Our shitshow of a School Committee, and who to vote for instead

The School Committee race often gets less attention and votes than the City Council, but even if you’re not a parent you should be paying attention this time. As I’ll explain below, the process of hiring a new superintendent has been so utterly mismanaged that I don’t think any of the incumbents deserve re-election.

Even without incumbents, however, there are a very large number of candidates running, so who should you vote for? And you should vote, it does make a difference—last School Committee election, the final member won with just 8 votes!

Below I will:

• Provide just some of the ways the School Committee’s hiring process utterly fucked up.
• Explain my personal criteria for choosing candidates, including:
  • A willingness to fight for budgets.
  • Reducing educational achievement gaps.
  • A respect for teachers.
• My understanding of where candidates stand on some of these issues.
• My current personal ranking of candidates.

Even if you disagree with some of my conclusions or assumptions, I hope this will at least be helpful in deciding who to vote for.

My general process

With 18 people running, it’s easier to do assessments in two passes:

1. First, filter out people I’m definitely not voting for.
2. Then, rank the remaining smaller pool.

How not to hire a superintendent

The Cambridge Public School Department superintendent is in charge of a budget of more than $280 million, and the schooling of thousands of children (including my daughter.) The previous superintendent was fired in May 2024, so the hiring process of the new one took 17 months. The process was, to use a technical a term, a shitshow.

A truly awful semi-finalist: One candidate, who was a semi-finalist in the process, infamously gave the following advice to first-year teachers:

“I’ll use an Oakland analogy … a pimp has to groom, he has to get to know a young lady in order to get her to go out and sell her body to get him money… Similar to a Catholic priest … similar to a pedophile … it’s about building those relationships where there’s trust, where I will do whatever you ask me to.”

This information is trivially easy to find by googling this candidate’s name, but apparently the hiring committee were specifically told not to research candidates. While this makes sense at certain stages of the process to reduce bias, apparently non one did minimal filtering when they should have.

A problematic finalist: Another candidate, who was a finalist, lost $750,000 in a cryptocurrency scam (perhaps not a dealbreaker, but not promising given the financial responsibility involved in the job), and was accused of domestic violence by his wife during divorce proceedings (even worse). The School Committee knew about this during the hiring process, but kept him on as a finalist. When the Boston Globe asked him about this, he claimed the documents were sealed and threatened to sue the Globe (not great); per the Globe these documents were actually part of the public record.

An inexperienced search form: The firm that is leading the search has apparently never done an executive search before. They were hired with a no-bid process, after the three companies that applied for the bid-based process didn’t meet all the requirements. Most of the current School Committee members, with the exception of Elizabeth Hudson, were not willing to comment on this last article, which is pretty typical of how this process has gone.

No regrets by most of the School Committee: The hiring committee members have an NDA that means there is no way of even knowing which members of the School Committee were on the hiring committee. Essentially, with the exception of Hudson and Harding who only spoke up late in the process, the School Committee has publicly either said nothing or claimed to be fine with this process.

The teachers’ union was upset enough about all this that they called for starting from scratch, but the School Committee did not agree. Three of the Committee members running for reelection at the the October 6th meeting where they finally picked a superintendent came out in strong support for the process:

• Member Rojas: “I want to reaffirm that this process has followed best practices.”
• Member David Weinstein: His only complaints about the process where delays and the need for better communication and updates, and otherwise he was happy with it.
• Member Caroline Hunter: No acknowledgment of any issues with the process.

To their credit, members Elizabeth Hudson and Richard Harding were both willing to acknowledge that the process could have been run better, beyond just communication. But they’re still saying that what matters is the outcomes, and… this whole process is happening because the previous superintendent was fired soon after she was hired. It would be good to have a decent hiring processes for key personnel.

Conclusion: I’m not ranking Rojas, David Weinstein, or Hunter.

