Achievement Gaps, AI Policy, and Upper Schools

I’ve recently gotten some really great questions from CPS parents. Here are my responses! (Be warned, it's long.)

1. What are specific things you propose to close achievement gaps?

Okay -- I found myself writing a thesis, because it's such a complex topic. (I tried to simplify it, but I think I utterly failed.) But since the specific answers vary from school to school (because there are multiple causes for achievement gaps), I believe it starts with a shared mindset for all stakeholders. 

We should be creating a time and space where the learning process can be accessed by and protected for all students in Cambridge. 

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 starts with leadership and accountability for district administrators and principals. It should inform what curriculum you should choose (aka fact-based) and how one teaches that material. That goal influences building maintenance and school start-times, and how quickly one responds to caregiver concerns. And it should aim to build trust by following through on one’s commitments.

I believe that to learn:

1) Students have to get to school.

2) They have to actually be present (mentally, physically) to learn.

3) They have to know what's expected of them.

4) They have to interact with the material and with the teacher.

5) The material has to be actually helpful & pertinent to the subject at hand.

6) They have to interact with each other.

7) They have to grapple with their own interests and skills -- the things that make them, them -- and that's specific to each person.

8) They have to have their needs addressed on a social-emotional & physical level.

9) They have to go back home.

10) Their caregivers have to aid and abet them in their schooling.

Within that list, I can see policy and budget implications on everything from transportation to family involvement to classroom management.

These include:

• Swiftly addressing transportation questions throughout the year, and planning for the beginning of the year far, far in advance

• Addressing chronic absenteeism

• Explicitly stated expectations of teacher & student rights and responsibilities 

• Scaffolding and classroom management

• Healthy union to district relationships, school to school, school to district, and caregiver to teacher to school to district relationships

• Enough support in the classroom

• Not-burnt-out-teachers

• Mentorship for new teachers and professional development that genuinely helps all teachers

• Strong and competent principals

• A responsive administration that encourages leadership and professional growth -- which means a comprehensive ownership of responsibilities and not needlessly replicating services

• A school committee that leads by example to encourage excellence in all

• Curriculum based on evidence based learning practices

• The capacity and a plan to address classroom behavior issues

• Enough time to play

• Anti-racist, anti-bullying policies and curricula

• Social-emotional learning skills leading to an awareness that your actions impact others and yourself and healthy ways to resolve conflict

• Access to differentiated materials (because consistent growth curves only happen on paper)

• Having learning disorders addressed in a timely fashion

• Culturally responsive learning materials

• Availability of social workers and counselors; enough to eat; safe buildings & playgrounds

• A place to sleep, a reasonable expectation of knowing what's going to happen tomorrow, and a feeling of safety.

2. What is your position on technology in the classroom? Do game-like math and reading programs work? Are they better somehow than analog methods (human teacher, paper and pencil)? What do you think?

My position is somewhat nuanced here. I'm a very tactile person myself, and I keep a notebook and pencil on me at all times -- that's how I prefer to learn. So I see the benefit of continuing to work in an analog environment, especially for kids between preschool through about third grade. But if math feels more accessible via a piece of software, I think that’s all about the user interface design for both the analog and the digital methodology.

I think the problem comes in when digital methods are treated as the only way to access the material. That, I’m against.

3. What's your AI policy?

Whooooo-boy. My AI policy is that I think that AI is a marvelous tool for record-keeping tasks and can be life-changing for folks with disabilities. But I also think that value judgments should not be made based on predictive assumptions made by AI – and those value judgements have implications for students and teachers throughout the district.

And then, as a media maker, I’m offended by companies that data scrape other people’s intellectual property to offer watered down art. Like – yeah, Aristotelian dramatic structure has been kicking around for a long, long time. But we tell stories out of our experiences of how our individual bodies move in the world in the context of the times in which we live. And those experiences might be shared, but they can’t be generalized.

But now I’m going to complicate that again and say that while I believe that we learn our own opinions and values by writing them down, I don’t necessarily think that the person writing their thoughts down must do it by either typing or via analog methods. To me, speech to text is a valid way to communicate! And it makes communication possible for lots of folks who may have dyslexia or other learning differences. 

So – I think we’re using it now. But I think we don’t always know that we’re using it at all. And I think we should all learn about the ways or when we should or should not use it. Finally, I think that fact checking and proofing work that incorporates AI is deeply, deeply important. 

To sum up: humans use tools; AI is a tool; use it with the full awareness of why and when that tool is (or is not) appropriate.

4. Should students have access to advanced materials if they are working at a level of above their peers, or is it better for everyone to study the same thing?

I don’t think that’s an either or question. 

