This Thursday, the Montgomery County (Maryland) School Board is slated to vote on a proposal that would begin to address a long-festering problem in the state’s largest school district. The Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) system is, as a whole, wonderfully diverse, and yet for too long, many of its individual schools have been highly segregated. A promising new plan would use regional public school choice among magnet and specialty programs, rather than compulsory busing, to bring children of different backgrounds together to learn.
The school system’s student population boasts a stunning array of races and ethnicities: It is 35 percent Hispanic, 24 percent White, 22 percent Black and 14 percent Asian American. Systemwide, 45 percent of pupils are eligible for subsidized meals (which is available to students in a family of four making about $60,000 or less). The remaining 55 percent students are middle or upper class.
And yet the student populations in the system’s 25 high schools range dramatically from a 7 percent low-income and working-class population at Walt Whitman in Bethesda, where most students are White or Asian, to a 71 percent low-income and working-class population at John F. Kennedy in Silver Spring, where most students are Black or Hispanic.
This matters because segregation thwarts the central goals of public education: to promote academic achievement and social mobility and to foster good democratic citizenship and social cohesion.
