Taking the School Committee Back to School

Many Cambridge residents had hoped that the induction of a new School Committee and new mayor would initiate active measures against issues currently facing the Cambridge School District: the deepening budget deficit, the perennial student achievement gap, and organizational difficulties.

But progress in many of these areas has remained sluggish. The Crimson reviews the Committee’s past year, as well as the issues that will be brought yet again to the Committee’s table this fall.

MIXED REVIEWS

Nine months after the election of the new School Committee, members remain uncertain about how best to balance budget shortfalls with the need for greater professional teacher training, modified curricula to accommodate all levels of students, and increased focus on the middle grades—a heated topic on its own. But committee members, as well as Schools Superintendent Jeffrey M. Young, contend that tangible progress has been made.

According to Young, a focus on professional development in the past fiscal year has helped “increase [educators’] capacities to deliver a structural method to help all students, regardless where they are in the academic spectrum.”

“A lot of work that has been done, and the benefit of it you can see now,” Cambridge Mayor and School Committee chair David P. Maher says, pointing out that of the 22 high school seniors in the Cambridge school district accepted to Harvard this year, 16 attended Cambridge public schools. “This puts Cambridge in the top five communities in the world.”

A WIDENING GAP

Maher’s statistics may be promising, but the Cambridge district schools continue to grapple with gaping disparities in test scores between White and Asian students, and other minority groups. In last year’s Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System testing, poor overall scores placed the district in the “needs improvement” category for the first time ever, due to the low average test scores of Black, Hispanic, low-income, and special education students.

The gap has been attributed to uneven instruction throughout the schools and the lack of focus on the middle grades, as exemplified in Cambridge’s current lack of stand-alone middle schools.

The long-standing problem arose as a prominent issue during last November’s elections for members of the School Committee, as candidates loudly criticized the achievement gap plaguing the district and called it “unacceptable.”

In an effort to bridge the gap, current Committee members set aside a budget that would promote curriculum continuity in the jump from elementary to high school. In addition, the Committee has pushed training within the Cambridge Leadership Network, a group of leaders in the education community who focus on the improvement of classroom environment, teaching techniques, and feedback for teachers.

“We need to continue to focus on the middle grades and other issues including our curriculum construction and professional development of teachers,” School Committee member Nancy Tauber says.

THE PROBLEM MIDDLE

To help tackle the achievement gap, Young formally proposed the establishment of a middle school to supplement the city’s K-8-only system at a School Committee meeting in February.

“Not every child is getting exactly what they need,” Young said at the meeting, calling the achievement gap “immoral.”

Young originally committed to presenting concrete proposals regarding the issues pervading the Cambridge middle grades by October 2009, but the recommendations were delayed multiple times and finally slated to appear this month.

“We began the year with an intent to look at restructuring possibilities for our middle grades,” Young says. “The further along we went, we found that it was a layered problem that required further study.”

Of the five options Young forwarded at the February Committee meeting, he pushed for the “hybrid” model, which involves a combination of some K-5 and K-8 schools and the establishment of a grades 6-8 middle school. Committee members expect to flesh out the model this month.

In spite of the oft-discouraging delays in implementation, Tauber assures that the Committee has been discussing “the structure for a very long time” and that “the teachers and administrators are working on it every day.”

CONTROLLING CHOICES

The proposal to create a separate Cambridge middle school has divided district leaders for decades. The current school system, which includes 11 K-8 schools, has been accused of supporting the racially and socio-economically isolating environments to which the achievement gap has been attributed.

Controlled choice was initially set in place to create a racially-balanced student population across schools. The program allows parents to submit a ranked list of preferred schools but ultimately uses an algorithm to place students according to set demographic ratios.

Several School Committee members have pointed out that controlled choice has largely failed to achieve its goal, as it eventually assigns students based on their neighborhoods of residence and thus results in racial and socio-economic imbalance.

“We have a lot of middle school grades that are not as diverse as they should be, and that should be addressed,” says Alfred B. Fantini, the longest-serving member of the Committee.

In the past year, little has changed in the controlled choice system. Parag A. Pathak ’02, an assistant economics professor at MIT, recommended a new algorithm for the student-to-school assigning process, but concrete discussion were mostly tabled.

“We’ve talked about pieces of it,” Tauber says. “It’s complicated because at the end of the day it talks about race and class.”

“I think that we really need to take a comprehensive look at it...I don’t think we’ve done that since I’ve been on the school committee,” Tauber adds.

The current schools assignment system will not see drastic changes anytime soon, Maher says: “I don’t think that you’re going to see the system thrown out. You’re going to see some fine tuning.”

GOVERNING MONEY

The Cambridge public school system faces a $3.7 million deficit going into the 2011 fiscal year, and city schools consequently suffered deep staff cuts in the central administration.

“This budget was crafted in a time of fiscal constraint,” Young said back in April when the school committee recommended reorganization of the city school system’s central administration, eliminating administrative support jobs and cutting teaching aides in the elementary grades.

Young said he hoped these cutbacks would have a streamlining effect, creating positions that require higher skill levels and greater efficiency. Young also said he hoped budget tightening would shed light on the larger-than-average spending of Cambridge per student. (Cambridge spends approximately $25,000 per student per year, about $10,000 more than Boston or Newton.)

The School Committee’s budget decisions have relied largely on widening the pool of early retirement candidates, in hopes of reducing the number of actual staff cuts.

“That was a very difficult but prudent decision to not have to deal with budget constraints,” says Committee member Marc McGovern. “[But] it’s never easy when you’re talking about peoples’ livelihoods.”

“There are a lot of folks that are in unions and there is a certain process you have to go through before downsizing,” Fantini adds.

Members of the School Committee have tried to look on the bright side, but according to Tauber, “when it comes to talk about the budget [next fiscal year], it’s going to be tough again.”

Additionally, some uncertainty within the School Committee itself—such as this year’s prolonged mayoral election—has added to the Committee’s troubles. Some Committee members also take issue with the superintendent selection process and the two-year term Committee members serve, complaining about the too-rapid turnover within the governance.

“Members who voted for the Superintendent, they are no longer on the school committee,” Fantini says. “He [now] doesn’t have the majority of the School Committee that can say they voted for him.”

“We had to get everyone up to speed; after two years, there are three new members,” Fantini adds.

“It wouldn’t be out of line to look at what makes us a more effective body as opposed to the most political,” McGovern says.

It took the Cambridge City Council seven tries to elect a mayor, and for those two months the School Committee operated with a missing member and without its chair.

But Maher expresses faith in at least the existing mayor-Committee relationship.

“The system that we have has been in place for over 70 years,” he says. “When you’re living through it, it probably seems longer than it is.”

—Staff writer Rediet T. Abebe can be reached at rtesfaye@college.harvard.edu.