Note 1: Mayor Simmons was also heavily involved in this process; the Mayor is a City Councilor chosen to be chair of the Council, and as a side-effect also becomes chair of the School Committee. Simmons is running for the City Council again, and I would suggest not ranking her.

Note 2: There are two (unrelated) Weinsteins on the current School Committee, Rachel Weinstein and David Weinstein. Of the two, only David Weinstein is running again this year.

More fuckups: a school closure

Also during this term, the Kennedy-Longfellow School was closed due to the school’s “untenable situation” and low scores and underenrollment. The acting superintendent (recently promoted to actual superintendent) explained that the closure was:

“necessitated by a combination of enrollment and demand patterns along with the systemic structures that have resulted in a disproportionate and inequitable allocation of students across our district.”

What are the systemic structures he was referring to? It seems to be both the resources the school got, and the way parents choose where their kids go to school (“controlled school”) works, which is something the district, and by extension the School Committee, is responsible for:

K-Lo caregivers say they have been calling on the district to give more attention to the school for years, but have been gaslit and ignored. “Students at K-Lo deserve restitution for the many years that the School Committee failed to take action on a system they knew was inadequate,” a caregivers group wrote Monday in a newsletter formed in the wake of recent deliberations.

…

“I take partial responsibility for finding ourselves in this moment,” said [School Committee] member Rachel Weinstein, citing the lack of annual review to the controlled choice policy that places students, and which has been cited as the biggest factor in K-Lo’s imbalance.

Mayor Simmons, it’s worth noting, seemed to blame school staff, though she did not explain how mechanically they could have been responsible for a disproportionately high percentage of children with high needs being assigned to this particular school. Again, I encourage you not to rank her for City Coucil.

CCC endorsements, and aligned policies

The Cambridge Citizens Coalition stands for:

• Preventing any taller or denser construction, which notably prevents almost all subsidized affordable housing projects built or proposed in Cambridge.
• Keeping taxes low, in order to benefit the richest people in Cambridge: property owners.
• To a lesser extent, fighting against safer bike infrastructure like separated bike lanes.

Broadly speaking, they are the Party of No: their core platform is that nothing in the city should be improved if it inconveniences them in any way. They endorsed candidates both for City Council and School Committee.

While affordable housing isn’t as relevant to the School Committee (I’ll cover the other two next), I have to assume that anyone accepting CCC endorsements is one of the following:

• In agreement with CCC’s policies, which I deeply dislike.
• Or, very politically naive.
• Or, someone who believes that anyone being unhappy is a fundamental policy failure. This belief effectively means giving veto power over policy changes to anyone with a strongly held belief, however factually wrong or actively harmful.

None of these are positives for an elected official of any kind.

The CCC endorsed members Elizabeth Hudson and Richard Harding, as well as new candidates Jia-Jing Lee and Jane Hirschi.

Let’s consider the last two CCC policies, the budget and biking, and how they relate to schools.

A counterpoint to the CCC: Money is useful

Imagine, as a thought exercise, if we spent $200,000 per year per student. Could we get better outcomes, and reduce the unfortunate diverge in educational outcomes? Seems plausible: we could, for example, create a completely personalized curriculum for each child down to the topics in math questions. A specific kid loves Red Sox? No problem, they get lots of Red Sox-themed questions.

We do of course have limits to our budget, and the district does actually get a lot of money. But saying that we shouldn’t even think about where more money would be helpful seems like a problem. And this is especially the case since our tax rates are lower than neighboring cities.

So I want candidates who will actually consider negotiating for more money with the City Manager—the City’s chief executive—if it’s necessary. Right now the City Manager just tells the School Committee “here’s what you get” and there’s no real negotiation.

On the positive side, Luisa de Paula Santos, Lilly Havstad, and Jess Goetz talk about doing this in the CPEC questionnaires, and to a lesser extent Arjun Jaikumar as well.

