Luc Schuster's School Committee Post-election Update — November 2007

1. Election Results
2. City Council Results/Mayor Vote
3. Inauguration

1. Election Results

Thanks to the hard work of friends, family, and neighbors we won a second term on the Cambridge School Committee, coming in fourth out of six elected candidates and moving up two spots from our first election. We actually came in third after #1 votes, just barely, but then moved down to fourth after the redistribution of some ballots. For detailed round-by-round numbers please go to:

http://rwinters.com/elections/election2007/2007unofficial.pdf

These numbers are still unofficial and will become official 10 days after the election when all potential overseas ballots have arrived in town. Unofficial #1 votes by ward and precinct have also come in:

http://rwinters.com/elections/election2007/2007schoolwardprecinct.pdf

We did best in ward 7 (Agassiz/Baldwin area), ward 10 (Porter Sq. and Avon Hill), Ward 9 (West Camb.), and Ward 11 (North Camb.) Once again, these results show a direct correlation with where we knocked on the most doors and made the most calls and where we earned the most #1s.

In many ways this victory is even more satisfying than our first election two years ago. We had a record on which to run and we were no longer a fresh new face. We recognized this dynamic early on and ran just as hard this second time around. The fact that we moved up two spots is very satisfying.

Two unfortunate aspects of Tuesday’s election were the record low turnout and the loss of Richard Harding, who is the only person of color, on the School Committee. When voter turnout is as low as it was this year, we risk electing legislative bodies that are not representative of the population at large. As it stands now we will have an all-white School Committee representing a school district that is 64% non-white.

2. City Council Results/Mayor Vote

The biggest story of Tuesday’s municipal election was the landslide victory of Henrietta Davis, who was the only candidate to meet quota with #1 votes. My close friend Matt Nelson ran Henrietta’s campaign and worked the last four months like he was a candidate himself. Matt ran our campaign’s door-to-door efforts two years ago and it was great to see him move on to bigger and better things—even though we missed his expertise on our campaign this time around!

Every other incumbent won re-election for City Council and challenger Sam Seidel won the open seat vacated by Anthony Galluccio, our new State Senator. I have enjoyed getting to know Sam and expect that he will be a thoughtful, knowledgeable, and accessible City Councillor.

Here are the unofficial results, round-by-round, for City Council:

http://rwinters.com/elections/election2007/2007unofficial.pdf

The next two months will be consumed by off-line deal making by City Councillors trying to organize five votes to elect the next Mayor. It will be very interesting to see what happens. The Mayor’s most important duty, in my mind, is serving as the chair and seventh member of the School Committee, since most of the other Mayoral duties are merely ceremonial under our City Manager form of government. Frankly, I wish the voters of Cambridge had the opportunity to vote directly for the Mayor with this in mind.

3. Inauguration

The new School Committee will be inaugurated on January 7, 2008 in the Media Cafeteria at CRLS. The ceremony begins at 6pm with a nice reception immediately following. The City Council inauguration will happen that afternoon and this is when the Mayor will be decided upon. Both inaugurations are open to the public and I would love to see you at either one!

Luc Schuster's School Committee Fall Update — October 2007

Contents:

1. Introduction
2. Civic Engagement and Service Learning
3. Time for a Middle School?
4. Superintendent's Contract
5. The Budget
6. Declining Enrollment and the new Tobin Montessori
7. MCAS/Standardized Testing and Meaningful Standards
8. School Committee Governance and Sub-committees
9. Not to Mention...

1) Introduction

I am thrilled to be running for re-election to the Cambridge School Committee. My first term has been very full, full of progress and improvement as well as fraught with deep political challenges. It is my hope that this update will help the voters of Cambridge appreciate the work of the School Committee and my contributions to that work. I believe in an active and informed citizenry; that belief has been the guiding principle of my work during my first term, and it will continue to guide my work on your behalf if you should entrust me with a second term on Tuesday, November 6th. In Cambridge elections every #1 vote is critical; it is my hope that I will earn yours.

2) Civic Engagement and Service Learning

Promoting the civic mission of our public schools continues to be a primary focus of my work. Public schools should cultivate young people to become engaged citizens, creative problem-solvers, lifelong learners, and responsible friends and neighbors. Many pressing community issues—high housing costs, unaffordable health care, environmental degradation, violent conflicts—will require sustained attention from the next generation of local leaders. Our schools must impart the economic skills to compete in a global job market, but we must also teach our children the political skills to participate in our democratic system and to advocate for change.

Early in my term I was elected to a national organization, 100 District Leaders for Civic Engagement and Service Learning. This network is composed of school board members and superintendents from across the country sharing best practices in civics education and service learning. I have attended two national meetings of this organization in search of best practices and this spring pushed successfully for the creation of a new Service-Learning/Internship coordinator position at CRLS.

3) Time for a Middle School?

