Ed. Note: During August, Fig City News conducted interviews with each of the 10 School Committee candidates who are running in competitive elections. This notice was sent to all candidates prior to the interviews. All interviews were completed before any were published.
Your campaign materials and website discuss your work as an educator, views on the civic role of schools and activism. Did that lead to your running for School Committee? If you’re elected, how will that perspective inform your actions on the Committee?
I have been thinking about running for a number of years now. It’s an occupational hazard of being a social studies teacher. I always encouraged my students when I was teaching K-12 to get involved and to stay involved, and I need to take my own advice.
I believe that part of what ails American education, and not just Newton, is we have gone so far into viewing schools as just places where students individually pick up skills to compete in the job market and the world economy. That historically has not been the only function of schools; co-equal with that is learning how to be in a community with other people who aren’t their family, how to share that space and participate in a process of democratic self government. I would like to see more of that.
The literature on civic education is very clear that you’re not going to get good levels of civic knowledge and engagement by simply offering a civics course; it has to be more. There used to be what was called the Six Proven Practices. Four more were added about 4-5 years ago. There’s the coursework, discussing current and controversial issues, service learning, student-led volunteer associations, a voice in governance of their school buildings, and lately, they’ve added media literacy, and social emotional learning. Those are areas where I would be listening when issues come to the School Committee. I don’t have any grand illusion about turning the needle back to where it’s centered all by myself. But we all have to start doing that work.
You said that we view schools solely for job training skills. Do people in Newton believe that?
I think a lot of people do. When kids talk to you about the pressure they feel, [to] do well in school, get into a good college, end up with a good career, being self-directed in that regard and thinking to the future is a really good thing. But [not] when it becomes the overriding consideration.
When I taught in Weston, I offered a debate course, which was a very rigorous course, and it taught kids an awful lot. But it was not an honors course, and so I had kids regularly tell me that they couldn’t take it, because even if they got an A, it would be for naught as far as their transcript went. It’s hard to say whether that’s more prevalent in Newton as opposed to Weston or anyplace else. But we’ve got to that point, and we need to do something to create a better balance.
You put on the table increased civic education and engagement, and less pressure to take honors classes. I could see a Venn diagram between those two, but they’re not exactly the same thing. Can you delineate those issues, and where you see overlap?
I want to push back on the question. I don’t regard those two things as being exclusive of one another at all. The literature on civic education and engagement overlaps significantly with the literature on social emotional learning. Both say when kids are more engaged, the academic outcomes are better, so I don’t think that there’s a split here between the civic purpose of school and individual skills. Where I think they can coexist across curriculum and from preK-12, is in some of those practices I mentioned. You can have a debate in a science class. All good teaching starts with getting to know the kids. So social-emotional learning would be part of that also. I don’t think that those two things exist in separate universes, and if it’s a Venn diagram, I think it’s a pretty heavily overlapping one.
I think of civic education as learning the U.S. has three branches of government, and this is how a bill becomes a law. What do you mean beyond that when you say civic education?
That’s part of it. We obviously have to teach the structure of government. The problem is we’ve tended to leave it at that. Reports based on the NAEP scores in civics say that they’ve gone down, but there’s some problems with how those tests are administered. They only ask about the structure [of government]. They don’t ask what kids know about current and controversial affairs that they see on the news or on the Internet. We need to have a more expansive notion of what constitutes civic knowledge and engagement. That produces more thinking about the world. For instance, a kid who’s in the school play is learning to put themselves in the place of others. That’s a pretty good piece of what it takes to be an active and engaged citizen.
In a classroom, when you say “have debates and learn about current events,” what would you say to a reader or voter who’s cautious about putting politics into the classroom?
First off, you have to think in terms of what’s developmentally appropriate. You don’t have first graders debating some hot-button issue. You build from the bottom up and you give kids the opportunity to have discussions. A second grader could have a debate about how long recess is. Most people wouldn’t see that as political, but it builds the skills that later can translate into being able to have a discussion with somebody about politics. In high school or middle school, kids are very concerned with social justice issues, and you have to be careful and deliberate framing those discussions. You have ground rules. But when you do that, you’re building something important.
The state of our current political discourse is really a sign of those things not happening. I do understand there’s a lot of fear. A lot of teachers are afraid to go near any of that stuff. That’s unfortunate, because it prevents thinking about what they can do.
What are topics you think teachers are afraid to go near?
