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Key Issues:

Contents:

Civics Education and Service-Learning
Let's put the “public” back into public education! The City of Cambridge spends over $130 million on our public schools and we deserve a strong return on our investment. There are pressing community issues-high housing costs, unaffordable health care, environmental degradation, violent conflicts-that desperately need attention by the next generation of leaders. In addition to giving our kids economic skills to compete in a global job market, we must also teach them the political skills to participate in our democracy and advocate for change.

One important move in this direction came when Dr. Saheed created a new Service-Learning/Internship Coordinator position at CRLS. With increased testing, college, and job pressures, our youth yearn for more participatory learning. Research has shown that learning is most lasting when students are actively involved in their education; average retention rates are lowest for learning based upon lecturing and individual reading, whereas retention rates are highest when students are engaged in group discussions and are actively involved in doing projects. Interestingly, students learn most effectively when they are called upon to do the teaching themselves-our students grew up before our eyes when they taught younger kids during the one-on-one golf clinics.

Service-learning includes community-service, but also integrates other key elements designed to provide a more lasting experience. It is a model that respects the intellectual abilities of young people and emphasizes real-world learning outside of classroom walls. It is critical that kids develop practical organizing skills so that they can lead our communities and our democracy.

Subcommittees and Student School Committee Member Voting Rights
As a result of the newly restructured Superintendent contract, we now have subcommittees up and running. I chair the digital divide committee and the governance subcommittee, the committee charged with keeping an eye on how we do our business and troubleshooting any potential conflicts.

The greatest challenge I have found is that some members are accustomed to the way the school committee operates and others, particularly the newer members, have strong opinions for how we ought to do things differently. The Cambridge School Committee has a long institutional memory and changing our methods-reforming the Committee's role in drafting the annual budget, for example-has proven no small task.

As chair of the Governance Subcommittee, I have initiated a series of discussions on how to better involve our student school committee members and make their participation more meaningful. We have already had several meetings on the topic, including a joint meeting between the Governance Committee and CRLS's Student Government.

We are now finalizing a proposal that will seek to make a few important changes: 1) Student members would have an “advisory vote” on all votes that the School Committee takes. This means that their opinion will be recorded in the official minutes, even though it cannot count towards the outcome according to state law. 2) Student members would be able to participate fully during discussions, rather than solely at the beginning of meetings, as it currently stands. 3) Student members would have the option of turning their participation into an independent study for social studies credit.

The Budget
I have been a consistent voice for reallocating money to the classroom during my first two years on the committee. Cambridge spends roughly twice what similarly sized school districts spend. Allocating this generous budget money so that kids in our classrooms really feel like $23,000 is being spent on them must be one of the committee's top priorities.

There are many explanations for where our extra money currently goes-small classes, small elementary schools with principals and assistant principals, full-day kindergarten, etc.-but these do not account for all of the extra money. I believe that we should reallocate money from central administration towards funding additional specialist positions in each of our elementary schools. Since 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 support the instruction going on in our classrooms.

Patty Nolan and I have twice brought forward motions to reallocate money for specialists during the '06 and '07 budget cycles and, unfortunately lost them both 5-2. I feel strongly about this issue and have been willing to speak up and demand more reasoned budget expenditures. I am hopeful about making progress on this issue in the future.

Specialist Staffing
During this year's '07-'08 budget planning cycle, Patty Nolan and I have continued our efforts to reallocate a greater portion of our generous annual budget towards direct classroom instruction. According to the most recent Department of Education statistics, Cambridge spends over two times as much money per pupil as similarly sized MA districts, but only 1.5 times as much on classroom instruction. Ultimately, the whole Committee could not reach consensus on how to make these changes and a motion co-sponsored by Patty and me to fund roughly one additional specialist position, depending on enrollment, at each elementary school failed on a 5-2 vote.

I am prepared to continue standing up for what I believe in, even if that means finding myself on the losing end of future votes. I re-elected to the school committee, I will continue fighting for more sensible allocation of our generous budget.

