Agreed. Not sure this is on Harris, though. Transparency was a big part of her platform when first elected, but, again, she'd need 3 of the other 6 to feel the same on that to really change the BOE approach. |
McKnight said "Officers from the Board of Education indicated last week their desire for me to step away from my role as superintendent" on January 22nd. |
It's not politics. It's a personnel matter that is subject to privacy laws. I am sure that those who were instrumental in moving McKnight out would like to be more transparent, but they are prohibited from doing so. |
I moved elsewhere and check this forum every couple months out of...I don't know. Nostalgia isn't the right word but neither is schadenfreude. I was absolutely stunned at how much better the public school system was in the southern state that we moved to-- I had blindly believed that MCPS must be great. We no longer need to hire tutors and my youngest is much, much better educated than my oldest that mostly went through MCPS. |
Different bag from normal HR/personnel, as the Sup is under contract to the BOE. Even if the nature of the action were such that details were subject to privacy-related statute, the BOE could have held the vote to terminate the contract in public view. Politics. |
It would have served their purposes to do so; yet, the BOE did not, because it was a confidential process. |
An ouster very much could have been a public process. It did not serve their purposes to do so publicly, however (political liability/alienation of a bloc), so they chose to handle it in a way that provided a shield of confidentiality and plausible deniability. |
o So of the alternative candidates, who would be better at getting books back in the classrooms? Montoya? Kim? Amy others? |
Kim, I think. I wouldn't want an entire BoE made up of Kims, but I think having ONE person who is laser focused on raising academic standards would be a game-changer. We have to expect more of these kids, and expecting a middle schooler to be able to finish a novel is not some out-of-touch rich person standard. She won't win, though. Honestly, I think Harris will win again, but I'm hopeful that she comes out of this election with a better appreciation for what her constituents want and need. |
That expectation already exists, officially. Individual schools/teachers may not be sticking to the guidelines, but MCPS English 6, 7, and 8 are all supposed to include "Study of one full-length text per marking period (novel, play, or non-fiction text)" https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10rXMartGmyDZDMhf0P-U0W18It8pMd4F?usp=sharing |
My kid read more books in 4th grade CES than all of MS. It was a joke. |
Given her continued condescension and disdain for constituent feedback, I don't know why you're holding onto that hope. |
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Right. I had one kid go through CES and Eastern, and another go through regular ES and TPMS. The older one was assigned a diverse selection of books, some of which he hated (The Giver, The Pearl, Number the Stars) and some of which he loved (Outsiders, Hobbit). The one who didn't have access to that enriched literacy curriculum never read a full novel in ES or MS ELA class. She read novels in HIGH, but not English. If you have kids in the magnets, I think you might not know how terrible the StudySync curriculum is/was, and why parents are so frustrated. |
Under the law, you’re right. But should the law give a $300k executive the same privacy protections than it gives a $60k teacher? I argue that it shouldn’t because at the highest levels, the public interest trumps employee privacy. |