Boy, that’s a long list. There would be a lot of teachers who would be petrified about talking about anything the current [Presidential] administration is doing, because there are two very clear sides about this administration, and I think a lot of teachers [are] worried about coming off partisan themselves. Also, could they handle a discussion that went off the rails? What might happen if a student goes home and says, “today somebody said XYZ about President Trump?” This doesn’t exist in Massachusetts, but there are other states where discussions like that almost certainly would land a teacher in hot water. Those same teachers may tell you they might not feel their principal or the superintendent would back them up if they had a discussion like that.
Should a high school class be debating, say, whether Medicaid should get cut? Would the teacher introduce points of view with pros and cons, and explain fiscal expansiveness versus contraction?
Yes, I think a high school course could have those kinds of discussions. Hopefully, you’re not just saying, “Hey, let’s debate Medicaid.” Presumably [you’re] dealing with the issues of Medicaid, so the kids have a knowledge base to work with. You demand that they work off of evidence, which is a really important skill. And there’s some real overlap between individual skills for the later job market and civic skills. This is one of them, working from evidence. You can do that if you prepare for it. I trust a teacher who’s willing to engage that, prepare it, rather than just jump right in.
So the teacher should have the discretion to introduce the starting materials for topics like that?
You could also ask kids to do some research on their own, and now you’re getting into media literacy. Can you trust that source? These are all important skills in and out of school.
On your website you discuss empowering educators, making decisions at the building level, and you use the phrase “miniature community.” One of Anna Nolin’s stated priorities is to have more standardization of curriculum and instruction across NPS. How does what you’re saying sit alongside that?
I would have to talk more to Anna to understand where she sees standardization. It seems she’s looking for uniform data, particularly in terms of literacy and things like that. And beyond that, she would like to be able to say that anybody who takes [for example] Algebra One will cover [certain] material. When you have a curriculum, you are imposing a certain level of standardization. The question is, how far do you go with that? There’s always a balance. I think that the balance is overshot at the point where teachers are told: it’s Tuesday, you have to be on page 47. I don’t get the impression that Newton teachers feel that way.
But there is a school of thought that does that. I get a little worried when I hear somebody call themselves data-driven. To me, data is not as objective as people sometimes make it out to be. It says to me there’s going to be a certain slavishness to the numbers. Numbers can tell us a lot of things. But they don’t necessarily tell you why something’s happening. What goes on in the classroom is very people-driven. When you hire good teachers, you need to give them some agency to make decisions during the day. I don’t think that exists completely outside of having a standard curriculum. When you get to middle school teachers, they want to work together. I think you see that at all levels.
Classroom educators want to work with people who are doing the same things they are. They want to compare notes, come up with better lessons, fish for ideas. You could call that a kind of standardization, but where there’s some agency and desire to make each other better.
What’s an example of data that we’ve seen about NPS that you would say isn’t the whole story?
I think the state using [MCAS] for graduation purposes was a pretty significant misuse of data, It only tested three subjects. That’s a pretty incomplete set of numbers. With respect to MCAS testing, it’s ironic, because teaching got so focused on it, I think it almost gave less weight to the numbers, because when you’re using MCAS testing, as it is being used now as kind of a dipstick rather than a graduation requirement, I think you’re getting more honest numbers.
On your website, you say coming up with the next statewide assessment [following repeal of MCAS as graduation requirement] is work you’re already doing. What are you doing?
Statewide, there is an effort afoot to come up with new graduation requirements. That discussion initially began talking about a common core of courses, based on MassCore, which is essentially the sort of transcript requirements for getting into a state college or university. So you would have to have taken X number of math courses and a number of English courses. That discussion has broadened with the Massachusetts Teachers Association going about the state, holding gatherings – of community members, teachers, whoever feels like coming – to talk about what ought to replace MCAS, and what those sessions are yielding sounds very much like Newton’s Portrait of a Learner.
The Governor’s Council, which is holding its own listening sessions, is getting much the same feedback, and it appears also to be working toward a statewide version of a Portrait of a Learner. So I think that there’s some interesting movement in rethinking how we determine what a high school graduate ought to have when they walk out the door.
Do you view your role in the School Committee to be an advocate for issues beyond Newton?
