An October piece in MoCo 360 had a headline “MCPS’s Black and brown community presses [MCPS Superintendent Thomas] Taylor on educational inequities.”
At this meeting, concerned parents were looking for solutions to the festering student performance allegedly attributable to race. According to the article, one parent asked if MCPS would allow students to switch schools if their needs aren’t being met at their neighborhood school. Taylor’s response revealed his betrayal:
Programs should be equitable across the district. We should take a step back and look at that from even a bigger picture of: Why go to another school if we could just provide better programming across the county and making sure that folks have that access?
Further in the article Taylor is quoted as saying MCPS needs more resources, that students need anti-racist education, and there will be incremental improvements over time.
This is an example of 100% Allegany County horse____.
Parents, you need to understand something very fundamental. Thomas Taylor is very well compensated appointed official. At $360,000/year plus all sorts of other “deferred compensation,” he is incentivized to keep his job. To keep his job, he needs to appease his superiors, and they are a) the school board and b) the teachers’ union. You pay his salary, but you had no input into his selection, he doesn’t work for you, and he doesn’t work for your students. That is the fundamental disconnect.
If you want school choice (which you should), if you want your students to attend schools every bit has exclusive as the BCC cluster (which you should), if you want to end the red-lining (which you should), then you need to haul in teachers’ union president David Stein and ask him a) why he opposes school choice and b) why he opposed Board of Education candidates who demand school choice. Then you need to ask him why he opposes school choice even when students in Camden, NJ’s failing elementary schools are now catching up to their wealthier peers after the introduction of charter schools in 2012. (There are many other examples of successful charter schools.)
Parents, do you really, really think there is school inequity because your children are black or brown? Hardly. There is school inequity because your children are locked out of high-performing schools by the teachers’ union and the Board of Education who deny school choice. Your children deserve much better than what the teachers’ union gives them.
Tell Superintendent Thomas Taylor that he can keep his salary and stay at home to play video games—he’d be doing less damage. Instead, demand that David Stein and the teachers’ union “allow” school choice and school vouchers. After all, your property taxes are paying for the schools, so you deserve a voice that is louder than Taylor’s, Stein’s, or the seven barely legitimate members of the Board of Education. You will be richly rewarded for the effort, because within five years your child’s school will be every bit as good as anywhere in the BCC cluster.
