Wall Street Journal Profiles Montgomery County’s Gap-Closing Efforts

We’ve started a trend! The Wall Street Journal follows our lead and takes a closer look at Montgomery County, Maryland’s progress in narrowing achievement gaps for low-income and minority students, especially in the early grades. While it doesn’t actually mention PreK-3rd reforms, the Journal notes Montgomery County’s ambitious–and largely successful–PreK-3rd reform strategy that is producing learning gains and narrowing gaps in the early grades. It also narrows in on Montgomery County’s intensive use of data to track individual students’ learning, direct interventions to struggling students, and improve instruction. As the Journal reports, this approach isn’t cheap–Montgomery County spent $47 million (keep in mind that Montgomery County is a BIG district) last year on technology tools that help teachers monitor and track students’ learning, such as the Wireless Generation handheld assessment tools in the early grades. These investments may seem costly, but putting in place infrastructure and technology solutions that help teachers and administrators use data to improve student learning is exactly the type of upfront investment that delivers lasting benefits that school districts should be looking at for their stimulus dollars.