Who's at the head of the class?
Staffing issues & culture mismatch at MBLI raise more questions about its readiness to open this fall
MCPS has a culture. This culture isn’t perfect, but it is generally viewed positively by the community, the staff, and the students, and anecdotally, it’s been getting better since Dr. Thomas Taylor started as superintendent and began to remove many of the personnel that were inhibiting growth and that were responsible for the cover-up that led to the departure of our previous superintendent. But what will adding a charter school to this system do to the culture of the district? How will they staff their school?
In the introduction to this series, I gave an overview of why I believed MECCA Business Learning Institute (MBLI), Montgomery County’s second charter school is doomed to fail. In the second installment, I explained why issues with MBLI’s physical building problems make it dubious for them even to open on August 26, 2025. Let’s do a deep-dive into the culture mismatch and staffing problems that MBLI is facing.
Who wants to work there?
The core of any school, until we are replaced by SkyNet, anyway, is the staff. That’s not just teachers, administrators, and counselors, but secretaries, building service workers, and paraeducators as well. Simply put, a school needs adults to function. An extremely unscientific survey of my colleagues at my school and others returned only a single person who had even considered applying to work at MBLI. Scaling that up to the whole district (again, anecdotally and unscientifically), how many current MCPS employees are willing to take a chance on MBLI? A dozen? Two?
This person submitted an application when it became available back in April 2025 and has heard absolutely nothing since. This is a person with decades of experience, both in a content area and special education, many years of service in middle school, and so should be considered a top applicant, yet they have heard nothing from MBLI? I will fully admit that maybe there is something that MBLI is looking for that this person doesn’t have, which is why there hasn’t been any attempt to interview them; I don’t have a crystal ball, nor can I read the minds of MBLI’s leaders. However, MCPS culture tends to be that candidates hear quickly through the MCPS Careers system. It isn’t uncommon for a school to have a job post open for a week, interview within a few days, and let everyone who applied know less than 2 weeks after posting, especially during open transfer season.1 The fact that it is now June and this person has heard nothing shows that MBLI at the very least has a cultural disconnect with the rest of the district regarding hiring practices.
But how the school chooses to hire people may not be relevant if they don’t have any applicants. The Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) sent a message to all of its members in April 2025, saying in part that “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.”
MCEA negotiates its contract with MCPS; if MBLI wants to enter into a memorandum of understanding with MCEA, they need to go through MCPS, use MCPS’s negotiators, and get MCEA agreement. Per Maryland law, MBLI employees are employees of MCPS, and MCPS’s agreement with MCEA (and SEIU and MCAAP, as I understand it) cover all unit members at all work sites. If MBLI wants to do something differently, that’s fine, but they need to work out a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with MCEA to exempt them from certain provisions of the MCEA/MCPS negotiated agreement. This process usually can take months—or even years—to accomplish. The fact that MCEA has not received word of a desire to negotiate means that it is highly unlikely that an agreement will be made by August.
What are the promises that MBLI has made to parents that may violate the current MCEA/MCPS agreement?
One of the major selling points of MBLI has been that students will attend an extended day with extra classes. Unfortunately, the sample schedules that MBLI has provided violate the contract MCPS has with its teachers. The MCEA/MCPS negotiated agreement is very specific about how many hours a teacher (or other teacher-level faculty member) can be worked on-site and how many classes can be taught in a day; it also specifies the amount of planning time a teacher gets daily. Although a creative workday schedule might be possible,2 MBLI’s sample schedule included with its 2018 application would violate a significant portion of the MCEA/MCPS negotiated agreement, including but not limited to hours worked, planning time, and course load.
And to be clear, MCPS would have to approach MCEA and request to negotiate a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to account for the different schedule. MCEA negotiates with its members’ employer (MCPS), not the individual schools in the district. As of the April 22 email from MCEA President David Stein to members (and to the best of this author’s knowledge, not since then), MCPS has not made the request to even enter into negotiations.
What does this mean for MBLI? The MCEA/MCPS Negotiated Agreement, which does not expire until June 2027, would remain in force. MBLI would be required to follow the contract as written for all instructional and non-instructional teacher-level staff.
What are some other potential problems with MBLI’s proposed school culture?