On the negative side:

• Elizabeth Hudson appears to be very much opposed to raising taxes: she brings up concerns about property taxes in the very first paragraph on her website. While I appreciate that buying a $6 million home does lead to her having to pay high property taxes, it also means she can afford those taxes. The same principle is generally true of most, albeit not all, property owners in Cambridge.
• Anne Coburn seems to have bought in to the idea that we’re facing a budget crisis, saying in one recent email that “Cambridge has been maxing out its credit cards and needs to be cost sensitive now.” This comparison is just plain wrong: credit card debt pays 20% interest rate on average (and more if you’ve maxed them out!), whereas Cambridge is borrowing at a 3% interest rate. And Cambridge taxes are lower than neighboring cities so there is capacity to raise them more if necessary.

Yes, there are limits, and yes things aren’t as rosy as they used to be. But the biggest budget issue is a political unwillingness to raise taxes on homeowners and landlords who have had vast capital gains over the past decades. There’s also a political unwillingness to, for example, cut the large amount of money we spend on the police’s budget; personally I think much of it is a waste.

Paying people well is useful

To dig a little deeper into the usefulness of money—

Elizabeth Hudson has a chart on her website showing how district expenses—mostly salaries—are up 50% over 20 years (above inflation) and claims this shows we’re investing lots more money in education than we used to. The problem is that GDP per capita has also grown ~30% (after inflation) during that time, so in general if economic benefits are distributed fairly you would expect teachers to get paid 30% more over those 20 years at least.

Living expenses in the Boston area, especially housing, have grown faster than CPI which is an average across the whole country, so you’d expect increases of more than 30%. Otherwise, you’re telling teachers that e.g. the starting pay they get now will be equivalent to the starting pay teachers got 20 years ago, even as many people around them are making far more than equivalent people did 20 years ago. For more, you can read about the Baumol effect.

More broadly, American society vastly undervalues educators in terms of pay. To be fair, we do pay more than other districts, but it’s still not a particularly well-paying career. And consider CPSD paraprofessionals, who are getting paid so little they need to take second and third jobs.

Both out of fairness, and because paying teachers well is part of how you get good, motivated teachers, I am very skeptical of Hudson’s premise. This is especially true given her starting point on Cambridge’s taxes (which, again, are very low by neighboring towns’ standards).

A counterpoint to the CCC: I would like my child to stay alive and unharmed

My daughter is in middle school, and starting to bike on her own; many of her classmates are biking to school. Huge numbers of high-schoolers bike to school. I would like all of these children to bike around safely. This is also an educational policy: concussions and broken arms impede learning, and being dead makes learning impossible.

A key way to keep these kids safer is with infrastructure improvements like separated bike lanes, but not all candidates support this. And if a candidate isn’t willing to support policies that will allow children to get to school safely, I feel like they don’t have the minimal moral capacity to run a school system.

In 2017 Harding was very critical of bike lanes. At the time the only two bike lanes he could have been referring to were one on Brattle St which didn’t remove any parking at all… or the one on Cambridge St that allowed high schoolers to get to CRLS safely by bike for the first time. In 2022 he signed a petition by an anti-bike-lane group. And since he didn’t bother answering the CBS questionnaire (see below), I have no reason to think he’s changed his mind.

Cambridge Bicycle Safety (CBS) asked candidates about their views:

• Hudson was equivocal in the questionnaire, not great given her endorsement by the CCC.
• Alex Bowers didn’t fill it out so I don’t know her views.
• Jane Hirschi didn’t want to weigh in on the Cycling Safety Ordinance since it’s under School Committee purview, which is fair, but I know from elsewhere that she does support safer infrastructure so I have no complaints there.

Conclusion from all the above: I’m not voting for Hudson, and I’m not voting for Harding.

We should work to shrink educational achievement gaps

It’s bad that we have some students who are doing much worse than other students. We should try to fix that. Given the society we live in, systemic bad outcomes are a result of both racism and economic inequality; focusing on just one or the other isn’t sufficient.

