Well, friends and neighbors, I got hilariously, truly, deeply squashed in the 2025 Cambridge School Committee election.

In the last couple of weeks, the City of Cambridge raised commercial property taxes by 22%. There’s a projected Nov 10 joint City Council-School Committee round table to discuss broader macroeconomic trends and their effect on the upcoming budget. At the same time, we’ve also collectively learned more about an inappropriate $40,000 contract award to The Equity Project, which participated in the now-concluded superintendent search. Here’s my comment in response.

My budget sensitivity isn’t because I want us to be more efficient for efficiency’s sake. It’s because I want CPSD to keep and expand the services that we should already be offering, and offering well.

Endorsed by CALA, 25 miles of walking in two days, researching and finding; speaking and speaking and speaking.

I’m writing immediately after the Cambridge School Committee vote on the Superintendent search process – and Cambridge Day already beat me to the punch, with their article “David Murphy Named Permanent Superintendent for Cambridge Schools in Unanimous Final Vote.”

While the swirl around the superintendent search makes for great #myhbo, I want to shift to the actual content of the interviews. Each candidate was asked the same twenty questions, and each candidate provided in-depth answers. Occasional follow-up questions were asked of each finalist. I found these interviews to be revealing, both around School Committee members’ concerns and conclusions and finalists’ approaches regarding educational best practices. But all three interviews are dense and jargon heavy, making it harder for the public to parse any kind of meaning from the interviews or the questions. So I’m going to do my best to summarize.

A quick recap of the format and content of last night’s superintendent candidate interviews (with a few of my own editorial comments at the end).

As the superintendent selection process comes down to the wire, I wanted to provide a little bit of a season recap so we've all got a shared understanding of the stakes.

Kids' window for learning to read is ideally between kindergarten to third grade. So we need to prioritize everything that helps with that goal.

I think that the legitimacy of this entire search is highly questionable and that, overall, the School Committee has handled this task very poorly. But I also think the process has brought – as far as I can currently tell – three qualified candidates forward for review.