Cambridge teachers reported higher satisfaction in categories like “belonging” and “well-being” in this year’s school climate surveys, while principals and administrators reported lower favorability in most categories compared to last year.
In this year’s survey, 65% of teachers reported a sense of belonging and 56% reported a positive school climate, up from 62% and 54% respectively in the 2024-25 school year. This data, however, placed the district between the 30th and 40th percentile nationally in data gathered by the platform Panorama Education. Around 3,000 schools contribute data to Panorama’s national benchmarks, according to the database website. (This year’s national percentile data is still being reported on Panorama Education, as data collection is still underway in other districts.)
But only 51% of district staff and principals reported a sense of belonging, down nine percent from last year, and 46% reported a positive school climate, down seven percent. This data represents 123 district staff, 12 of whom are principals, said Jennifer Amigione, the district’s director of Data, Assessment & Accountability, at a meeting in June.
The district is in its third consecutive year of school climate data collection, which conducts optional responses from students, Central Office Staff and administrators, principals and families about satisfaction and school culture through the. The surveys were also administered in 2017 and 2018, and then paused during the pandemic.
The surveys are an “incredibly important” tool to assess staff satisfaction, said Chris Montero, president of the Cambridge Education Association, the union that represents 1,500 Cambridge educators.
Survey questions and categories have not changed in the past three years. Teacher and staff data, for example, has a “belonging” category under which teachers are asked questions about how well they feel their colleagues understand them and how connected they feel to their peers. Families are also asked questions in some categories, such as “barriers to engagement.”
A jump in student engagement
Participation increased across most focus groups this year compared to last year, with a 17% jump among families and caregivers and a 24% increase among students grades 3-12. A little over half of families and teachers responded and around three quarters of students.
The district prioritized student engagement in this year’s survey, offering incentives like popsicle parties across all schools, said Amigione at the June 16 School Committee meeting. She attributed this year’s boost in student and family responses in part to Melissa Bolden, the district’s new Family Engagement Officer, who started this past Spring while the survey was already underway.
Student data was mostly flat compared to last year. Students in grades 3-5 reported a similar sense of belonging, valuing of school and rigor expectations at their schools, and a slightly lower sense of positive school culture than last year. Meanwhile, for students in grades 6-12, where the district saw the biggest boost in engagement, numbers went up by a few percentage points in school culture and valuing of school, and stayed flat in other categories.
School Committee Member Richard Harding raised questions about the validity of the student data at the committee meeting.
“Are we really to believe that a third grader is going to understand a question about rigor in the classroom and be able to answer that in a real way?” Harding said, adding that students in other grades may relate to survey questions differently, causing disparities in the data.
Committee Vice-Chair Caitlin Dube agreed that survey questions can be “difficult to ascertain” depending “on the age of the student,” and suggested an in-house survey with questions directed at students of specific age groups.
Family engagement data saw small boosts across categories of school culture, barriers to engagement and school fit. Families were also asked about the extent to which they trust teachers and their comprehension of what their children are learning in school, new questions specific to this year’s survey.
School-specific data from this year shows improvements at certain schools that had been previously trailing in teacher satisfaction data.
Some school turnaround
Fletcher Maynard Academy, an elementary school with the lowest teacher satisfaction data out of any district school last year, saw up to 14% improvement across most categories, although it had a 1% decrease in the area of feedback and coaching. The school recently saw a change in leadership when former Principal Bobby Tynes was moved to a district role at the end of the school year. However, FMA was among the schools that saw a significant decline in teacher survey participation this year, with 60 staff responses last year and 20 responses this year. Montero said he thought the decline was due to “fear of retribution” and “demoralization.”
Cambridgeport and Cambridge Street Upper School also saw small downturns in teacher participation this year.
On the flip side, Graham and Parks Alternative School, which has faced controversy over its leadership, saw satisfaction rates rise in most categories this year, and 10 more staff members completed this year’s survey.
The worst-performing school this year in staff satisfaction data is the district’s newest. Darby Vassall Upper School garnered the lowest percentages of any school in the district in nearly every category, placing it in the 0-20th percentile nationally.
Murphy said at the meeting that the district would have to “engage with specific school leaders” about if “certain impediments” were responsible for the downturn.
“We have a couple of situations at a couple specific schools that I could absolutely anticipate would have diminished participation,” Murphy added, but did not go into specifics.
Montero said “the fact that participation is low is itself a data point,” adding that the union advised its members to avoid including identifying information in survey responses to avoid retaliation from school leaders.
While the district does not use the data as its only metric, it will often focus its attention on analyzing outliers, said Jaclyn Piques, a district spokesperson. She added that school leaders often present the data to their respective communities and school councils in the fall. Amigione said the results have been shared with Attuned Education Partners, an independent consulting group, and will help inform the four-year strategic plan for the district that is currently underway.
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