In 10 years on the job, Montgomery County Superintendent Jerry Weast has watched graduation rates slip, SAT scores decline and the racial achievement gap linger.
His school system — once hailed as the best in the Washington area and among the top in the nation — has fallen by some measures in comparison with its neighbors in Fairfax County, Howard and Calvert counties.
Now, Weast is asking the County Council for nearly $2.2 billion to maintain his 142,000-student district — double the price tag when he arrived in 1999 and among the highest per-pupil expenditures in the United States. And like a marriage that has fallen on tough times, the financial pressures have forced latent complaints to the surface.
Some of the jabs concern his spending habits.
“When the county alone is spending $11,000, or $11,000-plus, on each student, we should be in a different place,” said Councilwoman Valerie Ervin, chairwoman of the education committee and a former school board member.
Other criticisms concern Weast’s attitude.
“He’s been excessively political and heavy-handed,” said Phil Andrews, the only council member to have served throughout Weast’s tenure. “It is simply wrong for him to suggest that the system will go downhill if he doesn’t get the money he’s asking for.”
And others worry about how he’s handling the kids.
“Every student has to count,” said Kay Romero, president of the county’s PTA. “When one student leaves without a diploma, then there has been a school system failure for that particular student. Dr. Weast has to acknowledge that and do something about it.”
Weast declined through a spokesman to be interviewed for this article.
But according to his carefully crafted narrative — one that has attracted national accolades despite doubts at home — he has done plenty. Graduation rates may be falling, he says, but the county has been challenged by unprecedented growth in low-income and non-English-speaking students, and their graduation rates still remain above national averages. SAT scores may be down, but participation is up, and the number of students taking college-level Advanced Placement classes has nearly quadrupled. Among black and Hispanic students, AP participation has multiplied nearly tenfold.
In other words, and in a phrase that caused Weast some embarrassment in 2008, his district is “the cream of the crap” — or pretty good, considering that public education throughout the country ought to be much better.
“What he has done has definitely been worth the doubling of the cost,” said Councilman Mike Knapp, citing the decade’s demographic changes, which have polarized wealth in the county. “Undoubtedly, without the increases, you’d have seen far more variability in test scores and in the graduation rate, and that would’ve been a huge problem for the people in this county.”
But despite the influx of dollars, and despite Weast’s own almost oppressive optimism, his is a lesson familiar to urbanizing districts across the country: The successes, at best, are incomplete.
A controversial and expensive move in the early part of the decade to shrink class size in low-income elementary schools did produce well-publicized gains in test scores, for example. But those early gains have not kept up as the students have grown older.
By the time the 2004 class of third-graders reached eighth grade last year, reading scores improved across demographic groups, but their math scores diverged. White and Asian students stayed about the same, with about 90 percent of them passing standardized math tests by 2009. But not even 60 percent of their black and Hispanic peers achieved the same results, falling almost 10 percentage points since their third-grade highs.
Similar patterns exist at the high school level, where achievement gaps linger on standardized tests required for graduation.
The question left for the County Council, staring at Weast’s bold request, is whether incomplete gains sold as progress are good enough.
“A lot of people see him as a savior,” Ervin said. “I see him as someone who’s been very clever with the data.”
