Last month, four candidates—Jenna Miara, Mali Brodt, Bruce Hedison and Jim Murphy—jointly announced their campaigns for Newton’s School Committee in this year’s local election.

On Tuesday night, they sat down with Progressive Newton at the First Unitarian Universalist Society in Newton to talk about their visions for the Newton Public Schools. 

Managing expectations

Miara, who has a child attending eighth grade, pushed back on that idea, noting that teachers already determine what options for classes an eighth grade student should have in their first year of high school based on past work and assessments. And educators caution against overloading a kid with too many advanced courses.

“There will be some students who might qualify for the most advanced levels of every single kind of course, but that doesn’t seem like a very healthy or well-rounded schedule for somebody to have, certainly in high school.”

Miara said the district shouldn’t give up on multi-level classroom learning, which Superintendent Anna Nolin has said could work but was implemented incorrectly.

“My understanding is that there were certain subjects and courses that had been multi-level for a number of years and had been quite successful, and then about three or four years ago they expanded it,” Miara said. “They kind of scaled it up very quickly to a lot of classes. And I’ve heard feedback from teachers, students and parents alike that it wasn’t fully formed when it was launched.”

Nolin has said that teachers weren’t given the right training and professional development to properly execute the move to multi-level learning, which Miara echoed Tuesday night, emphasizing that moving too quickly to set something up doesn’t negate its potential.

“What I don’t want to do is throw the baby out with the bathwater,” she said.

And honest conversations between parents and teachers about level placement are already happening, Murphy said.

“We have students who feel very pressured,” Murphy said. “Not all of it is, ‘Can I comprehend all the way up to calculus?’ It’s, ‘Do I have to?’ And students very often feel very voiceless in this process, and I think there need to be more ways to add student voice to that and to give students the confidence to say, “I know that I want to go to this school or that school, but for right now taking five AP courses is too much.’”

Brodt said the district needs to get curriculum in order as well.

“You get a very different education depending on which elementary, which middle and which high school you go to,” Mali said. “The classes are not the same, the curriculum is not the same, the PD [professional development] is not the same.”

Trust deficit

One thing the candidates agreed on was a desire to address a lack of public trust in the school system.

Hedison said the lack of public trust makes it crucial that School Committee members have a background in education.

“We’re not going to get money for the schools unless the community feels that their money is going to be spent well and it’s going to mean something instead of going into an empty pot,” Hedison said.

Murphy said trust from the public comes with advocacy from elected leaders.

“There really does seem to be a paradigm shift as far as school committees see themselves.”  Murphy said. “And many of them manage quite well. But what they often aren’t is advocates.”

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https://www.newtonbeacon.org/school-committee-candidates-talk-multi-level-classrooms-and-more/