By Adam Pagnucco.
Class size. It’s one of the key phrases in MoCo politics. Whenever school funding comes up, the subject of class size is raised right along with it. The question is not an academic one, but rather involves spending plans of tens of millions of dollars or more. In fact, MCPS Superintendent Thomas Taylor is justifying his new recommended operating budget, which calls for a 5% spending increase despite falling enrollment, in part by claiming that it cuts class size in elementary schools.
That raises an important question.
How well does MCPS measure class size?
County Executive Marc Elrich addressed this issue in his December 23 media briefing. When Bethesda Today reporter Ceoli Jacoby asked Elrich about the fact that MCPS is requesting a budget increase while its enrollment is declining, he stated the following.
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County Executive Marc Elrich discussing MCPS class size measures at a December 23 media briefing.
So just because enrollment trends down doesn’t mean you need fewer teachers. You know, if you took the, I put it they’re down about 2600 students and you spread that over 220 schools or whatever it is you’re talking about, ten kids a school, you’re not going to see any real decrease in the number of staff you need based on those level of changes. There are some schools that actually are probably seeing increases while other schools are seeing decreases. So you’re not really at a point where you’re triggering any significant savings in personnel just because of the downward enrollment.
It might be different at the point that you’re talking about 15 or 20,000 fewer students. But at this point, I don’t think it’s enough to expect much meaningful in the way of staff reduction.
And one of the things he’s [Taylor] pointed out – this is another example of how misinformation generously provided by the school system for years, which he’s trying to undo – when the council did not fully fund the budget a couple years ago, they were told by the school system, well, this will only increase class size by about one student. And it turned out it increased class size more than one student.
And that’s because the school system’s way they used to tell us what the class size was, they would take all the staff in the building that were teachers and they divide that into the number of students. What you find out later is not everybody in the school was teaching and some of the people they counted as teachers were in fact probably teachers, but they were not classroom teachers. And so they artificially deflated the number of the size of the classrooms when everybody knew it wasn’t true.
I knew it wasn’t true. I complained about it. I talked to the teachers union. We talked to teachers in classrooms. They said it wasn’t true. But they persisted in the fairy tale and people bought the fairy tale.
So what’s the nice thing about Doctor Taylor right now is we’re actually dealing with real numbers and some level of transparency. That’s not been school practice for a very, very long time.
In fact, at no time did I remember when this place was transparent.
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Elrich is no ordinary observer of MCPS. He has been an elected official at the county level for 20 years and is a former MCPS classroom teacher. Additionally, his critiques of MCPS data have been echoed by many others for many years.
So how does MCPS actually measure class size? We will start exploring that next.