ROCKVILLE, Md. — While Montgomery County public school students savor the summer by squeezing in as much fun as they can before school starts again, the school system’s new superintendent is busy already.
Jack Smith has been meeting with principals, planning ahead and hopping on the school system’s interschool mail truck on its daily runs. Thanks to the mini-field trips, he has been to 150 schools so far.
“And I’ll finish up with the other 54 in the next three weeks,” he said.
What’s the value of that experience?
“It gave me a chance to visit all the communities, all the areas around the schools,” Smith said, adding that it gave him the chance to talk informally with staffers in the schools during his unannounced visits.
Smith comes to Montgomery County Public Schools at a period of change: There’s increasing pressure to close the nagging achievement gap that’s left many Latino and African-American students lagging behind their peers.
A county report issued two years ago found the gap’s fault lines crossed race and included income disparities as well, with a noticeable achievement gap between schools with high rates of poverty and those whose students were better off economically.
Smith is confident as he outlines his twin goals — “to maintain the excellence in academic achievement and learning that Montgomery County’s had, and to strengthen the equity, so that more students have higher levels of performance.”
Exactly how will he do that? Smith says focus will be key.
“Knowing the data is like knowing the temperature in this room all day,” he said.
Smith says accumulating the data is one thing, but applying what the data tell you is another.
Without outlining what metrics he’d use to achieve the goal of boosting performance among struggling students while giving high achievers what they need to excel, Smith said recording progress “cannot happen just at the end of the end of the year when we’ve given a state test. It has to happen all the time, in each classroom, across each school building.”
He adds that the central office has to provide the backup that teachers and principals need.
Smith says he’s been soliciting input from principals and will do the same with teachers. So far, what he’s hearing confirms his belief that added focus on closing the achievement gap is needed.
Smith says the message from principals is, “We need to be focused as a school system, and we need to it to be very clear to us what our targets are — what we’re working towards.”
Smith makes it clear the task ahead is not an easy one.
“But we have to do it. And we have to never, ever, ever give up,” he said.
Before being unanimously approved by the Montgomery County School Board in February, Smith was the interim state superintendent of Maryland schools and superintendent of Calvert County Public Schools.
