By Adam Pagnucco.
The county council’s Office of Legislative Oversight (OLO) is the council’s in-house think tank. Its responsibilities include regularly issuing deep dive reports on policy issues of interest to the council. While little-known to the public, they (along with the work of the Planning Department) contain some of the most detailed and thoughtful analyses of county programs available at the level of local jurisdictions. And now a new report makes startling charges against MCPS. It includes these two findings:
“MCPS’ budgeting and staffing practices center and privilege White students.”
“MCPS’ budgeting and staffing practices disproportionately harm Black and Latinx students.”
Yes, you read those correctly. Those quotes do not come from a community activist group. They come from an office of the county’s legislative branch that is funded by taxpayers.
Are these findings right?
Let’s dig into the report itself. It’s hugely complicated because, well, MCPS is hugely complicated and so is public education. The report studies four specialized MCPS programs designed to help specific service groups of students: EML (emergent multi-lingual learners), SPED (students with disabilities, or special education), FARMs (students eligible for free and reduced price meals) and GT (gifted and talented students). All four programs receive allocations of resources. Indeed, MCPS makes funding decisions for individual schools partially on the basis of their FARMs and EML student populations. (See Appendix C of the MCPS operating budget for more details on how that works.)
The report describes the racial distributions of students serviced by each of the four programs. More than 80% of the students serviced by EML and FARMS are Black or Latinx (with the latter accounting for almost three-quarters of EML students) while Whites are less than 5% of either group. Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of GT students are White or Asian. Special education students have a demographic distribution that is much closer to the general student population. For example, Whites are 22% of special education students and 24% of all students. Special education is therefore more targeted at White students than either EML or FARMs.
The report then notes that performance outcomes – tests, graduation rates, dropout rates – are lower for students in EML, FARMs and special education than students not in those programs, but they are particularly low in EML. FARMs and special education program outcomes are roughly comparable on most measures.
Finally, the report notes disparities in spending per student for each of these programs. In FY26, $29,902 per student was spent on special education, $4,006 per student was spent on EML and $1,440 per student was spent on compensatory education (FARMs). Let’s remember that EML and FARMs are more than 80% Black and Brown while special education has a White percentage approaching the overall student population.
Furthermore, the report authors could not obtain spending data on gifted and talented (GT) students, who are almost two-thirds White and Asian. The report commented, “…MCPS does not report its school-based spending on GT programs separate from what it spends on general education. Moreover, MCPS did not respond to OLO staff requests for this data. As such, annual spending on GT programs within MCPS remains unmarked and unknown.”
The intersection between spending, race and outcomes prompted these statements in the report.
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MCPS’ budgeting and staffing practices prioritize special education over EML and compensatory education [FARMs] programs while leaving unmarked what is spent on GT education. Among the three service group programs with budget data, the one that serves a significant portion of White students is the best funded program by many degrees: special education. Additionally, MCPS does not publish program budget data for the service group program that disproportionately serves White students: GT education…
Given MCPS’ under-funding of EML and compensatory education programs relative to student need compared to its robust funding of special education programs, MCPS’ inequitable budgeting practices disproportionately harm Latinx and Black students who are more likely to depend on EML and compensatory education programs. The under-funding of EML and compensatory education programs also disadvantages Black and Latinx students regardless of their FARMS or EML status because they are more likely to attend high FARMS schools with high levels of unmet needs due to the under-funding of EML and compensatory education programs.
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Given the equity-driven nature of MoCo politics, this is a political hand grenade.
Now, the report has deficiencies which MCPS is sure to target when it responds. First, while the report mentions several times that MCPS does not allocate money explicitly on the basis of race, it fails to mention that federal law and a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision place restrictions on the distribution of educational benefits on racial criteria, a situation that has become even more restrictive under the Trump administration. Any efforts by MCPS to increase racial targeting of funding face legal obstacles, and county residents are not shy about suing MCPS.
Second, MCPS’s decisions on special education spending are not made in a vacuum but occur in a web of federal and state mandates. And once again, litigious parents are not unheard of in MoCo.
Third, the report recommends that the county council act in ways that exceed its authority under state law, such as requiring that MCPS funding increases be targeted to EML and FARMs programs. State law only permits county councils and commissions to appropriate funding for specific expenditure categories like administration, instructional salaries, special education, maintenance of plant and the like. Local legislative bodies have no further line item authority over school budgets. This is well known to both the council and MCPS and the report’s authors should have demonstrated awareness of that.
And so to the extent that the report’s issues are a problem – and the funding disparities that it identifies are definitely eye-opening! – the entities with the authority to deal with them are the school board and the state.
That said, the politics around this issue are undeniably explosive. Neither MCPS nor elected officials will enjoy a sectarian conflict between advocates for special education students and Black and Brown students, which is the natural extension of the report’s findings. The issue could influence debate on the next round of MCPS’s operating and capital budgets, each of which are bound to be hefty requests. Outside groups will definitely want to play. And let’s remember that the chair of the council’s Education and Culture Committee, Will Jawando, is the Democratic nominee for county executive.
Let the debate over equity in MCPS begin… again!