Now we get to the point of nuance. To be honest, most of the eduspeak in MBLI’s application is fairly typical and straightforward. Without delving into the details, MBLI basically asserts that they will largely provide the same kind of education already being provided by MCPS schools. I’ll delve deeper into the curricular differences in the next (and final) installment of the series, but here, I want to talk about school culture. According to The Glossary of Education Reform,
The term school culture generally refers to the beliefs, perceptions, relationships, attitudes, and written and unwritten rules that shape and influence every aspect of how a school functions, but the term also encompasses more concrete issues such as the physical and emotional safety of students, the orderliness of classrooms and public spaces, or the degree to which a school embraces and celebrates racial, ethnic, linguistic, or cultural diversity.
Many of the aspects of a school culture cannot truly be known until the school exists, as a real place, where actual human beings begin to interact. However, MBLI’s charter application does give some hints as to the founders’ educational philosophies and disconnect from typical MCPS schools. Sadly, as is all too common in the education world, most of MBLI’s “School Culture Overview” could be applied to any school in the US due to phrases like “MBLI believes all students have the capacity to learn and succeed in school” and “MBLI aims to recruit and retain teachers who demonstrate earnest concern and attention to the academic performance and general well-being of students.” What I’m going to cover now are the exceptions to the vague edu-speak in MBLI’s application.
School Dress Code. MBLI has stated that their students will wear uniforms. While there has certainly been research showing both the positive and negative aspects of school uniforms,3 it is not lost on me that there are currently zero schools in MCPS that use a school uniform. And maybe MBLI will be a leader in showing MCPS that school uniforms can be done in MCPS correctly. A 2019 change.org petition, however, asking the MCPS Board of Ed to institute school uniforms across the district received fewer than 50 signatures. There does not seem to be a great clamoring from the public for uniforms, and they are not being used anywhere else in the district. Neither of these points mean that uniforms wouldn’t work; they do, however, set MBLI apart.
Daily fitness & wellness. I don’t know if you, dear reader, have spent much time around middle schoolers. Some students in middle school embrace their PE classes: these kids love the lessons on personal health and wellness. Meditation? Yoga? Sure! … But for most middle schoolers, physical activity (like traditional PE class) is fine, but when it comes to “wellness”-based activities, very few are actually mature enough to regularly implement this kind of discipline. Sadly, many outright refuse to engage in such practices because they don’t want to “look dumb” in front of peers. That isn’t to say it doesn’t work or can’t work, but the way it is described in MBLI’s documentation makes it seem (to this reader, at least) like it will become so routinized that they do not think it will be a potential sticking point. And maybe it won’t be. But my two decades in the classroom suggest that it probably will be, for at least a handful of kids.
A bunch of good ideas that most MCPS schools already do. Positive Behavioral Intervention Support (PBIS).4 Embedding social-emotional learning into daily instruction. Resilience. These are all common ideas; they aren’t bringing anything to the table that other MCPS schools aren’t already doing. This brings us back to the question I have been posing since the beginning of this series: what is MBLI offering that MCPS isn’t already offering? I genuinely don’t think anything positive.
No staff + little uniqueness = point?
I’m open to new ideas. I actually think there are a lot of ways that MCPS can improve the education for its students, which I’ll hopefully have the opportunity to delve into on this platform. But if MBLI is going to be successful, it needs to be able to function. With no seasoned MCPS teachers and a culture that doesn’t do much to stand out from MCPS schools’ culture on paper, I simply don’t see the point of the school beyond giving “choice” and funneling money into the hands of non-public actors.
The final installment of this series will focus on the proposed school curriculum; this is the main selling point for the school, and even though it is something that MCPS does not currently do well, it absolutely is something that MCPS is capable of doing … but is it worth the time and effort?
“Open Transfer Season” is a time designated for MCEA unit members where they can freely apply and move between schools. It usually starts in February/March, pauses briefly for the placement of involuntary transfers, and ultimately closes in mid-July. I will fully admit that I do not have personal knowledge of the transfer protocols for SEIU and MCAAP personnel, so the reader should keep in mind that all discussions of transfer, etc. in this article are limited to MCEA-unit staff (teachers, counselors, and related service providers)
I’m not going to get into the specifics of how this problem could be solved. It isn’t my job to come up with them, and unless I’m placed on a committee by MCEA to negotiate this agreement, it wouldn’t be my place to suggest them, anyway. The onus for such creativity would be on MBLI, in any case, not on the teachers it hires.
The uniform debate was hottest about 15 years ago. A fairly good summary of the pros and cons of the debate can be found here, although the article itself is decidedly anti-uniform.
Look, I don’t love PBIS. I don’t particularly find it to work once a kid hits middle school. But it’s an MCPS standard, and my point here is that MBLI isn’t offering anything unique.