For this I’m interested in specific policy suggestions. Reading the CPEC questionnaires:

• I particularly appreciated the answers of de Paula Santos, Caitlin Dube, and Lilly Havstad, all of which centered teacher skills.
• Arjun Jaikumar suggests more time for teachers to do cross-class observation.
• Coburn’s suggestions in the questionnaire were specific but I didn’t find them that compelling. The suggestions on her website, however, were much more detailed and interesting.
• Goetz, Battle, Lee, and Bowers didn’t have much in the way of concrete suggestions (but Goetz has said she is focusing more on process).

Looking at candidate websites:

• Eugenia Schraa Huh has specific policy suggestions (including teacher support and feedback).
• Alborz Bejnood has some interesting ideas but they’re not focused on achievement gaps, and he seems way too positive on AI for my taste.
• I didn’t get much from the remaining candidates’ websites.

I value teachers’ opinions, as well as the teachers’ union’s opinions

I have been personally unimpressed with many district-level staff, and often unimpressed with prinicipals. I have been much happier with the teachers I met. And the teachers’ union is the teachers; one of my daughter’s favorite teachers last year was on the union negotiation team.

So I value candidates who have been involved with the education-focused advcocacy group Solidarity Squad. They developer their policies with teachers, including another teacher of my daughter’s I respect. Candidates that have been involved here include Goetz, Coburn, and Havstad (and maybe others I’ve missed?).

I also value candidates who have been endorsed by the teachers’ union, although to be fair their last set of elected endorsees from 2023 didn’t turn out so well. The union endorsed de Paula Santos, Dube, Goetz, Havstad, Hirschi, and Jaikumar.

Schraa Huh seems rather skeptical of the union, which is a negative.

Other positives

Keeping in mind that these are people I know and like on a personal level, and so this may be biasing me:

• Schraa Huh has successfully organized and advocated for improvements in after-school care, and in general is good at getting things done and political organizing.
• Goetz seems quite good on process, which is important (see the terrible superintendent hiring process), and data analysis (also super useful).

My own niche question: IHRA and support for free speech

I asked candidates about the IHRA definition and whether they would restrict free speech; see my write-up here along with candidate responses.

A caveat, a summary, and my current ranking

First, a caveat. I have spent far more time learning about the policies impacted by the City Council than the School Committee. I also know the people involved much better, and there are more endorsing groups whose opinions can be helpful. As a result, I am far more confident in my suggestions for City Council than I am for School Committee. I encourage you to read the CPEC questionnaires and candidate websites yourself, and spend the time to learn about the candidates.

Nevertheless, here is my own takeaway from the above. After omitting incumbents, none of whom I’m going to rank, here’s my attempt at a summary:

Candidate	Budget	Squad	Union	Policy	CCC	Free speech
Battle
Bejnood
Bowers
Coburn	☹️	👍		👍		👍
de Paula Santos	👍		👍	👍		👍
Dube			👍	👍		👍
Gause
Goetz	👍	👍	👍			👍
Havstad	👍	👍	👍	👍		👍
Hirschi			👍		🚩	👍
Jaikumar			👍			👍
Lee					🚩	👍
Schraa Huh			☹️	👍		👍

Looking at this chart, I eliminated Battle, Bejnood, Bowers, and Gause, and came up with the following ranking:

• 1st/2nd, order TBD: de Paula Santos and Havstad.
• 3rd: Goetz.
• 4th: Dube.
• 5th/6th, order TBD: Coburn and Schraa Huh.
• 7th/8th, order TBD: Jaikumar and Hirschi.
• 9th: Lee.

IMPORTANT: No matter what, rank lots of candidates!

Because so many different candidates are running, if you only rank a few candidates there’s a decent chance your vote will be wasted. So whether you agree with my ranking or hate it, it’s really important that you rank many candidates.

A bit more

Song of the day: Chrono Trigger Main Theme, performed by the 8-Bit Big Band with Steven Feifke on piano.