Excerpts from Eli Beckerman’s interview with Luc Schuster, Oct. 10, 2007

ELI BECKERMAN: Compare running for re-election with running the first time around.

LUC SCHUSTER: Our young team has campaign skills that we didn’t have the first time. We worked on statewide campaigns and other folks worked on other local races in the last two years.

We have a much deeper understanding of issues specific to Cambridge’s budget, the structure for its elementary schools and the controlled choice system.

Our central message is still the democratic mission of public schools. We need to raise young people to be active in democracy, to be creative thinkers and good problem solvers, to work well in groups, and to be agents for change. They need to learn to take jobs that exist within the system, but also to change that system. This is very different from many of the other candidates.

How have you put this into practice on the school committee?

We helped create a new service learning internship at the high school to work with juniors and seniors who have finished MCAS. You take MCAS in the tenth grade. Students were passing MCAS and then sort of being abandoned at the high school.

Service learning means kids doing community service out in Cambridge, but having it connected to the curriculum. It means studying pollution and then taking that knowledge and serving the community. It means addressing where we see pollution by working to clean it up.

I know you are opposed to the MCAS test.

The state and federal mandates these standardized tests. We cannot ignore them, because kids simply will not be able to graduate, as long as we we rely upon federal funding.

Still, I’ve opposed budgeting for test prep during the school day. There was a vote just recently to pay a private corporation to come in and lead a test prep course for SAT during the school day. I was the sole vote against that. I was also the sole vote against district goals explicitly designed to increase test scores.

Again, we need to prepare kids for tests—but for the long term, not in the short term. The focus has been on short-term test gains at the expense of the broad educational experience that public schooling should be.

Does being in the Green-Rainbow Party separate you from other school committee members?

I think it’s important for us to work across all party lines. My feeling is that we need to work outside of the two-party system.

Everyone on the committee wants our buildings environmentally sustainable and energy efficient. Now we should tie these new building elements into the curriculum. If you have solar panels on an elementary school, or use recycled plastics rather than wood in patios, kids are curious. Opportunities are opened up by connecting kids to their environment. It’s not just an impersonal concrete building.

Is there a social component where you see things differently from other committee members?

I am a teacher myself. I have serious issues with our zero-tolerance disciplinarian approach to kids acting out.

Our schools should be cultivating young problem solvers, who can work together to resolve conflicts. I want our teachers to look at behavior problems as an opportunity for young people to practice their skills at solving problems.

When you resort to just expelling a kid, or taking away recess as punishment because a kid didn’t do their homework, school becomes a place where kids don’t want to be. There are implicit lessons about the role of authority and their role as a subordinate in the classroom.

If you go into classrooms, the classes with the fewest behavior problems are the classrooms where the best instruction is going on and where the teachers are the most engaged.

What would you say is this committee’s biggest accomplishment?

One of the most important developments during my term was the creation of the new Tobin Montessori school. I don’t deserve most of the credit. It was being debated when I first came on the Committee. There were some folks who didn’t support changing the model at Tobin. I consistently supported that model from the beginning.

It’s a completely different model. It’s not teachers assigning worksheets and very specific tasks to learn very clearly defined skills. It’s much more open-ended.

Starting the Tobin Montessori this past September has helped increase enrollment in the Cambridge public schools by over 100 students, the first increase in eleven years.

And who is enrolling in the Tobin Montessori? So far, the kids come from a wide range of families. There is a strong demand for places from all income and ethnic backgrounds. But it has always been easier for us to integrate the lowest grades. The challenge will be to maintain that balance as the first classes graduate to the higher grades.

Frankly, there is still a lot of inequality in the way our kids are treated, especially in the middle years. To address this it’s essential to make early education and the middle school option available to all.

Was there something you are sure wouldn’t have happened without you?

Yes, I rewrote the military recruitment policy for the district. Federal No Child Left Behind legislation allowed military recruiters to literally roam the halls at Cambridge Rindge & Latin. It wasn’t every day, but they would just come in, grab kids one-on-one, and develop relationships with them. They would try to recruit them, literally, between classes.

We passed two important changes. Recruiters now have to notify the high school in advance, so the Peace Commission can organize balancing information. And students can now file a single “opt-out” forms to keep their contact information from the military for four years.

About the pledge of allegiance?

My decision to sit silently during the pledge of allegiance was difficult.

There were letters to the paper and hate calls left on my home phone. My first reaction was a real feeling of unease. But rather than avoid the conflict and avoid discussing it, I felt that a dialogue about the pledge would really benefit our schools and our community. I wanted to be a model for that.

I don’t regret it at all, and I talked with some folks about the pledge of allegiance who I never otherwise would have talked to, and that is really valuable.

Every once in a while someone contacts me completely out of the blue. Somehow they heard that I don’t do the pledge, and they contact me just to commend for not doing it. A parent at the Morse School just emailed me two days ago, saying that her first grade daughter is very uncomfortable with doing it and was asking for any ideas I had.

I am in no way the first one in Cambridge not to do the pledge. There are countless students and teachers in our schools who have refused since it was mandated after September 11th. It’s interesting that I got publicity for it and these folks never did.

Another issue that I’m interested in addressing along these lines, is the flying of the POW-MIA flag above our elementary schools. That flag is part of a myth that there are still Prisoners Of War in Vietnam. The Department of Defense says that there is no evidence that there is a single American POW there. So we have this symbol of a false history that’s hanging over our educational institutions in the city.

You pulled a John Kerry, spoke against the superintendent, then voted for him. Why?

Some people thought the smart thing for me would have been to vote to get rid of the superintendent. But it wasn’t the responsible decision to make as a board member. Stability matters when you’re dealing with educating children.

Our schools, our kids, have been through so much turmoil! The high school was restructured three times in eight years. Three elementary schools closed. The elementary school system was restructured, there were several new high school principals, three superintendents in five years.

Yes, I voted to keep a superintendent who does not share my vision for public education. He has much more faith in standardized testing. His style is much more top-down and I don’t think he inspires the highest quality innovative work in the team that works around him.

At the same time, he is an effective leader. He helped institute teacher evaluation that’s more supportive of teachers, improving rather than just reprimanding them. He’s encouraged the elementary school principals to work more closely together.

I would have loved to go out and find a new superintendent. But there was no guarantee that we would agree on a superintendent that I would want.

We voted for the superintendent, but under a radically restructured contract. In his first contract, the school committee had negotiated away its own subcommittees.

That meant we couldn’t deliberate to make informed policy decisions. We insisted—and I led the charge for this—that under no circumstances would he be invited back as our superintendent without restoring our subcommittees.

The old contract made the district goal-setting a private process in executive session. I led in the negotiations to get public goal-setting back. We did this without giving him any bonus, because he was going to lose his job if he didn’t agree to it.

This is the decision I’m most proud of and it’s probably the hardest decision I’ve ever made.