Declining Enrollment
One of my first accomplishments as a new committee member in early 2006 was to push for commissioning a comprehensive market study of Cambridge families with school age children; this study involved extensive focus group interviews and phone surveying. 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 see a conclusive report sometime in the next couple of months. Overall, people seemed pretty satisfied with our schools, and this should not be forgotten. I saw three main concerns raised across the board by parents in each of these groups: dissatisfaction with general academic quality, concern over the degree to which teachers are teaching to the test, and frustration with persistent behavior issues. I see these three issues as all being closely related. Over the long haul, teaching to the test sterilizes learning and turns kids off to school. And kids 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. I was a strong supporter of this change from the beginning and it is exciting to see a previously failing school change so rapidly. Adding exciting new programs like Montessori is the sort of proactive approach we need to addressing our enrollment decline. Parents need meaningful options so that they get a top choice school and do not leave us out of frustration.

Middle Grades and Confronting Resegregation
After attending all eleven elementary school graduations, and speaking at two of them, I am more convinced than ever that Cambridge needs a new middle school option. As reflected in the different graduation ceremonies, there is a great divide in the quality of the educational and social experience being offered at each of these schools. Some have healthy graduating classes of 35-50 students, whereas a couple other graduating classes were as small as 15-20 students. For the most part, these smaller upper grades lack vibrancy and do not provide a healthy transition for kids entering adolescence and preparing for a larger citywide high school. Kids at these schools lack a large peer group large enough to organize bands, plays, sports teams, and clubs. Additionally, teachers at these grade levels lack enough colleagues to collaborate and offer dynamic project-based learning.

The superintendent has floated a couple of different ideas for creating a new middle school option for those families seeking a broader middle school experience. Here are a few possibilities: 1) We could create a 7/8 grade section in a separate wing at CRLS, emphasizing a smooth transition to high school and enabling interested middle school students to take high school courses. 2) We could create a “hybrid” middle school at a couple of the larger elementary school buildings-like Peabody and Kennedy/Longfellow-that would still be connected to the lower grades but would also draw incoming seventh graders from other schools that would turn into K-6 schools. This way we could create a couple of larger middle school strands that could provide a broader middle school experience. 3) We could start a new 7/8 grade middle school in one of the empty school buildings, such as Graham and Parks, left over by consolidation. This school could become a magnet school with a particular theme or educational philosophy appealing to middle school families.

Each of these three options would eventually force the closure of the weaker seventh and eighth grade classes at a few current K-8 elementary schools, while leaving untouched the successful ones. It should be stressed that under any of these options any new middle school in Cambridge would graduate no more than 100 or 150 students a year, still much smaller than most American middle schools.

Starting a new middle school would help also us desegregate the upper grades; a couple of the eighth grade graduating classes were comprised almost entirely of students of color. While we must get better at affecting those who otherwise would decide to leave our schools early, we should continue to strive to diversify our schools with students who choose to enter our controlled choice system. Starting a hybrid middle school would add another entry point to the controlled choice system and give us an opportunity to ensure greater diversity.

Elementary School Programs and Controlled Choice Placement
I commend the superintendent for getting us talking about Cambridge as one cohesive school district, rather than as a city with twelve independent elementary schools; however, I differ with the superintendent's means of unifying our system. It is important to have expectations for which broad content areas are taught in our elementary schools, but I do not support the emphasis on standardized assessment tests. For example, the new periodic assessments, implemented by the superintendent, are terribly burdensome on our teachers. An emphasis on testing with young kids sends the wrong message about schooling's purpose and introduces an added element of pressure that looms over students all the way through high school.

Due to the recent Supreme Court decision overruling the use of race in certain school desegregation plans, many districts are looking to Cambridge's 5-year old controlled choice model of assigning kids based primarily upon socioeconomic status. The idea behind our plan is that socioeconomic integration is critical to overall student achievement and that socioeconomic status serves as a close proxy for race. I support our model but feel strongly that it needs modification. Far too many families do not get placed in their first choice neighborhood schools and our plan still does not achieve a desirable socioeconomic balance in many schools.

The success of our school choice system depends upon parents having meaningful choices. The system breaks down when the vast majority of parents rank less than half of the elementary school options in their top three choices. Adding Tobin Montessori is precisely the sort of programmatic change we needed to make in order to support meaningful parent choice.

Tobin Montessori
I am thrilled about the new public Tobin Montessori School and am proud of the vocal support I provided for this new program from the earliest stages of debate. Montessori represents a commitment to early childhood education and is a model that fosters intellectual curiosity from in even the youngest children. Additionally, it is encouraging to see excitement in a school change overnight with the thoughtful implementation of a new program. I am committee to supporting the growth of Montessori up through the grades and hope that interest remains high.