I think kids should have a shared, consistent curriculum that helps teachers and students to identify areas of need or strength. Then we should adapt from there. I’m a big fan of using the IEP format to address the needs of the child in front of you – and that goes for advanced learners as well as for kids who need more support to access the material. And yes, all students should have access to advanced materials – how else are you going to be able to stretch further? Intellectual curiosity should be met, not discouraged.

I just don’t think we should be afraid of kids having staggered levels of educational attainment. When we wince away from that concept, it implies that we think that educational attainment is static rather than dynamic – and isn’t that what learning is all about? 

I believe that how well or poorly a kid does on one day isn’t necessarily a predictor of that kids’ mastery of the material in the long run – and in my opinion, it’s the long run that counts.

5. What's your feeling about play for kids in elementary school? Do our kids get too much? Not enough?

More of it, please, and more of it for kids in middle school as well.

6. Do you feel like you can go against the grain when needed? I.E. Do you "toe the party line" in terms of things liberals "should" think or conservatives "should" think? Do you hold any positions that are not typical for your main political affiliation? Are you able to work with people with different flavors of belief?

At the recent CEA forum, Chris Montero, the teachers’ union president, asked a lightning round question, requiring a yes or no answer only. He asked “will you pledge to never close another Cambridge school again?” 

I said no. 

To put that no in context, my daughter recently graduated from Kennedy-Longfellow (which just closed) and now attends PAUS. 

I do not want to close another school, I don’t like the fact that the school closed, and I don’t like that the kids at the school were ignored for years. But I won’t be pressured to commit to a decision like that without having all the information and making up my own mind, no matter how much I like and respect the person making that demand. (And I both like and respect Chris Montero and the CEA.) These are teacher’s careers and friendships. This is the continuity in so many kids’ lives. School closures are traumatic to the community. 

There would have to be some very good reasons to even contemplate the idea of closing a school – and if there are reasons that good, it would be my responsibility to grapple with them honestly and pursue the information relentlessly, no matter where that line of inquiry would take me.

And for the record, I consider myself very, very left. I also define myself as aware of the human cost of blanket decisions, no matter who is making them.

7. Can you talk more about your thoughts regarding middle schools, performance, and attrition? 

Here's a spreadsheet with data that I’ve used to form some of my conclusions. I drew all of this data from the DESE website; please be aware that this data only references school populations and Spring 2024 ELA data for 6th, 7th, & 8th grades for all Cambridge upper schools.

Some thoughts:

• I stand by my conclusions that overall, Cambridge upper schools, and the district as a whole, seem pretty competent — at least as can be measured on one day in April 2024! We're ahead of the state’s scores for meeting or exceeding expectations across the board. The one slightly dicey area for 2024 seems to have been sixth grade math. But I’ll also say that once you get into the data with any depth, you can see that the district’s demographic academic evaluation gap is very, very real.

• From what I can see, the district’s upper schools as a whole were at 94% of capacity at the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year. But prior to the beginning of the year, 9.34% of fifth grade students left the district. That’s the lowest rate of attrition since 2020. Great! Upper schools seem to be beating the bad rap! But if those students had not left the district, sixth grade would have been over-enrolled. 

My conclusion: we maybe need more upper school capacity…?

Specific to RAUC: Mea culpa. I wasn’t specific enough in my phrasing at this past Monday night’s CALA event, so I fleshed out the data further. I’m appreciative of the opportunity to add more nuance to my comments.

• RAUC does a good job for the majority of the students that it serves. RAUC's Spring 2024 8th grade ELA scores were especially strong, leading the district among students with disabilities, African-American/Black students, and White students.

• But RAUC's student population is also reflective of the elementary school feeder pattern (Baldwin, Peabody), and therefore its population skews more White and less low income than the district as a whole. Relying on averaged test scores reflects those population patterns, so it's important to interrogate that data to see if all groups are being well served by the school across all grades. And I'm not 100% sure of that yet, in part because of a lack of robust data set. Specifically, there aren't enough test takers to report on for the following demographic groups:

• Sixth grade: English language learners/former English language learners; Asian students

• Seventh grade: English language learners/former English language learners; Asian, Hispanic/Latino, Multi-Race, Non-Hisp./Latino students

• Eight grade: Hispanic/Latino, Multi-Race, Non-Hisp./Latino students

• A very, very quick review of RAUC’s student attrition and discipline data shows that 22% of Asian students left the school during the seventh grade. 87% of the students disciplined were considered high needs. 87.5% of students disciplined were people of color; 62.5% were students with disabilities. I've been told, by the way, that these numbers reflect a substantially separate group participating in "Structured Academics." Full disclosure: I don't know enough about the program to evaluate its efficacy or its equity. And yes, these are small data sets (as we generally have small schools). That can magnify percentages.

Anyways, that’s what I've got for the moment.

More soon, and thank you!

—amc