Yes, I do. For instance, a School Committee member ought to be looking to advocate to the State House to fully fund special needs monies. I think School Committee people ought to be out there talking about those issues. There are likely to be some real hardships imposed by the federal government in terms of budget cuts. That’s when I think even a local School Committee member needs to speak up about something national. I don’t believe that the School Committee is solely about managing the budget and the personnel. Somebody elected to local office is elected to be an advocate, and a School Committee [member has] a responsibility to be a cheerleader for the schools, to be an advocate for the kids. Whether that’s just in the meeting or with the state representative or writing an op-ed, or something entirely different, that’s a responsibility.
How would you respond to a voter who reacts by saying, “I’m electing a School Committee member to fulfill their duties in Mass. General Law, which is generally to govern the Newton School District. I am not electing someone to leverage Newton’s name or the Newton School Committee’s name to advocate beyond that.”
Then I would say they probably shouldn’t vote for me.
Your website doesn’t highlight the NPS budget as one of your priorities, though just about everything that someone can say about the budget has probably already been said. Is there anything you’d like to add?
I don’t really need to pile on to what’s been said. But the budget is something that when I go door-to-door, people do want to know about. With respect, this last process should be a wake up call to improve the process,to be clearer with the public, the taxpayers, on how numbers are arrived at and what it really costs to run the schools. The budget starts with the Mayor, who’s going to have to commit to funding the schools adequately and sustainably. As a school system, we should not have to count on things that are unpredictable, like special education reimbursements, or finding efficiencies over the course of the year, or random infusions of cash to run the system. All of those things are sometimes necessary but you don’t budget that way, you don’t plan for those. In any large organization, you’ll find some money that was unspent that you can use and put to other purposes, but you don’t budget that way. Budgets need to be predictable because the taxpayers have to have faith in the numbers, especially if they’re asked to come up with more. I do think, though, that this process ended up with a couple of silver linings.
One is that it was really clear to City Council members that we really need to be very clear, concise, and transparent about what the needs are. Otherwise, it’s going to be a recurring mess. As a School Committee member, I certainly would push to build faith in the process.
And the other thing that was good was the level of parent community involvement. I felt like the School Committee was being very docile about the budget until parents started filling the rooms. Some of the things I heard current School Committee members saying – when parents got up in arms, packing meetings – was very constructive, and that’s what broke what could have been an awful logjam. I hope that that will continue to happen.
Let’s talk about the strike. You are not on the MTA executive board, and have never been?
No, I am not. I’m a retired member of the MTA. So I pay slightly less dues. And I am also co-chair of the policy and practice committee, working on academic issues, in terms of the new graduation requirements.
Does that encompass the controversial curriculum materials about the Middle Eastern conflict?
No, that’s over in professional development.
You wrote a piece in the spring of 2024 for the MTA retired member newsletter, where you generally said that the strike was in the interest of children. I’m a parent, and I would say that the strike was not helpful for my kids. Can you explain what you wrote?
I think this was probably oversaid, but it was oversaid because it was correct: teachers’ working conditions are children’s learning conditions. I think that the real problem lay, at least in terms of how a good outcome was had for the kids, was in better salaries for the classroom aides. When I’ve been talking to people out in the campaign trail and asked about the strike, I say I’m convinced at this point – having now talked to people on both sides of the table and a whole lot of people who are just peripheral to it — that had the School Committee, at the beginning of negotiations, simply said, “What we’re paying the aides is awful. Let’s fix that.” I do not believe there would have been a strike.
That point about Unit C is consistent with what’s on your website. Publicly, the negotiating positions of the two parties on the eve of the strike were many millions of dollars apart in COLA’s for all Units, not just for Unit C, as well as benefits like parental leave. So your saying that the real issue was Unit C is a fairly pointed view to take.
So the “millions of dollars apart” was a real issue, but it wasn’t the main issue. I think the aides were the key to whether or not there was goodwill and good faith bargaining. If the School Committee had said you’re right, we have an interest in being able to retain aides, there would have been enough goodwill in those negotiations, after having resolved that, the other issues could have been hashed out without a strike.
If there were a statewide effort to repeal the prohibition on teachers’ going on strike, would you advocate for the Newton School Committee to pass a resolution to support that effort?
The right to strike is a human right. Maybe not specifically in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but the right to collectively bargain and to join unions is there, and labor conventions do ensconce that right, with the exception of things that endanger public safety.
There’s a big difference, though, between saying you should have the right to strike, and saying you should strike. I don’t think you ever want to strike. I don’t think you ever want to get to that point, because not only did we see what happened with an 11-day strike, but we’re also seeing what’s happened with the relationships since. There’s a lot of bad feelings still left over. You have to go back to where the negotiations started, and having a respectful, goodwill, good faith environment is crucial to that. I think that we’re using a really outmoded version of collective bargaining, where we both play this game of hide the cheese.
