By Adam Pagnucco.
With controversy over the recent sexual harassment scandal continuing to roil both the community and MCPS’s workforce, attention is increasingly focused on working conditions in the school system. Is MCPS a good place to work? What do MCPS employees think about their employer?
It turns out that MCPS measures this and discloses the results. MCPS has administered staff climate surveys in FY17-19 and 23. They have also administered parental engagement surveys in FY13-19. The school based staff results are broken out by school and can be found here. A memo to the school board in July discusses the FY23 survey and additionally provides data on central office employees.
This series discusses some of these results for school employees and reveals that MCPS – like most organizations with more than 20,000 employees – is complicated. On some measures, large majorities of employees provided positive responses about their workplace. On other measures, the results are less positive. The results also vary by school although sample size is a constraint. This suggests that the school system has strengths and weaknesses as most workplaces do. It’s an interesting data set and I hope MCPS continues this work.
Before we start, let’s acknowledge the fact that MCPS performs and discloses this work at all. More government entities should do this and do it regularly. I located a similar survey by county government in 2019 but I have not found another since then. (Readers, if you can correct me, I will post a link to a new one!)
Now to the data. In FY23, 8,638 school based employees and 1,326 central office employees responded to the survey. That’s roughly 40% of their employees. In other years, the surveys have also collected thousands of responses. The FY23 survey asks for school/central office status, race and union and poses 21 questions on various aspects of work environment.
After using the same questions in three consecutive fiscal/school years (FY17-19), MCPS did not use the survey over the next three years and implemented a new set of questions in FY23. That makes longitudinal comparison impossible, so at least using this survey, MCPS cannot answer whether conditions are improving or declining. That’s a major problem.
Another issue is that MCPS could have asked more detailed demographic questions such as gender, age, tenure and work classification. That would make the data richer and enable more crosstabs.
Finally, multiple questions sometimes ask the same things or close to it. For example, question 5 asks, “Overall, how positive is the working environment at your school?” and question 18 asks exactly the same thing. Question 13 asks, “During the past week, how often did you feel safe at work?” and question 21 asks, “How safe do you feel in your school?” The latter two questions produced similar results. These questions suggest that the survey could have benefited from review prior to going out to employees.
We will begin exploring the FY23 data in Part Two.