Joshua Starr appointed new Montgomery superintendent

Montgomery County school officials Monday night named Joshua P. Starr, head of a small but distinguished district in Connecticut, as their replacement for Superintendent Jerry D. Weast, who is retiring after 12 years as head of Maryland’s largest school system.

During the meeting, Starr was praised as a man of infectious personality and big ideas. Patricia O’Neill, the only member still on the Board of Education from when Weast was hired in 1999, said members were drawn by Starr’s “enthusiasm, his research of us, his commitment to data-driven decision making and his youth.”

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“This is a passing of the torch,” said O’Neill (Bethesda-Chevy Chase).

Board President Christopher Barclay added: “We have a good thing going here, and we were not looking for candidates who were going to change direction. We were looking for candidates who were going to take us to the next level.”

Starr, 41, who is married with three children, has presided over the Stamford, Conn., school system since 2005. The appointment in Montgomery is contingent on the completion of contract negotiations and approval of Maryland’s state superintendent.

Weast plans to retire in June.

Stamford has 15,000 students in 20 schools, about one-tenth the enrollment of Montgomery. Like Weast, Starr has sparred with local elected officials over funding and has enacted cuts that have eaten away at his reforms.

“When in this business, you want to be with the best,” Starr said in a conference call shortly after the board voted unanimously to appoint him. “And in many ways, Montgomery has been certainly on the forefront.”

Weast is among the longest-serving superintendents in the Washington region, and his initiatives to narrow academic achievement disparities in the D.C. suburbs have attracted national attention.

Starr did not attend Monday night’s board meeting, but in the conference call, he drew on comparisons between Stamford and Montgomery, both urban-suburban systems largely defined by the competing needs of rich and poor.

He discussed possible changes to the Montgomery system in only the broadest terms and emphasized that he didn’t think it was a system in need of major reform.

Starr added that he isn’t opposed to charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run, but said he “doesn’t know why they would be needed here in Montgomery County.. . . I don’t see what the value add would be,” he said. Charter schools have struggled to gain a foothold in Montgomery during Weast’s tenure.

On another controversial subject in public education, Starr said he was “not a strong believer” in paying teachers based on the academic performance of students.

Starr has a doctorate in education administration, planning and social policy from Harvard University.

He began his career as a special education teacher in Brooklyn, N.Y., and later helped guide reforms in early childhood education and gifted and talented education in the New York City school district. There, he helped design one of the nation’s best-known programs for measuring performance in public schools.