I grew up in the CommonPlace housing cooperative in Porter Square. That co-op was started 32 years ago by grad students in the Boston area pooling their resources. And that's actually where my parents met—in CommonPlace.

Luc Schuster is a Green-Rainbow Party candidate for Cambridge School Committee

Yeah, there were a lot a lot of kids in the building and a lot of adults around, too. I wnt to the Agassiz[renamed the Baldwin four years ago]—that was my neighborhood school.

In high school I went to Pilot, which was the smallest of the five “houses” under the old system. My sister, who’s three years younger, was a senior there during the restructuring. A lot of the Pilot teachers supported the restructuring because they saw they were serving just a very small potion of the school population.

Among the houses, under the old system, the more active parents formed a sort of “parentocracy,” and the most active teachers gravitated to those houses.

I was a strong supporter of the restructuring of the high school, because there was such vast inequality across the system. The promise was that we would take the Pilot model and apply it everywhere. The promise of Paula Evans [the new principal under restructuring] was that there would be smaller classes for everyone. The teachers would have less classroom time, more time to collaborate with one another. That didn't happen… the School Committee didn’t support her. Partly because Paula Evans had a very abrasive leadership style….

I think that the quality of education at the high school has not improved—and that's for every student. There's still a big gap in the way students are being served.

The restructuring coincided with a nationwide political attack on education. Now we spend a lot of effort accommodating the MCAS test. Recently, the Superintendent has even imposed quarterly tests.

So the restructuring never happened in the way it was supposed to… the city has accommodated the nationwide testing and completely restructured the high school around that.

Causes and effects of declining enrollment

The School Committee was forced to close some grammar schools because of the decline in enrollment. That happened because of the loss of rent control in 1994—here the middle class just up and fled the city. That is just the biggest issue, and people are not talking about that.

You can’t compartmentalize school issues and say that we have no control over the demographics of our city. We need to be in close communication with the City Council over affordable housing. It’s a shame that kids that grow up and go to school in the city can’t turn around and live in the city that they went to school in.

We talk about trying to build a community around our schools and yet teachers can’t live in the communities that they teach in.

[In deciding which schools to close] the School Committee tried to hit the underachieving schools. But in doing that it was terribly disrespectful of some of the schools.

I was in the King Open the year after they closed the Harrington. [The East Cambridge parents] perceived this uppity sort of upper class liberal Cambridge elementary school [King Open] coming in and taking over the community school in East Cambridge. I think that just the taking [away] of the name Harrington was very, very disrespectful of the people in East Cambridge—and the generations who went to that school.

In reality, many of the Harrington teachers remained. The same thing happened at the Fitzgerald when the Peabody moved in. They are now sort of hybrid schools.

Choice and community

One of the reasons we don’t have strong community-based schools in Cambridge is because of the choice program, where many students are bussed across the city. Politically, it’s a very tough issue because the reality is that parents do have choice. For example, charter schools—and if the parents have money, they have the choice of sending their kids out of the school system.

There are big issues around declining enrollment. We do have to make the schools attractive to that upper class. Diversity is a value of the Cambridge schools, and that means economic—that means class, too. I think it’s good when kids of Harvard and MIT professors are going to school with kids who live in public housing.

The solution is not to segregate. The solution is to do away with tracking. The Cambridge high school now has “upper level” tracking, but not downward tracking. I think it’s OK to have those honor classes.

We have a relatively strong vocational school. For awhile we had to send kids to Minuteman but now they are coming back.

The 1993-1994 Education Reform Act has radically changed the way we run public schools. It opened up the educational market place for charter schools, and Cambridge is a very attractive place for charter schools, because we pay so much per pupil and that’s how the charter schools get their funding, based on that.

Charter schools are absolutely an assault on the vitality of Cambridge public schools. But whether we like it or not, charter schools are a challenge to get our act together.

Great teachers perceive charter schools as the only option if they want to do creative and innovative teaching. I, too, am dismayed at the state of public education. I’m a teacher who strives every day to make learning jump off the page, and be community-based. My response to my dismay with public education is to run for School Committee. Whatever charters are doing well—we need to be doing that in the public system.

Education for citizenship

The pubic school system is where a young person grows up in your community. This is a vital part of your upbringing, so the values that we promote in the school system are vital, they will affect your whole life.

Let's look at food. Cambridge has done gardens, taught organic farming, presented students with some alternative style snacks. The problem is, that just comes once in a month, it’s not integrated into the curriculum. It’s better than nothing, but it’s a token.

The vast majority of my campaign team all went to the Cambridge public schools, and we’re sort of coming back to the political process because we’re sick and tired of what’s happened to our schools.

One barrier to involvement is the idea that serious policy work has to be left to trained experts. We have a city council, city manager system, which does not encourage active participation. On the School Committee we see the Superintendent of Schools as some kind of hired hotshot who is going to know how to run the schools better than we do.

I see the School Committee’s job as more than supervising the superintendents and passing the budgets. It also involves starting a dialogue with the people on the city’s schools.

We on the campaign have actually had to educate ourselves about how city government works. We never learned anything about that when we went to the Cambridge public schools. You’ve got to wonder why we aren’t learning about our own government in our city schools.

Our campaign decided that race and class imbalance would be an issue that we would deal with head on. The first step was to develop our ten point plan. We drafted a plan in meetings of parents, students, educators, and administrators, early in July.

We decided we’re not going to use the term “achievement gap” anymore. Everyone pays lip service to it and doesn't do anything about it. Also, it’s a deficit term that places the blame on students for not achieving enough, rather than on the system for not serving them.

Cambridge has some innovative programs but it’s just happening in pockets... we need to apply these programs for everyone.

Our plan was much more about really serving everybody, rather than just people of color and poor people. Still, I am running for School Committee for those students who have not been served. I would side with those students who don't get served by the school, because ultimately the wealthier can go out of the system.

One of our points is about recruitment. Cambridge can’t get its act together to hire teachers early enough. Teachers of color are attractive in all districts, because it makes them look better. We pay teachers well, but we don’t recruit early enough in the summer, so other districts are plucking teachers who should be in our schools.

You see, fixing that's not just gonna serve students of color, it’s gonna serve everyone.

Luc Schuster is the candidate for Cambridge School Committee endorsed by Mystic River Green-Rainbow Action, which sponsors this newspaper.

contact: 617-276-5759 e-mail: voteluc@gmail.com website: www.voteluc.org contributions: Friends of Luc Schuster, 65 Eustis St., Cambridge, MA 02140