I’ve devoted my career to equitable education systems. We have everything we need to build one in Massachusetts.
When I was growing up in Spanish Harlem, I tested into a talented and gifted track. When I started high school at Bronx Science, I saw that a well-resourced public school can unlock the limitless potential in its students — it unlocked that potential for me, setting me on a path to a career fighting for education justice. But I also saw that my zoned public school down the street, where the majority of my neighbors got their education, graduated fewer than 3 in 10 students.
I’ve often thought back on these schools throughout my career in education in Massachusetts. We’ve set up our education system to deliver similar disparities — the best public schools in the country for some students and under-resourced and undervalued schools for others. We see these disparities in Brookline, where the Sagamore has covered persistent racial disparities in access to education opportunity, and the gaps between districts are even more pronounced.
Thanks to tireless advocacy from students, teachers, parents, and legislative leaders like Senator Sonia Chang-Díaz, we’ve made real progress in equitably funding our education system. The Student Opportunity Act has set Massachusetts on a course toward fairer funding this decade. This funding is essential, but my decades of work on educational justice have taught me that we can’t solve the persistent racial and socioeconomic opportunity gaps in our education system through funding alone. We need an anti-racist school system in Massachusetts, and that starts with real school desegregation, culturally responsive curriculum, and far stronger systems for recruiting and retaining educators of color.
Students, educators, and families of color have been fighting for an antiracist education system in Massachusetts for decades. We’ve seen that we can make real progress when educators stand with them, but that happens too rarely, and our education system is worse for it. I’ve devoted my career to these fights, and I’ll take them to the legislature.
I will fight to desegregate our schools. I’ve done this work on the Racial Imbalance Advisory Committee at the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. One of our primary tools for school desegregation is the METCO program, and its success rests on host communities making their schools and towns welcoming to METCO families. METCO only works as a desegregation program if students who are enrolled in it have full access to the resources and support systems available in their school district, both inside the classroom and outside of it. I’m proud to have done this work on the Select Board, where I successfully fought to expand Brookline’s safety net fund to cover METCO families.
On a state level, there are two steps the legislature can take right now to strengthen our desegregation system. First, we need enabling legislation for towns to allow families enrolled in METCO to vote and run in School Committee elections in their school district; every student and family should have a real and meaningful place in the dialogue around what’s happening within schools, and that starts with access to School Committee service. METCO also needs more funding to keep up with demand. Brookline was one of the first communities to open a METCO program, and started with 300 students; the district has grown significantly since then, but our METCO program has not, and we need more state resources to support communities as they work to expand this program.
Of course, we can’t talk about school desegregation without talking about how high housing costs lock many underpaid families of color out of some of our strongest school districts. METCO can work as a housing desegregation program too — in Brookline, we provide a local preference for public homes to families who are part of our community through METCO. But we can’t fully address school segregation without changing our housing policies. You’ll be hearing a lot more from me on this when I talk about housing next week!
I will also fight for culturally responsive curricula in every school in Massachusetts. I was proud to stand with Educators for Excellence at the State House several weeks ago in their rally to demand anti-racist curricula. I’ll say now what I said then: we need a legislature that not only backs the educators that teach racially affirming, historically accurate, and welcoming content — but that passes legislation to make inclusive and accurate curricula the norm, not the exception. Many of the most transformative points in American history came when people who have been marginalized on the basis of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or disability stood up and fought to make our country truly democratic; we enact this marginalization over and over again when we systematically exclude these moments from our classrooms, as they have been for too long in too many Massachusetts schools. Our schools won’t support excellent outcomes for every student until every student feels welcome and valued in the material that they are learning, and building culturally responsive curriculum is a key step toward this goal.
Finally, building a school system that is excellent for every student requires recruiting and retaining educators of color. The pipeline into education professions in Massachusetts is not as diverse as our student body, and hostile work environments force many excellent teachers of color out of the profession: both recruitment and retention are essential. Building up pathways into education careers is a state responsibility, and there are a lot of tools we can use. I support strengthening pathways for paraprofessionals into classroom teaching roles. Our career and technical education system is also an important tool: I’ll fight to increase funding for more high schools to add early childhood education careers programs and to add college and career counseling for future educators to their programming.
We must also make our schools supportive workplaces for educators of color, not hostile ones. Black teachers in particular leave the profession at higher rates because of hostile work environments. On the Select Board, I’ve worked to make Brookline municipal government welcoming to employees of color, including by successfully banning the town from including non-disclosure agreements as a condition of discrimination settlements. On a state level, I will work with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination to expand their anonymous reporting services for discrimination against educators of color. Massachusetts should be a welcoming place for every excellent teacher to work, and every student should have some teachers who share their cultural background — recruiting and retaining teachers of color is essential to achieving both goals.
These three priorities — achieving desegregation, building culturally responsive curricula, and recruiting and retaining teachers of color — are essential in building an education system with excellent outcomes for every student. But we also need to think more broadly about what it means to have an excellent education system. In the long-term, this means replacing our testing-driven assessment system with more holistic measurement — MCAS does not measure every skill that students learn in our schools, and the high-stakes use of standardized testing pressures educators to teach only the material that a Scantron sheet can evaluate. An excellent education system relies on care and preparation well before kindergarten. I support expanding state aid for early childhood education to all who qualify and indexing aid levels to match the cost of childcare in the community where the child resides, and I support extending ECE training programs in career and technical schools to build the workforce of excellent educators necessary for a great ECE system. As a parent in Brookline, I know too many people who have sought childcare outside of town because of the astronomical costs that we face, and thriving communities require affordable, high-quality early education and care.
We have everything we need to make Massachusetts an excellent state for every student, and the progress that our legislature has made recently shows that we can get there when we fight for it. But these fights only succeed when they’re driven by partnership between students, educators, families, and government. I hope that you’ll join me for an education policy conversation with Azavia Barsky Elnour, Malcolm Cawthorne, Lisa Guisbond, and Paul Epstein on Thursday, April 7th at 6pm via Zoom webinar.
