We stopped actively blogging over a year ago, but the Montgomery County Education Blog (MoCoEdBlog) is going into a deeper sleep.  The MoCoEdBlog was an experiment in combining professional work with support for a local school system that our children attend.  Our goal was simple: to use our professional experience in a way to support MCPS and provide a counter voice to those who criticize the every move of the school system often without any knowledge of the complexities of the issues MCPS is facing.   Our hope was to be inclusive of different points of view and engage in a thoughtful discussion that was not centered on our own children but on some of the big decisions that in education today, including teacher evaluation and new standards for student success.

We learned a lot in this process.  We learned first about each other and our different perspectives on MCPS.  The internal conversations as we debated what to write about were fascinating in how they drew on different perspectives of equity and school improvement and the reality of systems like MCPS and MCPS itself.  We learned that engaging the system of MCPS can be difficult because over years the central office has developed a public relations approach that is not designed for dialog.  We also discovered that the amount of time this kind of project takes from our busy professional lives is significant.

The times have changed since we began this effort and there is a new leader for MCPS who has instilled confidence that he understands the critical issues facing the system and has a solid team assembled to be able to address these challenges and so we are going to put this project aside and see how things develop with this promising new leadership.  As individuals we remain ready to support MCPS in any ways we can, but don’t find the blog the best .