In my campaign, I pledged to be transparent and accountable -- including by offering public explanations for my votes on key issues without requiring you to sit through a School Committee meeting to hear what I said. I'll track that here. I won't include every vote to honor a person or community or to approve routine contracts, but if there's something I don't list here that you want to hear about, please let me know.
March 3: There were three motions.
First, Chair David Weinstein, Vice Chair Caitlin Dube, and Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui offered a motion calling for a look at protocols around delayed starts and snow-day decision-making. This was a no-brainer. I voted yes.
Second, with Members Richard Harding and Elizabeth Hudson, I sponsored a motion calling for 360 reviews of school principals, drawing on input from staff, caregivers, and, where age-appropriate, students. DESE regulations already call for principal evaluations to draw on staff feedback to "ensure that this critical perspective is used to support professional growth and development."
As of now, school culture survey data may be the only fully institutionalized form of feedback we have from caregivers and staff about their school leadership, and that is a blunt instrument at best. In the past few years we've seen that it can flag real problems in schools, but it doesn't necessarily offer nuanced and specific enough information to fully diagnose where those problems are coming from, particularly in the case of the caregiver survey.
And I know from one on one conversations that both staff and caregivers often feel not just unheard but actively rebuffed when they try to offer feedback about principals to district leaders. I get the concern that we don't want small yet vocal groups overly influencing personnel decisions. But rather than ignoring people, we could have a careful, standardized, independent system for soliciting information across multiple constituencies, ensuring that we're not selecting for people with axes to grind.
I think we always want our building leaders to have a growth mentality, and understanding how their leadership lands with different constituencies can be important in supporting that.
Finally, and this one drew by far the most attention, including a great deal of public comment, Members Hudson and Harding proposed that third-graders who have not demonstrated reading proficiency (according to a standardized assessment to be selected by the superintendent, which students would have multiple chances to pass) should be held back to repeat third grade. Notably, this would not apply to students with IEPs and multilingual learners.
The outcome of the discussion was that the measure was referred to the curriculum and achievement subcommittee. While I appreciate that Members Hudson and Harding wanted to underline the urgency of early literacy – an issue I also feel strongly about – I would not be able to support this as written.
First, I think it's important to recognize the research showing that being held back has, at best, no effect on development, as even studies that find some positive outcomes find that they are balanced by negative outcomes. Other studies have found long-term negative outcomes such as increased likelihood of dropping out of school and reduced annual earnings in adulthood.
Second, I'm concerned that when schools organize learning around passing a specific test, kids learn to pass that test, but may not learn either more broadly or more deeply. We see in Mississippi that fourth-grade reading scores – the thing the state has invested heavily in – have risen to a genuinely impressive extent. But eighth-grade scores have been stagnant even as several years worth of the fourth-graders whose performance was dubbed a miracle have reached eighth grade. As was said during public comment, that should be a red flag, because we want to prepare students for when they leave CPS, not necessarily for a waypoint during their educational journey.
Third, while Member Harding in particular was dismissive of the idea of focusing on educational growth rather than raw proficiency scores, I understand growth as a critically important measure. Let's say a kid started third grade two grade levels behind and ended it one grade level behind. Should we hold them back? Or should we say great, let's keep making that level of progress in fourth grade?
Finally, we need to hear from educators about what would help. In fact, a number of educators offered public comment emphasizing that they understand this issue and want to work with us. We can partner with them, and with our administration, to develop robust solutions, and we should. No educator wants kids to end the school year not having made adequate progress. Let's find out what supports are needed to ensure that doesn't happen.
I also want to flag important context offered by CPS director of ELA/literacy Emily Bryan, who said that while this motion exempted students with IEPs and multilingual learners from being retained after third grade, in fact those students are where we see the largest gaps. She emphasized that a comparatively small number (somewhere around 25) of gen ed students are not reading on grade level in grade three, and a large majority of those are approaching grade level by this point in grade four. While we want every kid in Cambridge to be reading at grade level, the reality is that the numbers among gen ed students do not point to a crisis. By contrast, there is much more work to be done among the highest-needs students – and Bryan and Dr. Heather Francis, executive director of academics, pointed to systems that already have been put in place or are planned for improvement in the next year to accomplish that. This is something the School Committee will obviously be watching very closely.
Feb. 3: I put forward two motions, both of which were referred to subcommittee.
First, as I promised during my campaign, I proposed (with Chair David Weinstein and Vice Chair Caitlin Dube) adding a representative of the Cambridge Education Association as a nonvoting member of the School Committee, just as we have two student members. I believe that educators should have a voice in their working conditions, but more than that, I know that we lose out on vast expertise when we don't regularly hear from the people who are in classrooms every day with students. I believe we should be ready to learn from them, to hear what's working and what's not and what we need to think about that wouldn't necessarily occur to people who are focused solely on data and metrics.
