What was the payoff?
Quality has gone up when historically the demographics that would cause white flight have increased: poverty, the number of kids that don’t speak English as their first language.
Weast in his Rockville office .
We set the highest scores in the history of the district. The highest SAT scores. The highest graduation rates. The highest college attendance and college graduation rates — and we have the evidence to prove that.
In fact, we’re now 2 1/2 percent of United States children who check the box that they are African American and are able to get a 3 [out of 5] on an Advanced Placement test. And nearly 1 percent of all of the Latinos in the United States of America who scored a 3 on an AP test came from this system.
But there are still major achievement gaps. Hispanic students, for example, are much less likely to graduate on time than non-Hispanic white students. Black students trail far behind white counterparts on state math tests. Is it realistic to expect such gaps will close?
It actually is not only realistic, it’s something we’re going to have to do. What America needs to understand is how much time it’s going to take and how much effort it’s going to take. We’re going to have to have ... the discipline to stay over a long period of time.
If budgets tank, will the Weast strategy fall apart?
No.
Why not?
Because it’s the people’s strategy. It’s the community’s strategy; and even more important, the people who work in the system now believe, and it has become their plan.
What have you learned from this quest?
The hardest lesson to learn is patience. I mean, everybody wants everything right now. It’s America. And it’s hard, hard to hold people steady for a 10-to-12-year period of time.
I’ve learned the people who work in the schools came there for the right reasons. The majority of them. Yes, we’ve had to figure out how to weed our garden, if you will. There are folks who get into our profession, and it isn’t a good fit. They’re not very effective or productive.
But, you know, our own people figured out how to weed the garden [through] professional support and peer assistance and review. They do a better weeding process than I ever could — and it’s cheaper, quicker, better, faster.
Does the focus on achievement gaps mean you pay less attention to other problems?
Certainly you have to talk about the achievement gap, or people will think you don’t notice. But a more important gap is high expectations for all. That’s the conundrum you fall into: If you just concentrate on closing the achievement gap, people think you’re going to lower the bar. If you concentrate on just excellence, people think that you are going to leave bunches behind.
So we came up with a phrase — raise the bar and close the gap.
You can’t do this at the expense of your high-end kids that metabolize quick, who had good language skills when they came to school, whose parents give them extra training and support, stuff like that. You cannot, cannot. That’s a lesson for every superintendent. Do not leave those kids behind. They need a push just as much as anybody.
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