A BIT OF HISTORY

The Montgomery County Education Forum (MCEF) is a grassroots activist organization of parents, teachers, students and community members in Montgomery County, MD, whose goal is to move the county's public schools toward educational equity. The group's work for the past six years has entailed, primarily, education and advocacy organizing to change Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) policies and practices that sort children into educational tracks that correspond to race and class. MCEF posits, and national research supports, that this sorting or "tracking" creates, perpetuates and exacerbates race and class-based achievement gaps at various stages of children's school experiences and leads to even greater disparities in future options.

Montgomery County Education Forum began in 1999, when, in a county where the student population is 30/30/30% African American, Latino and white, members-to-be noticed their children's elementary school classes were segregated through the mechanism of "gifted and talented" identification. A group of parents and teachers, including the then-president of the teachers' union, got together and began to study the issue.

In November 2000, MCPS released the much-touted Curriculum Management Audit of Mathematics Education in MCPS. This report pointed to tracking as a major contributor to the achievement gap in mathematics and opened the door for MCEF to begin a public campaign around educational equity.

Since then MCEF, as an organization and via its individual members, has:

Built a base of student support at a local high school with the assistance of two social studies teachers;
Published a position paper in February 2002, Success for Every Student?: Tracking and the Achievement Gap, which has been widely distributed and referenced in the County;
Sponsored a forum on February 9, 2002 attended by 250 people at Blair High School at which Mr. Bob Moses gave the keynote speech and eight high school students gave testimony about their academic experiences;
Testified numerous times before the County Board of Education to demand educational equity and around specific issues tied to educational inequity;
Served as guest speakers at local school meetings;
Presented workshops on equity, tracking and the achievement gap at conferences including the District of Columbia Teaching for Equity Conference (2002 and 2003) and National Association of Multicultural Educators (2002), and hosted a national networking meeting of groups organizing around tracking at the National Coalition of Education Activists (2002);
Established a partnership with the NAACP Montgomery County Chapter to work with Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) to collect data on grouping practices in the schools;
Been featured in several County newspaper articles as well as in the Washington Post, and been contacted by local press to comment on education issues;
Moved MCPS-sponsored "study circles" to set an end to tracking as a major policy goal;
Worked with the local teachers' union to sponsor community events with national and regional educational leaders who have successfully de-tracked school systems;
Partnered with community-based organizations and individuals to develop electoral strategy leading to the election of a founding member (and co-chair) to the Board of Education;
Created the Equity in Education Coalition in Montgomery County with six other local education and progressive organizations including the local chapter of the NAACP;
Launched, in collaboration with EEC, the "No Labels, No Limits" campaign to end the 2nd grade global screening process that sorts children into "gifted" and "not gifted" tracks; and
Co-sponsored a public dialogue with Jonathan Kozol, on September 17, 2005, to talk about his new book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.

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Last modified: Saturday, September 23, 2005