Survey paints grim picture of Cambridge schools, but a Monday town hall promises some ‘context’
Cambridge schools superintendent Victoria Greer at a Feb. 6 meeting. (Photo: Julia Levine)
Cambridge Public Schools faculty and administrators are discontented, according to a recent survey getting a town hall meeting Monday, and there’s cause for concern among families and students: Among 16 benchmarks across five surveys for different groups in a 2023-2024 District/School Climate Survey, the district doesn’t hit the highest quintile in a single one compared with districts nationwide. And in only a single benchmark – the sense of belonging of students in grades 3-5 – does the district land in the second-highest.
For students in grades 6-12, the sense of school belonging plunges to the lowest quintile.
Results range from simply underwhelming to outright concerning in the surveys of district teachers and staff and administration.
The sense of well-being among these district educators, administrators and staff working under superintendent Victoria Greer and her administration is in the tank – stuck in the lowest quintile, or compared with others nationally from zero to the 19th percentile.
There are no national benchmarks in some categories for the 136 administration voices surveyed, but percentage results on a summary page are lackluster: “belonging” (57 percent); “school climate” (45 percent); and “feedback and coaching” (28 percent).
The administrators’ results seem to track those from 1,013 educators and staff, though: “belonging” at 59 percent, in the second-lowest quintile; “school climate” at 50 percent, also in the second-lowest quintile; and “feedback and coaching” at 29 percent, in the lowest quintile with “well-being.”
“Feedback and coaching” is described in the surveys as a measurement of “perceptions of the amount and quality of feedback faculty and staff receive.”
Worsened evaluation
The School Committee hires and fires superintendents. Current committee members either didn’t reply to a request for comment Wednesday or said they were waiting for the Monday town hall to hear administration responses.
A 2023 evaluation by the committee aired some of the first official criticisms of Greer, ranking her overall performance as “needs improvement,” a step down from a 2022 evaluation of Greer as “proficient.”
“With regard to human resources, there was a consensus from the committee that a lot could be learned and changed from the processes for hiring principals at the Fletcher Maynard Academy and at the Morse school,” said committee member Rachel Weinstein during a July 11 meeting. “What we want to see improve is the management of, and buy-in of, staff. Our belief is that any superintendent can only go as far as their team will follow them, so we hope that Dr. Greer will rely on fewer top-down decisions.”
The results suggest Greer was slow to act on that suggestion between mid-July and the launch of the survey in late November.
Hiring and personnel critiques
A perception of Greer as failing to respond to feedback from community members or provide adequate guidance has grown for her administration since the Covid-19 pandemic. In the district’s breakdown of survey results, “in general, staff express trust and respect in their working environment and find their work meaningful. However, significant numbers of staff are exhausted, stressed, overwhelmed and frustrated. Moreover, the majority of staff are reporting insufficient levels of feedback/coaching in their work.”
Greer has also faced criticism for hiring policies and personnel management.
In January, Skyler Nash, a 25-year-old lacking the qualifications in a CPS job listing, was hired as a chief strategy adviser to Greer – while the role of deputy superintendent has been eliminated from the district budget – at a salary between $153,329 and $169,193. The hiring of principals has been a sore spot at the Fletcher Maynard Academy, Morse School and Rindge Avenue Upper School over the past couple of years, sometimes with only one person presented to the community as a candidate. A new 2022 hire at the Graham & Parks School, Kathleen Smith, has drawn allegations of fostering a culture of retaliation and undemocratic decision-making. A district-hired law firm is investigating Smith, whose automatic reappointment date is March 31.
Teacher and student views
Dan Monahan, president of the Cambridge Education Association, called the survey results “both deeply disturbing and not surprising. They are disturbing because of how low they are in comparison to national norms.”
Monahan said he was also “concerned and strongly disagree” with how some data is interpreted by the administration, including where it summarizes findings about staff as generally expressing “trust and respect in their working environment” and finding their work meaningful.
The survey does show staff finding their work meaningful. “It does not say that staff expressed trust and respect in their working environment,” he said.
Naseem Anjaria, a student member of the committee, said the findings that stood out the most when looking over these surveys was “the burnout, exhaustion and stress rates of teachers” and “the disconnect between teachers and those that employ them, a disconnect that had been growing since the lengthy contract negotiation process that ended earlier this school year.”
“The major problem that I have with surveys is that they are often used as a tool that solves a major problem, instead of being used as the first step in understanding how to solve an issue. I don’t know of any CPS plans to actually address these issues,” Anjaria said.
While he had faith the district would make some effort, “whether or not it will end up being effective is the question,” Anjaria said.
Parental concern too
Panorama, the company doing the survey, says it works with 2,000 district partners that makes up its data set for benchmarks. The Cambridge survey was open from Nov. 27 to Dec. 15 and saw “record participation” of more than 68 percent of families and caregivers, according to Cambridge Public Schools.
A summary of the findings went out Feb. 28 via the district’s ParentSquare platform.
At least one resident has spotted an apparent error on the CPS website summary, which said findings were “fairly consistent” from 2019 and pointed to how “families had the most favorable responses of any stakeholder group” on school climate, putting the district “in the 70th percentile nationally.”
In the 2019 family survey findings, though there was a much lower rate of participation, finding put “the overall school climate of Cambridge Public Schools … in the 80th percentile nationally.”
That looks like a drop of 10 percentage points on the district’s Assessment & Accountability page, but much farther drop in the report itself, where school climate is in the 40th to 59th percentile compared with districts nationwide.
“This climate survey communication indicates that the climate survey results are overall positive, but by my reading they are cause for serious concern,” said Haggerty parent Christopher Cullen, who showed Cambridge Day emails asking for clarification from the School Committee and district offices March 4 and March 7.
