnucco.
As promised, MCPS’s unions, the county PTA and MCPS leadership held a joint rally last night outside the executive office building to advocate for fully funding the school system’s huge FY26 operating budget request. After I watched the proceedings, I asked one of the reporters for her take on the event. She said, “The unions hold these all the time, but Monifa McKnight would not have been here.”
Exactly.
When I began writing about the county nearly twenty years ago, MCPS was a political juggernaut. Superintendent Jerry Weast, the system’s great bureaucratic general, had assembled a formidable coalition of unions, the county PTA and the Post editorial board – backed up by his relentless propaganda department – to clobber any politician foolish enough to oppose his budget requests. But Weast met his match in an even more fearsome opponent – the Great Recession – and his era of robust budget increases came to an end. Weast left the system in 2011 and was followed by successors who possessed none of his cunning, ruthlessness or organizational acumen.
The final blow to the Weast coalition occurred in 2016, when the county council offered the school board a substantial budget increase backed by an 8.7% property tax hike on one condition: the board had to reduce previously negotiated raises with its unions. The board agreed, shocking the unions, and a new era of labor-management warfare commenced in MCPS. The Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) underwent a dramatic culture shift from a genteel organization in lockstep with management to a militant, grass-roots group embodied by the toughness of sit-in organizing President Jennifer Martin.
MCPS had become a broken home.
That was definitely not the case last night. Sure, the unions always want full funding. But here was Superintendent Thomas Taylor standing shoulder to shoulder with them. Check out the video of his remarks shown below. There was no daylight between his message and that of labor. This has not been seen since the days of General Weast.
So far in his still-young tenure, Taylor has shown two commendable qualities. First, he is much more open about MCPS’s problems than his predecessors. Second, he does not jealously guard his power. His utter lack of pretense and defensiveness distinguishes him not only from former occupants of the superintendent’s office but also the vast majority of players in county politics. Other superintendents have referred to “collaboration” – perhaps Taylor’s favorite word – in the past. But how many of them have said it while standing next to the president of MCEA (now David Stein), whose head was nodding in concert?
Taylor, Stein and the other stakeholders have rebuilt the MCPS family, at least for now. We shall see how durable that arrangement proves to be. Any married couple can tell you that working together is easier in good times than bad, and bad times are definitely on the way. But the restoration of labor-management cooperation at MCPS offers many benefits going beyond budget advocacy. Employees benefit when management listens, and management is more effective when trusted by labor. It’s still early but the trend line is a positive one.
Taylor is cheered on by labor, an event that would have eluded his immediate predecessors.
And what of the school budget? The MCPS family’s true opponents are not county politicians. Lord knows that the county executive and the county council are happy to spend money when they have it. Instead, the real obstacle to funding MCPS’s request is the ailing status of the economy, a condition that has been deteriorating for years and may now be blown up by the Destroyer in Chief downtown. The family will have to stick together for quite a while before its dinner table is stocked with food for all.