After visiting each school and attending all eleven eighth-grade graduations, I am convinced that Cambridge needs a standalone middle school option. The quality of the educational and social experiences being offered at each of these schools varies widely, too widely. Some have healthy graduating classes of 35-50 students, while a few graduating classes are as small as 15-20 students. Smaller upper grades lack vibrancy and do not provide a healthy transition for students entering adolescence and preparing for a citywide high school. Teachers at these grade levels lack a professional peer group with whom they can collaborate effectively and creatively. Students at these schools lack the critical mass necessary to organize bands, plays, sports teams, or clubs; a rich extracurricular menu is key to a successful middle school.

Providing a middle school option would force the closure of the weaker seventh and eighth grade strands at a few K-8 elementary schools, freeing up money to fund the new middle school, while leaving untouched the successful K-8s. Any new middle school in Cambridge would graduate no more than 100-150 students a year, still much smaller than most American middle schools.

Additionally, starting a new middle school would help us desegregate the upper grades, where our schools have become the most segregated. Starting a middle school would add another entry point to our controlled choice system and give us an opportunity to ensure greater diversity.

4) Superintendent's Contract

I am proud of the role I played last summer in restructuring Superintendent Fowler-Finn's contract, rewriting three major provisions and giving him a shortened one-year extension without a significant salary increase (for more on my thinking go to www.voteluc.org/articles). Determining the future leadership of our district will be a critical decision for the next committee in January 2008. I believe there are substantial pros and cons related to offering the Superintendent a new contract; my decision will hinge on whether or not the new Committee can come together with a clear vision for a better leader, a unified vision that was missing last summer.

5) The Budget

I have been a consistent, independent voice demanding that we reallocate money to the classroom. Cambridge spends roughly twice what similarly sized school districts spend. Allocating this money so that the children in our classrooms really feel like $23,000 is being spent on them must be one of the committee's top priorities. We should reallocate money from central administration towards additional specialist positions in each of our elementary schools. Our classes are already very small; the best use of our extra money would be to hire additional social workers, subject-area coaches, librarians, etc. to supplement classroom instruction. I have twice supported motions to this effect during my two budget cycles as a sitting member.

6) Declining Enrollment and the new Tobin Montessori

As a new member in early 2006 I pushed for a comprehensive market study of Cambridge families. We were in the midst of a precipitous enrollment decline unparalleled by any neighboring communities, and this study was designed to give us a clearer understanding of the causes for this decline so that our policy making could address their concerns. Different theories abounded, including the high cost of Cambridge housing, a perception of declining quality of education, and an increase in the available charter school options, but we lacked data to accurately weigh the relative importance of these, and other, factors.

We have now received some preliminary findings from this study—which has sections on parents in the system, parents who left the system, and parents of 0-4 years olds considering entering the system—and we expect to receive a final report sometime very soon. Overall, people seemed pretty satisfied with our schools, and this should not be forgotten. Still, three main concerns were raised: dissatisfaction with general academic quality, concern over the degree to which teachers are "teaching to the test," and frustration with persistent behavior issues. As a teacher myself, I see these issues as closely related. Teaching to the test sterilizes learning and turns children off to school. And children who dislike school and lack intellectual curiosity are much more likely to act up. Classrooms that have high academic quality, in my experience, have far fewer issues with disruptive behavior and bullying.

The good news is that enrollment is up for the current school year for the first time in over a decade. Much of this is due to interest in the new public Tobin Montessori School that opened this September. Montessori represents a commitment to early childhood education and is a model that fosters intellectual curiosity in even the youngest children. Parents need meaningful options so that they get a top choice school and do not leave the Cambridge Public Schools out of frustration.

7) MCAS/Standardized Testing and Meaningful Standards

I am the one sitting committee member who has refused to divert budget money for remedial test prep courses during the school day, losing two votes 6-1 on this issue, including one to pay $25,000 Princeton Review to provide an SAT prep course during the school day. We must do more than just say we dislike standardized testing; we must put our money where our mouths are. We have a role to play in supporting struggling students to do well on these tests, but we cannot deprive them of the rest of our dynamic high school curriculum. The regular school day is sacred and test support should be offered outside of this limited time.

While MCAS is mandated by both the state and federal governments, we in Cambridge do have important choices about how to prepare our children for this requirement. As a teacher, I understand that drilling students day after day in test prep courses is bad practice, plain and simple. Real learning does not happen in the anxiety-filled environment of high stakes testing. Students become proficient readers and develop critical thinking skills when they are engaged in projects, when they take a range of interesting high school courses, and when they are required to analyze critically the world in which they live.

Interestingly, many colleges are now ignoring students' scores on the SAT writing section because research has shown that it is a poor test that does not demand meaningful college-level writing skills. The test was designed to be easy to grade rather than to be the best possible assessment of students' skills. It is a shame that easy-to-grade computer tests are driving day-to-day instruction.