CRLS Renovations and Green Building
Plans for the 2009 CRLS renovation project must be finalized by the end of this coming fall (2007) in order to avoid jeopardizing state funding at the 2003 level. We are urgently exploring adding renovations to plumbing, walls, floors, lockers, kitchens, cafeterias, and bathrooms, and we are in the midst of extensive conversations with the City Manager's office to calculate the extent of additional city financing for this much needed work.

The 2003 plan is LEED Certifiable, a lower-level industry standard for containing elements of environmentally sustainable building. This ranking reflects significant improvements in environmental efficiency, but there is hope of us going much further, particularly as we tease out potential cost savings for making our buildings less dependent on fossil fuels. Over the summer we won a $100,000 grant from the Green Schools Initiative of the Mass. Technology Collaborative to explore additional green options and we eagerly await their findings. There is some hope that they would kick in additional funding (not more than $40,000) towards their recommended improvements. I will insist that as we look at financing for the renovations that we include potential cost savings of at least 5 years ahead for added energy efficiencies.

Military Recruitment
I am proud of the role I played in rewriting our district's military recruitment policy. Military recruiters have a history of providing misleading information and making exaggerated claims about post-service educational support. The school committee has an important role to play in ensuring that our students make well-informed decisions about their future.

While local control over recruitment is restricted by the federal No Child Left Behind act, we were able to make two important changes: 1) Recruiters can no longer make drop-in visits and roam the hallways talking to kids one-on-one. They must give the Career Resource Center one week's notice so that the Peace Commission has the opportunity to visit the high school concurrently and present balancing information. 2) Student opt-out forms for withholding personal contact information from recruiters now last for all four years of a student's high school career, rather than for just one year.

Safe and Welcoming Schools
On June 10, 2006 I was honored to receive, on behalf of the School Committee, an award at the Annual Cambridge Lesbian and Gay Pride Breakfast. We received the reward in recognition of our successful efforts to include in the FY '06-'07 budget increased funding for the coordinator of Project 10 East at CRLS, Cambridge's gay/straight alliance created to support gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) youth in Cambridge's schools.

Our schools must provide a safe space for students of all races, religions, and sexual orientations. I support Project 10 East, CRLS's Gay/Straight Alliance, and will ensure that all students and school staff feel safe to make their sexual orientation public. I will support training to help teachers recognize and interrupt homophobic, racist, and sexist behavior and all bullying. Cambridge prides itself on being a diverse community. Appreciation of diversity must be taught and instilled through the school curricula and demonstrated in every aspect of the school community.

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. We must do more than just say we dislike standardized testing; we must put our money where our mouths are. I will not support funding test prep courses, such as SAT Prep or MCAS Prep, during the regular school day. We have a role to play in supporting struggling kids to do well on these tests, but we cannot take away from them the rest of our dynamic high school curriculum. The regular school day is sacred and we cannot taint it with the poor instruction of test-prep courses.

While MCAS is mandated by both the state and federal governments, we in Cambridge do have important choices about how to prepare kids 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's a shame that easy-to-grade computer tests are driving day-to-day instruction in our classrooms.

Rigor and Relevance
Much has been made about the need for greater rigor in our schools. I agree that our kids must be challenged and that we must confront the plague of low expectations. But we must not ratchet up rigor simply by assigning a greater amount of work. A more pressing matter, in my mind, than making school more rigorous is making it more relevant. Public schools must engage kids in meaningful projects that prepare them to follow their individual interests so that they will reach their potential, contribute meaningfully to society, and become active participants in our democracy. When schools are relevant to real world challenges, students and teachers will sit up and take notice. Only then will kids care enough about their learning to challenge themselves.

Standardized Report Cards?
A committee was formed prior to my time on the school committee to explore standardizing report cards for given grade levels across the district. This committee-composed of teachers, parents, and administrators, and excluding students(!)-has made some preliminary recommendations and a final decision on implementing district report cards will be made during the next term.

While I dislike the way that report cards are used as a tool for charting academic competition, I do believe they can be valuable for presenting constructive feedback. I fear that standardized report cards will depersonalize the feedback given to students and parents and, for this reason, I have consistently pushed for report cards that are based primarily on detailed feedback from teachers. The first draft we received from the report card committee confirmed my fears. It was filled with countless checkboxes for teachers to rank achievement through the use of obscure codes. Only at the end was there a section for additional written comments.

