How MoCo's next Charter School is trying to fill a hole where there is no hole.
MBLI is making audacious claims but hasn't produced the receipts
Montgomery County—at least theoretically—has what will be only its second charter school opening this fall. MECCA Business Learning Institute (MLBI) claims that it will provide choice to families, and that they have already notified their first 250 students of their selection to begin at the school in the Fall of 2025. I’m not even talking about the fact that their claims to have a building that will be ready by the fall are dubious or that it was only accepted by the MCPS Board of Education because the Maryland State Board of Education forced them to. The problems with MBLI are much more basic: what need are they fulfilling and will they actually be able to deliver?
Series outline
This series will argue that MBLI is actually not ready to open a charter school in Montgomery County and will either fail shortly after opening or will never actually open.
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Building Issues
Part 3: Staff & Culture
Part 4: Curriculum
You’ll notice that funding isn’t on the list. Although I have heard rumors that some of their long-term funding might be problematic, I would not call myself an expert in this area; I am therefore not in a position to adequately analyze its proposals or cash flow. It’s definitely worth noting that a significant amount of the start-up funding they received ($1.5 million) was from the US Department of Education, and with the Trump Administration’s cuts to grants, I can’t predict what will happen (though Trump does love to give money to everyone claiming to care about “parent choice, so who knows?)
Part 1: Introduction
It’s probably no secret that I’m not a fan of charter schools—private schools that suck at the public teat for the personal enrichment of the owners and investors—but at least in some places, charter schools offer something that people claim they want: choice in where to send their child to school. Never mind the fact that they already have that choice, that private schools have always been a thing, and that many private schools offer scholarships to those who can’t afford them otherwise, but I want to dissect the main claim that MBLI specifically will offer a choice that is somehow superior to the choices already offered in MCPS.
Let me be upfront: MCPS has its problems and has room for improvement. However, the claim that MBLI will provide something unavailable in MCPS is simply erroneous. There are plenty of reasons why charters have been successful in other places in the country, but the most successful ones tend to be successful because of the failure of state or local governments to adequately provide resources to the public schools. Data shows that urban charter schools may outperform non-urban charter schools, but this is largely due to the fact that cities tend to underfund schools compared to suburban schools in the first place (a pot of money that grows smaller when it is siphoned off to charters) and urban schools are situated in communities that are poorer, where tax revenues are lower anyway.1 How big are the gains for students in poverty? Not very. So… suburban district is a tiny strike 1 for MBLI. Of course, correlation does not equate to causation; plenty of bad suburban charters exist, as do plenty of good urban ones. Since MBLI hasn’t actually opened yet, let alone had students take standardized tests, we can’t really base any kind of analysis on that.
So what’s the problem?
The Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) requires that charter applications need to “demonstrate its understanding of how the school will benefit the students and local community. The applicant should know the needs of the community and have community support for the school.” The fact that a sufficient number of applications were received to implement a lottery does show that the school has community support. But what does their application to the MCPS Board of Education tell us about their goals? Is what they offer superior to MCPS’s curriculum? Will they be able to provide the services they have claimed they will be able to provide? Will they even have a physical building to teach in?
This is not West Virginia
West Virginia has a history of low educational achievement, ranking consistently near the bottom in educational outcomes (here’s a pretty good explanation as to why… hint: it has to do with poverty and access). That makes it interesting that the two places where MBLI has gotten approval to start a charter school are Berkeley County, WV and Montgomery County, MD. The fact that they have been unable to get the West Virginia school off the ground doesn’t bode well for the organization as a whole. From their website:
It’s not DC, either
MBLI also tried—unsuccessfully—to get a charter school going in Washington, DC. For the DC Public Charter School Board to outright reject their 2018 charter application speaks volumes about the preparedness of the organization at the time. Sadly, the publicly available records do not show the specifics of why that charter school was rejected, just that it did not meet the “high standards” of DCPCSB.
Failures in DC and West Virginia, of course, are irrelevant to the case of the charter school set to open in Montgomery County this fall. Lots of questions about the MoCo campus have been raised, which will be the subject of subsequent posts.
Will the building in Germantown be ready in the fall, or will students (mostly from the Gaithersburg/Germantown area have to be bused to a location in Bethesda? What does this mean for student travel times? When will a child that lives right next to the approved site in Germantown have to leave in order to get to school in Bethesda? What time will they get home after the promised “extended day”? Do the selected families even realize that they will be sending their children to a physical site nowhere near the one they signed up for?
Will they have a staff? Maryland law says that if the public school system has an agreement with employee unions, charter schools have to honor those contracts or get the school system to enter into negotiations to modify the contract for that site. An email from the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) on April 22, 2025 to its members said "there appears to be no feasible plan for implementing these promises without violating the negotiated agreement with MCEA and other MCPS unions, and yet, there has been no request from MCPS to negotiate amendments to any agreement.” In that same email, union leadership drew attention to the physical site problems and potential class size issues.
Is their curriculum sound? Will it meet the needs of the diverse learners of Montgomery County? This, of course, is harder to suss out without an actual look at their curriculum, but I will take a look at their proposal and attempt to break it down from an education perspective and compare it to the offerings in MCPS.
The leaders of MBLI attempted to answer some of these questions back in April, but I don’t feel like their answers are particularly transparent or forthcoming. Come with me as we dig deeper into the application of MBLI and why their attempt to open a charter school doesn’t seem particularly likely to succeed.
There’s also the racial resegregation that schools all over the country have been facing as a result of charter policies, but that’s beyond this post’s scope.