Along with who pays what in taxes and who receives how much for providing what contracted goods and services, employee compensation data is among the most basic and important information taxpayers need to assess independently the performance of their public servants. What better time to start than the first day of the new school year?Thus, The Washington Examiner today posts the second entry in the newspaper’s Examiner Community Action Network — a partial compensation database for the 21,497 employees of the Montgomery County Public Schools. The database can be accessed at www.examiner.com/montgomery_county_public_schools_salaries.xls. Previously, the Fairfax County government work force salary database was posted at http://www.examiner.com/FairfaxCountySalary.
Numerous officials within and a fair number of experts without MCPS over the years have touted the system as one of the nation’s best public school operations. In an age of diversifying enrollment, a maddeningly persistent academic achievement gap and many other challenges, however, it is even more important that Montgomery County parents and taxpayers have all of the data and other information they need — unfiltered by officials — to reach their own conclusions about the current performance of MCPS.
The database is organized alphabetically to make it easy to locate specific individuals of interest, each of which is listed with title and hire date. Note that the salary data includes only base salary. Other compensation such as stipends for extracurricular and other duties is not included.
We describe it as a “partial compensation database” because of what MCPS refused to provide in response to The Examiner’s request. Besides salary, we asked for other compensation, the amount of tax dollars paid towards retirement and health benefits for the current year-to-date, plus the gender, age and ethnicity of each employee.
But Brian Edwards, MCPS public information director, refused, citing a particularly novel interpretation of Maryland’s Public Information Act which otherwise requires that “records regarding the salaries, bonuses, and the amount of a monetary performance award of public employees may not be withheld as personnel records.” The Examiner continues to “dialogue” with Edwards on these issues.
Why is this significant? Because, to choose just one example, the age/gender/ethnicity data Edwards keeps behind closed doors is essential for enabling parents and taxpayers to assess for themselves whether MCPS’s work force looks like the people of Montgomery County. Like the rest of the Washington region, Montgomery County’s population is increasingly diverse, as is the student population. We asked for that data to enable independent answers to questions like whether MCPS has hired, trained and advanced a sufficiently diverse work force. MCPS officials talk a lot about diversity, but they seem fearful of outsiders having access to a critical portion of the data needed to assess their actions.
Giving “outsiders” — i.e. taxpayers, parents and others — access to critical data and other information is the fundamental purpose of The Examiner Community Action Network. For more information on ECAN — which is very much a work in progress — e-mail [email protected].