8) School Committee Governance and Sub-committees

An unanticipated focus of my work during my first term has been on the processes by which the School Committee conducts its business. General business meetings twice a month with occasional roundtables sprinkled in between does not provide us with enough time to do our job well; our work can be scattered thereby losing focus on overseeing the school district as a whole. In his contract with the previous School Committee, the Superintendent negotiated a ban on sub-committees because he felt that in the past sub-committees had been largely dysfunctional; I do not doubt that this was the case. But the only acceptable solution for poorly designed sub-committees is well-designed ones. I am pleased that through negotiating a new contract with the Superintendent, the School Committee has been able to reinstate sub-committees. Sub-committees enable high-impact governance because they: 1) focus the School Committee on its appropriate duties and help prevent micro-management; 2) allow members to research issues in much greater detail; and 3) encourage buy-in from members because decisions grow organically, not from ad hoc work done by members and the Superintendent in isolation from one another. I now chair two of these sub-committees: the Committee on Governance and the Committee on the Digital Divide.

9) Not to Mention...

Safe and Welcoming Schools: I was honored to receive on behalf of the School Committee an award at the 2006 GLBT Pride Breakfast for our efforts to increase funding for Project 10 East, CRLS's gay/straight alliance. Protecting Recess: I pushed successfully to ban the practice of taking away recess as punishment. Military Recruitment: I helped write a new comprehensive military recruitment policy that bans drop-in visits and allows student opt-out forms to last for all four years of high school. New Professional Development Coaching Model: Through the last two budgets we have accelerated the movement towards subject-area coaches providing professional development directly in the classroom. Coaches are now central to the new small school model at CRLS. Special Education: We have hired a dynamic new director for the Office of Special Education, Dr. Aida Ramos. She has hit the ground running and has compiled a list of needed improvements that are already being addressed. Additionally, last spring the School Committee voted to hire two part-time parent ombudspersons to act as free liaisons for parents who cannot afford to hire private advocates and/or lawyers. A focus of my work moving forward will be addressing the over-referral of students of color to SPED, particularly to behavior programs; our schools must better serve all our students and avoid unnecessary SPED referrals.

Our children deserve the best education the City of Cambridge can afford. That is why I decided to run for School Committee two years ago and why I am now running for re-election. I hope to earn your #1 vote on November 6th!

Teaching for change

Dear Friends and Neighbors,

What a whirlwind year and a half it has been! After winning our first race for Cambridge School Committee in November 2005 I have worked tirelessly to be a responsible steward of the Cambridge Public Schools. This committee work has been exciting, inspirational, and at times deeply frustrating. The seven school committee members have divergent views about the purpose of public education and we often have opposing ideas about how our decisions should be made. Navigating these dynamics has proven to be a great, yet not insurmountable, task. Of the positive accomplishments made by the committee this term, I am proud to say that my efforts have played a particularly significant role in:

✓ Reinstating subcommittees and making public the district goal-setting process. These were achieved through an aggressively restructured Superintendent’s contract.
✓ Changing the dominant out-of-school professional development model to a classroom-based support model with increased subject-area teaching coaches.
✓ Voicing consistent, often solitary, opposition to funding remedial test-prep classes during the school day.
✓ Addressing our schools’ precipitous enrollment decline by commissioning a market study of Cambridge families in order to discern causes and to inform new policy.
✓ Using surplus budget money to create two part-time parent ombudsperson positions to act as free liaisons for Special Ed. parents who cannot afford private advocates and lawyers.
✓ Providing active budget oversight by demanding that taxpayer dollars be redirected towards direct classroom instruction.
✓ Increasing funding for Project 10 East, CRLS’s gay/straight alliance.
✓ Writing a new comprehensive military recruitment policy that bans drop-in visits.
✓ Expanding efforts to recruit a diverse teaching staff that reflects our student population.
✓ Providing key support for the new Tobin Montessori School.
✓ Stopping the practice of taking away recess as punishment.
✓ Creating a new Service-Learning/Internship coordinator position at CRLS.

And yet there is more work to be done! If re-elected, I will work diligently on:

➢ Institutionalizing active civics education so that Cambridge youth are fully prepared to participate in our democracy.
➢ Funding curricula that teach to the student, not to the test.
➢ Starting a new hybrid middle school option to enrich opportunities for 7th and 8th graders, while leaving untouched our successful K-8 schools.
➢ Expanding vocational options at RSTA.
➢ Revising our controlled choice plan so that parents have greater certainty about placement and so that our schools are better integrated, racially and economically.
➢ Supporting the expansion of Tobin Montessori up through the grades.
➢ Addressing racial and economic achievement gaps not through testing based sticks and carrots but through individualized supports and institutional changes.

Winning re-election will be a serious challenge. First-term incumbents have had a difficult time retaining their seats in recent years and a slate of three challengers has been organized with the hope of succeeding Nancy Walser, who is not seeking re-election. Fortunately our campaign team has been proactive in campaigning early and not taking our seat for granted. We started working last December and we have since canvassed in several key neighborhoods with our new literature.

Our campaign needs your support. Here are a few ways you can get involved:

Combining these key elements with the boundless energy of our young campaign team is the formula for success!

With my deepest appreciation for all of your support in the past and going forward,

Luc

This website is designed and sponsored by the Friends of Luc Schuster. Copyright 2007. Banner Photo: Peter Bent.