The best reason for standardizing report cards across the elementary schools is to make it easier for high school teachers to understand the report cards for all incoming ninth graders. Additionally, posting report cards online would enable all teachers to access previous years' report cards for all of their students. I believe we can find a compromise system that takes advantage of these potential benefits but still encourages detailed individual feedback and allows for unique additional sections at individual schools.

WiFi and Digital Divide
As part of our new subcommittee structure I was named chair of our committee on the Digital Divide. We have recently decided to roll our committee's efforts into a broader joint CPS/City Committee on the Digital Divide. Our challenge is to design a structure for providing computer hardware to Cambridge families who would not otherwise have access to the city's coming free public wireless network. As a first step we are discussing a pilot project where recycled desktop computers would be made available to elementary-age kids in Newtowne Court, the first location where the city's wireless network is up and running.

As a School Committee member I am pushing to have the city's pilot project tied tightly to the schools, preferably providing computers to families through their CPS children. One exciting example of this potential collaboration is employing RSTA students to staff call centers to address families' technical problems. This would provide RSTA students with real world experience and help families troubleshoot the myriad potential technical problems inherent in a project like this.

Special Education
Despite being well resourced, our Office of Special Education has been a barrier for receiving services for far too many families. I also find it deeply problematic that students of color are over-referred to special education, particularly to behavior programs.

Fortunately, we have reason to be optimistic about change due to the hiring of Dr. Aida Ramos, our new Director of OSE. Dr. Ramos has hit the ground running and has compiled a list of needed improvements that are already being addressed. Last spring, the School Committee also voted to spend surplus budget money to hire two part-time parent ombudspersons to act as free liaisons for parents who cannot afford to hire private advocates and/or lawyers. These are positive improvements and there is more work to be done.

State/Federal Role in Local Education
State and federal governments do have a role to play in education. First, they must play a greater role in funding primary and secondary education. School budgets that are dependent on local property taxes have led to vast inequality of opportunity. Second, state and federal governments must ensure that schools are each performing at a certain base level. Unfortunately, this oversight is now done in a low-budget, streamlined manner, mostly through the analysis of poorly designed standardized test scores. Schools that do not perform well are threatened, rather than supported in constructive ways. Beyond these two roles, state and federal governments should leave local communities to run their schools and design curricula that reflect local values.

This is a scary time for public schools. The Education Reform Act of 1993 and the more recent No Child Left Behind Act have had far reaching effects on local control over education. Cambridge has radically restructured its school system to accommodate this institutionalized push for standards that serves to produce cogs in a wheel, rather than creative problem solvers who think independently. The Ed. Reform Act also invited charter schools into the educational marketplace. Not surprisingly, teachers and students have fiercely resisted this movement to dismantle our public schools. I work to represent these silenced voices in the debate over public education's proper role in society.

Charter Schools
Because charter school funding is based on a city's per pupil expenditures, Cambridge is an attractive breeding ground for charter schools. I am opposed to charter schools because they weaken public schools. They siphon money, students, and teachers from school systems that desperately need each of these.

Charter schools are a difficult issue for me because so many teachers I know and respect are involved in starting them and teaching at them. They are disgruntled with the state of public education and feel strongly that they can more effectively reach children by running their own schools. It is problematic that many people now view private charter schools as the only option for creative education. The exodus of energetic young teachers to charter schools is both a cause and effect of the perception that public schools discourage creativity.

I, too, am disgruntled with the state of public education. That's why I'm running for school committee! Without the option of charter schools other creative teachers will have no option but to work for radical changes within the public system that needs them so desperately.

Adult Education
I am a former GED teacher and a current organizer for adult education programs across the state (GED, English for speakers of other languages, and adult literacy programs). Fortunately, Cambridge has one of the country's strongest adult ed. programs in the Community Learning Center (CLC) based in Central Square on Brookline St.

Students at the CLC are often those who were most underserved by our public schools. They, more than anyone else, deserve strong educational programming. One immediate way the School Committee can help support the CLC is by advocating for a new building. The old police station is one possible location.

Additionally, the school department has much to learn from many of the CLC's innovative programs where, for example, evening classes are taught with parents and their kids learning side-by-side.

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