Brace for disruption, superintendent David Murphy said Wednesday. He has.
Murphy made big moves during his 15 months as interim Cambridge superintendent – shaking up staff, closing a 51-year-old elementary school – that rocked the community and seemed to simultaneously reassure and shock the School Committee deciding if he got the permanent job. He was expected to fill in for as few as 90 days when elevated from chief operating officer to interim superintendent in June 2024; by the end of those three months, members said they could see the surefooted Murphy in the interim role as long as two years while they searched for the best replacement for ousted district leader Victoria Greer.
With an ultimately unanimous committee vote Oct. 6 that he was the best replacement all along, Murphy is signaling that further big moves and potentially painful changes are on the way.
In a lightly attended speech and public discussion at Fitzgerald Auditorium with Tony Clark of My Brother’s Keeper Cambridge, Murphy dropped forms of the terms “needed” and “necessary” some 70 times in an hour and a half, according to a transcript. He also repeatedly framed change around “fulfilling my responsibility to zealously advocate in the interest of students.” This frame continued a thought from a Monday budget roundtable: that running schools when money gets tight means a singular focus on protecting the student experience.
“There’s some some professional culture adjustments that I’d be disingenuous [to deny] are necessary.” David Murphy, superintendent, Cambridge Public Schools
Doing so will require “a willingness for our organization to absorb short-term discontent,” he said, while admitting he was preparing for “consequences” from communicating “messages of, I’ll say, varying levels of popularity.” Those include measures of accountability “that will feel uncomfortable for some” internally as the district pursues change to address several persistent problems “with tremendous urgency,” he said. Other steps he took might mean “challenging the community to do better by its children.”
Here are a handful of issues Murphy raised as priorities to address:
Upper schools. The school district’s breakup of K-8 schools – creating junior highs for grades 6-8 – was approved in 2011 as the signature achievement of then-superintendent Jeffrey Young. But that “innovation agenda” isn’t working, Murphy said, and its structure “is of questionable sustainability. We are essentially keeping our fingers crossed and using all the scotch tape and glue at our disposal to keep” the model intact, adding “And I don’t know how long we can continue.” Excepting the Amigos School, which was allowed to stay K-8, and the Darby Vassall Upper School that is part of a new $299 million campus with the Tobin Montessori, the upper schools are “designed to rely on attrition,” Murphy said. Specifically, the four upper schools can each handle only about 100 kids per cohort, or 300 across the three grades. “If we didn’t lose a certain number of kids year in and year out, we wouldn’t be able to fit our kids either physically into the building, or into the classes based on the contractual class size.” Improvements that boost student retention could risk overcrowding the schools, at a time when the district may no longer be able to afford to build new ones.
School start times. Addressing “our highly unorthodox three-tier school start system” is on Murphy’s mind. He wants to better structure busing, which now allows for class-day opening bell times with 30-minute buffers, “and finally, at long last, deliver all students to school on time.” This won’t be easy. Like virtually all school systems in the state, Cambridge lacks options for switching bus companies and is far “removed from anything that most of us would associate with a competitive bidding process,” Murphy said. That demands new strategic thinking, but it also means a culture shift “from one that is focused primarily on adult preferences to steadfastly on children and their well-being,” Murphy said. “We know the system doesn’t work. Every year we’ve got this load of buses that are late; every year we pour tons of money into it. We make all sorts of changes around the edges, but the root issue is that we’re trying to transport too many kids with too little time between runs. To me, the student-focused approach is a willingness to correct it.”
A broader focus. In less dramatic shifts that perhaps few could complain about, Murphy wants attention paid to the Rindge School of Technical Arts, at which 1,026 of CRLS’ 2,072 students take classes, and the High School Extension Program, an alternative program for students who have encountered troubles at CRLS, projected to serve 52 students this year. The extension program needs discussion soon, Murphy said, including what he called low-hanging fruit: giving the program a real name. Meanwhile, “there is a misunderstanding as to what RSTA is and has the potential to be. It is not just a set of shops for students who don’t want to go to college,” Murphy said. While Cambridge should be proud of and invest in that role, it is also “the most likely program to best position students of all sorts of different backgrounds, with all sorts of different career postsecondary objectives, for success … and the programming most likely to deeply and meaningfully engage students.” The program is a “jewel” held back by “an antiquated, siloed” thinking that academics and vocational work are separate. “There’s some professional culture adjustments that I’d be disingenuous [to deny] are necessary,” Murphy said.
A stronger
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