The district never responded, Cullen said.
“Context” is promised
A spokesperson for the district responded to Cambridge Day asking the same question, explaining that the survey system allowed for percentiles to be adjusted “for various factors to enable more comparable comparisons.” In this case, the district adjusted for an “urban” setting for school type and came up with a result that was described in the summary but not reflected in the underlying report, spokesperson Sujata Wycoff said. In putting a different result into the full report – but choosing not to explain the difference to the public for 19 days – “we erred on the side of transparency in wanting to share the full reports with the public even though this shows slightly different national percentiles.”
It was unclear why the entire series wasn’t similarly adjusted for an “urban” setting or why, as Wycoff said, “the published reports cannot be similarly adjusted.”
In terms of landing on the middle quintile for family perceptions of school climate, Wycoff said that “the 40th to 59th percentile is a favorable rating when compared to districts nationally. However, the district continues to recognize school climate as an area of growth.”
The district is looking forward to talking about the data and “providing context” and next steps at the town hall on March 18, Wycoff said.
Returned as leader
Greer was first hired by Cambridge Public Schools in 2013 by then superintendent Jeffrey Young to oversee special education. She moved to North Cambridge from Nashville to take the job. At her hiring, Greer was Cambridge’s sixth head of special education in 10 years; Karen Dobak, co-chairwoman of Cambridge Public School’s parent advisory council on special education, called Greer “one of the best hires Cambridge has ever made.” School officials agreed, but she ended her term in 2017 to become superintendent of schools in Sharon some 30 miles south.
Things soured there, and ultimately the town of Sharon reached a $750,000 settlement with Greer over a racial discrimination complaint she filed with the state. Between leaving Sharon and returning to Cambridge as an administrator, Greer was a finalist in Arlington’s search for a school leader in 2020.
She became interim Cambridge superintendent in July 2021 after predecessor Kenneth Salim stepped down two years before the end of his contract. Greer’s position was made permanent Feb. 2, 2022. Though her contact ran through June 2023, that was preempted Nov. 2, 2022, by the School Committee decided to extend her stay through June 30, 2025.
Greer earned a doctorate in educational leadership and administration from Capella University, and her career spans decades of service in schools and education centers.
- The town hall is 6 to 8 p.m. (a dinner is served at 5:30 p.m.) in the Media Cafe of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, 459 Broadway, Mid-Cambridge. Child care will be provided. To register to attend in-person or virtually, click here.
This post was updated March 16, 2024, to clarify that the role of deputy superintendent was eliminated from the Cambridge Public Schools budget independent of the hiring of a chief strategy adviser.
Remember when most cps staff voted against Greer returning? And how her kids don’t even attend Cps but the district hired her anyway? And she got fired from her last job? Who could have seen this coming? Oh well.
This is not good news. There are many reasons to point to unsatisfactory results: Covid and post-Covid environments; economic stresses among families and staff; union issues (this survey was taken after the union contracts were settled, though emotions may still have been high; the weight of social media in pressuring young people.
But it’s the very poor shoeing of Cambridge’s results compared to the “benchmark” scores provided by the survey company that are most concerning.
I’m going to go out on a limb here, as a long-time observer of Cambridge’s public schools, and say I’m not sure this is about our superintendent per se.
I think our problem is in the frantic adherence to standardization of schools and curricula. It appears from these days that moving from K-8 to middle schools did not seem to manifest the promised sense of belonging for 6th – 8th graders.
The focus on curriculum and say-to-day activities emphasizing MCAS structures—such as a recently touted move to only a one-paragraph reading comprehension—doesn’t inspire excitement among students.
The steady elimination of free time and play and joy and connection during the day’s schedule is atrocious, though I have sympathy for the administrators who are pressured to do this.
We are failing here. We are more traumatized or unlucky or distressed than other districts. But something is broken.
Not all of this is Superintendent Greer’s fault. For example, Chapter 222 of state law handcuffs how schools can handle problematic students– too much coddling and tolerance of disruption, not enough suspension and expulsion. That is terribly draining for students, teachers, and principals alike.
That said, the district does seem like it spends too much time and money hiring C-level bureaucrats at high salaries, not enough on teachers and teacher aides. We have work to do on multiple fronts.
Surveys, surveys, surveys. Meaningless.
The CPS system spends more per pupil than almost any other city in the state.
Our students are entitled to get a good education.
A good education, at least when I and my siblings and friends went to school, was that you showed up on time, behaved yourself as your parents told you to do, and tried to learn the best you could. The few kids who caused major problems were dealt with in various ways i.e. expulsion when necessary.
Let’s get back to basics. The hardworking teachers want it. I would hope that all parents would want it. And the students have to be made to understand that they have to be decent kids who want to learn. That has to be inculcated in them by their parents as well as their teachers.
Let’s stop coddling the students. Set basic norms. And enforce the norms. Anything less is penalizing those students who realize that the only way to get ahead in this world is to take advantage of the education offered.
And… get rid of phones during class time. There is absolutely no reason for students to use their phones when class is in session.
And, do use phonics so that kids can learn how to read. A 50% (or thereabouts) reading “at grade level” is an embarrassment to the Cambridge public school system.
All of this is not difficult. It’s basic. It has to be done. No excuses. If not, we’ll be shortchanging those parents who want their children to get a good education in Cambridge.
Greer’s policies, such as cancelling middle school algebra and not cracking down on absenteeism, are doomed to weaken our students and our schools. They encourage wealthier families to send their kids to private schools that would not tolerate these things for a minute. They dishearten other families and faculol Committee needs to step up here.
Oops–earlier post should end with–They dishearten other families and faculty for whom escape is not so easy. The School Committee needs to step up here.