Member Richard Harding proposed an amendment to include a long series of parent groups as nonvoting members if we included the CEA. That amendment was also referred to committee, but I voted no. Here's why: I have the utmost respect for groups like the Cambridge Families of Color Coalition, Cambridge Families of Asian Descent (which endorsed me last fall), and others Member Harding named. And I want to change the School Committee's agenda-setting rules so that we have more flexibility to bring in representatives of parent and community groups to present or testify outside of public comment, and I envision many scenarios in which we would want to hear from groups Member Harding listed. But none of these groups, as far as I know, have more than 1,500 members, all of whom are stakeholders in our schools, and a rigorous structure of elected leadership. Additionally, many members of these groups are Cambridge voters who vote for School Committee and are allowed to run for School Committee themselves. We are their representatives, and it's important to me to act that way. But many educators in Cambridge cannot afford to live in Cambridge, and the ones who do are barred from running for School Committee here.
I also proposed (with Member Elizabeth Hudson) a motion removing a single section from the rules of the School Committee. Specifically, "Promote a formal atmosphere, with members referring to other members in the third person, and speaking to each other and to members of the public through the Chair." From what I've heard, many members of the public find the excessive formality of our School Committee alienating, and I have been one of them. People constantly referring to each other in the third person and having to say "through you, Mr. Chair" rather than simply addressing questions directly to the people they're asking questions of sounds ... kind of silly, to be honest, as well as clunky and inefficient. Some of the longer-tenured members of the Committee questioned whether we could run a meeting without this provision in our rules. The simple answer, which I will bring to the subcommittee, is that neighboring cities and towns do just fine without it.
Jan. 5: We voted in David Weinstein as chair and Caitlin Dube as vice chair. The votes were 5-2 in favor of David and 5 in favor of Caitlin, 2 present. Only the chair's race was contested in the end: Elizabeth Hudson was the other candidate for chair. Supporting Caitlin was an easy choice for me, and not solely because no one else was nominated. I got to know Caitlin pretty well during the campaign and since, and I have been consistently impressed by her extensive knowledge and experience in education, but even more so by her ambitious and optimistic vision for Cambridge Public Schools. I think she'll be excellent in leadership. David Weinstein is the longest continually-serving member of the School Committee, and on a body with three new members (and a fourth entering her second term) I think that experience can be valuable, More so, I appreciate that David is a person who seeks consensus, values collaboration, and is genuinely receptive to varying points of view, and I think those are particularly important qualities for a chair. For her part, Elizabeth would have brought a formidable intellect, work ethic, and organizational skills to the position. I expect that she'll be a leader on the Committee throughout the term, irrespective of title. I am looking forward to working with all three of them, and with Luisa, Richard, and Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui as well.
One note: I think several in city government, and some Members, are of the view that the Chair must be a person who has previously served a term in city government. I don't share that view, personally, although I respect it. I hope and expect that as the School Committee gets more accustomed to selecting its own chair, we may see more first-time members pursuing leadership, even the chair.
Jan. 20: The major votes we took today concerned financial authorizations for two contracts with law firms -- one which the School Committee has retained for several years, in large part to handle contract negotiations and other tasks on behalf of the district, and one (Norris Murray Peloquin) which has done a significant amount of work for the district itself, particularly in the absence of District in-house counsel over the past several months (as our former in-house lawyer, Maureen MacFarlane, retired over the summer).
I voted against the authorization for the first firm, and in favor of the second authorization. For the Norris Murray contract, as I stated in the meeting, I do see a difference between a firm retained by the School Committee for whom the School Committee is the client, and one for whom district administration is the client that is performing services that would ordinarily be done in-house. I feel pretty strongly that, where possible, clients should be able to pick their own lawyers -- and where the District is the client, they should generally be in a position to select the outside counsel they want. Similarly, when the District ultimately hires someone to fill Maureen's position, the Superintendent will be the final decisionmaker, even if I or other members advise on that choice.
For the first contract, these are going to be the School Committee's lawyers. One of the aggravating factors is that the School Committee is about to enter negotiations with the CEA over several new contracts, so there is a significant urgency behind retaining counsel. For the same reason, however -- that those negotiations are critical -- I do not like going into them without a more robust process of selecting counsel of our choice -- particularly given that we are hoping to build a more collaborative and mutually productive relationship with the CEA than the School Committee has sometimes had in the past. So I voted against, although I knew that the contract would be approved by a majority of the school committee.
In the end, though, I think Banke Oluwole -- a CPS educator and CEA member who spoke at public comment -- had the right of it. Banke actually recommended that the School Committee approve the contract given the imminence of negotiations, but reminded us that good lawyers follow the lead of their clients, and it will be the School Committee, not the law firm, that drives negotiations and sets the tone. I hope and expect that that will be the case with our lawyers, and with our new School Committee.