Elizabeth Hudson
2023 Candidate for Cambridge School Committee
Home address:
236 Walden St.
Cambridge, MA 02140
Contact information:
email: elizabethclarkpolner@gmail.com
phone: 203-997-8751
website: www.hudsonforcambridge.com
Twitter: twitter.com/ClarkPolner
Facebook: facebook.com/hudson4math/
Instagram: instagram.com/clarkpolner
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New Candidate - 2023
My name is Elizabeth Hudson – and I’m running to ensure that the Cambridge Public School District has a world class math and science curriculum. (In addition to the text below, you can also watch a video introduction here.)
ABOUT ME
I am the mom of three boys, who my husband and I are excited to be raising in Cambridge. I’m also an engineer, who appreciates the value of a strong math and science foundation – and is grateful to the public school system in Pittsburgh (where I grew up) for the opportunity to build one. After graduating, I attended Yale, and then went on to get my PhD in neuroscience, before moving to robotics and software engineering. I’m currently a Chief Technology Officer, and a Lieutenant in the United States Navy Reserve. The through lines of all these experiences are math and science. None of this would have been possible without the strong foundation the public school system helped me build – and I want to ensure our kids have the same opportunity.
MY ISSUES
1. First, we need to ensure that we have the right curriculum – a RIGOROUS and EXCITING curriculum.
There are incredible opportunities out there today in math and science related fields – but there are many ways in which the district ranks poorly on these topics. For example, in 2017, the district removed advanced math (Algebra) from its Upper School curriculum. 80% of public school students in the U.S. have the opportunity to take Algebra in 8th grade – but students in Cambridge are no longer a part of this group. If you’re an 8th grader who’s excited to take more math today in Cambridge – you cannot do so during the school day. Instead, you have to just…wait.
The reason that the district removed advanced math was because of inequities in who was enrolling. And this is an important, persistent, and pernicious problem - with which the district has a long and nuanced history. But I have a categorically different stance than the current Committee: I believe the way to address it is by ADDING resources for the kids who need extra time and support to access math and science, or who may need to approach the subjects in different ways, in order to spark understanding and joy. Not by removing opportunities for advancement for kids who are ready now.
Under pressure from parents, the Committee has recently pivoted to pledging to bring it back, over the next three years – but continued pressure is warranted: They’ve made similar assurances in the past with no follow through. And we should NEVER have been in this position in the first place. Even if Algebra is reintroduced by 2026 as pledged, there will have been almost a decade of students in the interim to whom we failed to give opportunities to grow.
(And lest you not think that we don’t have a problem when it comes to math, and that these decisions don’t have an impact, note that only 53% our students district wide are meeting or exceeding expectations on statewide standardized tests. Tests aren’t perfect – and they’re not the most important endpoint by far – but they can be an indicator that something is wrong, and it is.)
2. Second – in addition to a rigorous curriculum - we need to support our educators.
Rather than remove advanced options from the curriculum – we should be giving our education professionals the time, resources, and support to allow them to most effectively help ALL our kids access this content (recognizing that kids learn in different ways at different times and meeting their different needs takes incredible talent, energy, and time).
In contrast, our teachers are currently working without a contract: We’ve offered them a 2.5% annual pay raise – while the Superintendent enjoys up to 3.5%. We spend twice as much as the average Massachusetts school district each year – but we only pay our teachers 1% more than the state average. Our administrative positions have grown – while our teaching positions have shrunk. And our School Committee members makes more for its part-time service than our paraprofessionals make for their full-time jobs – and they’re the ones working directly with our kids every day. There’s no path towards ensuring that more students have a more positive school experience that doesn’t run through our educators. That’s a difficult job, and we can’t ask the world from them without supporting them in return.
(FY24 is the third year in a row that the budget included additions for more for highly paid administrative positions. In FY21 there were 115FTE’s for such roles vs. 132 in FY24. If an extra 17 positions doesn’t sound like that much to you, consider that part of the reason the district went the route it did and addressed inequalities by removing Algebra from the Upper School curriculum – vs. trying to serve all our students in parallel – was because we only had one 8th grade math teacher in each school. We could have DOUBLED the number of 8th grade math teachers for less than a quarter of what we’ve spent on these new admins.)
3. Finally, we need to hold our administrators and the Committee itself accountable:
The leadership of our school district is the only job where you can be responsible for steering a $245M budget, receive a less than stellar grade in your performance review, and no corrective action is taken. In any other organization, if you continuously present new initiatives/policies/strategic plans/task forces/agendas and never present concrete RESULTS, people get upset.
Similarly, as a Committee, we need to confront the fact that – despite having correctly having identified the achievement gap as a real problem for the past 40 years, and despite spending twice as much per student as the average district – we’ve made little progress in reducing it (in fact, it has grown by some measures). We should absolutely enable the district to take bold action to solve big problems (like our achievement gap) - but then we need to follow up by looking at the data, and being clear about what has worked - and what has not – and then adjusting accordingly. Trying something that doesn’t work isn’t a failure - but failing to learn from it is.
And lastly, the Committee should also be held accountable when it fails to follow the data that show us what IS working (and there’s a lot of it). For example, in 1981 we instituted our school choice program – the primary goal of which was to help us see which programs families were choosing, and to adjust what we offered accordingly. Today – we have programs that are regularly oversubscribed (like our language immersion programs) and highly rated by parents (like Tobin Montessori program) – but never expanded. And we have schools that are regularly avoided – but never addressed. As a result, 15% of our families don’t get ANY of their top three choices. In cases like this – where we have GREAT data, from our families, telling us what is and what isn’t working – the Committee should be held responsible for looking at it, using it, and improving. (The last available comprehensive review of the data – for those wondering – is from 2013; ten years ago…) 中文浸入式课程的存在是我和丈夫威尔(Will)选择搬到剑桥的原因之一。我认为这是一个了不起的资源.
THANK YOU
I appreciate your time and consideration in reviewing the Candidate Pages – and I hope to earn your #1 vote. My contact information is above – please don’t hesitate to reach out.
p.s. I’d also advocate for shifting every minute that was spent on the new school motto and using it instead to ensure that the buses run on time. If a parent doesn’t have the privilege of job flexibility – such that he or she can show up late when the bus comes late - this is a small thing that becomes a BIG DEAL. And if we’re truly serious about improving our kids’ education - let’s make sure they’re not late to class! Let’s nail the basics, before changing the curriculum.
CCTV candidate video (2023)