A Cambridge public school – the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School, serving 328 students from pre-K through grade five – has been named a 2024 National Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education. The goal of the Blue Ribbon School program, which started in 1982, is to recognize schools for overall high academic achievement or success in closing achievement gaps.
The King School is the first Cambridge public school to get the honor, and one of only nine schools across the state recognized this year. Of the nine awardees in Massachusetts, two are Catholic schools and the rest are public. Seven are elementary schools.
The King School has worked to close achievement gaps through two key initiatives: its Mandarin Chinese Immersion Program and eight-hour school day.
The Mandarin program started in 2011, inspired by former President Barack Obama’s “100,000 Strong initiative,” a national effort to increase international study in China. The goal of the initiative was to send 100,000 American students to study in China by 2014.
“Since he wanted students to study in China, he was providing money for schools that would develop immersion programs to help Americans become more bilingual,” principal Gerald Yung said. (In 2015, after the benchmark of 100,000 students studying in China had been met, Obama announced “One Million Strong,” an initiative that aimed to bring the total number of Americans learning Mandarin to 1 million by 2020.)
Every student at the King School learns Mandarin either through a standard foreign language program, which offers Mandarin classes four times a week, or through its Mandarin Chinese Immersion Program, which includes daily instruction in English and Mandarin. Thirty-six percent of students at the King School are Asian; 26 percent are two or more races; 22 percent are white; 12 percent are Black; and 4 percent are Hispanic.
About 150 students, slightly less than half of the student body, are enrolled in the two-way immersion program, defined by the state as including approximately an equal number of students monolingual or dominant in each language at the time of enrollment. The King School is one of only two public schools in the state and the only school in Greater Boston to offer a two-way immersion program in Mandarin and English; Cambridge offers other two-way immersion programs – one in Spanish and English at the Amigos School and one in Portuguese and English at the King Open School.
Longer day
In the other initiative, students are in school from 7:55 a.m. to 3:55 p.m. each day except for Wednesdays, when they leave two hours earlier. That’s 38 hours of school a week, compared with the 32 students at other Cambridge elementary schools get. (Before this year, when the district lengthened the school day by 30 minutes, that difference was even greater.) Fletcher Maynard Academy is the only other Cambridge school with this schedule.
The eight-hour day means students have more instructional learning time – up to 80 minutes of math and at least 160 minutes of English daily – while still having ample time for breaks.
“Students have two recesses instead of one, and a little bit of a longer lunchtime too,” Yung said. “It’s also enabled us to offer the Mandarin program at the level we would like to.”
The King School was one of the original recipients of the state’s Expanded Learning Time Grant, which funded the longer day starting in 2006-2007. The goal was to help boost academic performance overall and close the achievement gap between low-income students and more affluent students. In 2006, student proficiency scores were at 44 percent in English-language arts and 39 percent in math; since the implementation of the longer day those scores have risen to 83 percent in English language arts and 85 percent in math in 2023.
“Our school has come a long way,” Yung said. “We used to be at the bottom … we were the underperforming of the underperforming.”
Emphasizing teamwork
In general, Cambridge’s public schools tend to do well compared with their peers across the state. In this current school year, 55 percent of CPS students in grades three through eight met or exceeded expectations in English-language arts and 54 percent met or exceeded expectations in math in the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System standardized test. Statewide only 39 percent of students met or exceeded expectations in ELA, and 41 percent met or exceeded expectations in math.
Yung sees the Mandarin Chinese Immersion Program and longer school day as vital to closing the achievement gaps and the reason for the recognition, but emphasized the teamwork among teachers, students and caregivers. The King School, he said, has a veteran teaching staff that is passionate about its programming and always looking to improve.
“At times I feel like I’m a U.S. Olympic basketball coach; I’m surrounded by all these all-stars and I’m thinking to myself, ‘What a great team,’” Yung said.
Though it’s a school-specific achievement, Yung said the honor applies to Cambridge Public Schools and to the Cambridge community more broadly.
“We couldn’t have done it without the support of many people who were cheering us on and rooting for us even when our test scores weren’t good and we weren’t popular and all that,” Yung said. “It took a lot of people believing in us to help to get us to where we’re at.”
A stronger
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