That mode of distributive bargaining and the notion that it’s zero-sum lends itself to secretiveness and, worst case, not being honest. There are other models, interest-based models, where the two sides get together and first talk about what they agree on and prioritize. Eventually you get into bargaining that looks more familiar to people, in a more open setting, so people are filled in on what’s going on.
Does that eliminate all conflict? No. But I do think when two sides have been sitting and talking and realizing that they share certain priorities, they are less likely to assume the worst of the other. And if you have negotiations marked by good faith and good will, I don’t think you get to strikes. I can’t think of a situation where two sides that were still willing to talk to one another have gone off a cliff.
You used the phrase “hide the cheese.” What cheese was hidden? What was a factual misrepresentation by one party?
Well, let’s look at the kindergarten aides, right? There was an agreement between the School Committee and the Newton Teachers Association in a previous contract to fund kindergarten aides. Not only did the School Committee decide not to honor that, they tried to litigate it. They lost in court. I think they may have lost one appeal, and nobody I’ve talked to suggests that there’s any hope of winning that. So continuing to pursue that which would have been good for the kids, by the way, and also fed into the budget problems, but dealing with that forthrightly rather than kicking it down the road it was an example of bad faith, and right now, continued bad faith.
If the district were required last spring to budget for approximately $800,000 to $900,000 of kindergarten aides, there would not have been a balanced budget, and that would have resulted in more cuts. Would that have been the right outcome, to budget for aides, assuming you’ll rehire them, and then cut elsewhere in the budget to balance?
Part of the problem with that particular issue is it was an amorphous piece of the budget and a cost that could be moved around. Accounted for or not accounted for, depending on who was doing the talking.Had it been settled, we might not be talking about, we might have been talking about a different budget, that assumed that there were going to be kindergarten aides. I have a hard time hashing that out because it’s a what-if that we’ll never know.
What are some of your best experiences as an educator, which inform your views of what a school system should be like?
I coached debate for almost 25 years in Weston and at Hampshire Regional High School out in western Massachusetts. Those, I think, taught me the most about teaching, and what Jal Mehta calls deep engagement. He likens it to what athletes call being in the zone. When a kid is so engaged in something that they don’t even realize how hard they’re working, and how much they’re learning.
I saw in debate kids who, because they were going into a room with two opponents and trying to convince a neutral judge that their arguments were better, They worked really hard. They did a lot without my even having to coach them to do it. I used to sometimes say it was almost as if I would just wind them up and let them go. Sometimes, they just put me in my place with what they knew.
A really wonderful moment for me in teaching was when one of my debaters at Hampshire Regional, who had turned into a really good nationally competitive debater, was having a discussion with me about a piece of debate theory, and going on about how to apply that theory to a debate round, and somewhere in her explanation I realized I had no idea what she was talking about. She had entirely lost me, and my first reaction was “oh my God, what is this?” And then I said, “No, that is so cool.” She has worked so hard at this that she knows it better than I do, and that to me was a success.
What would you say to someone who says “Jim Murphy is a passionate educator, has a depth of knowledge about what happens inside a school building, and how to work with other educators. I’m not sure he fully sees the parent perspective. Why doesn’t Jim become a high school principal in Newton? Why is School Committee the best use of Jim’s experience?”
Well, I’m not planning on coming out of retirement that way! [School Committee] is a good use of what I have to offer, because it’s not a perspective that often exists on School Committees. A lot of people run for them, like people in the business community. There are certainly parents, realtors, all kinds of people who want to be on School Committee for all kinds of reasons. There are comparatively few educators, and that kind of gives superintendents free run with people who don’t speak the [education] language.
I have heard at many School Committee meetings across the state superintendents spending a lot of time explaining [educational issues] to people, like understanding the pedagogy,because they’re not up to speed on that. That’s not their area of expertise. It would be good if there were somebody in the room who could hear that the first time and say, “Oh, I know what you’re thinking.” or “Wait a minute, I don’t think that that’s true.” It’s a voice that is all too often missing.
In the past year, the NPS office of DEI has been downsized. reorganized within the HR Department, and at least based on public memos, now has staff-facing as opposed to student-facing responsibilities. Do you agree with those changes and how do you see the role of DEI in NPS?
I’m not completely up on the evolution of how it’s been used in NPS, but think broadly that DEI are really bedrock principles that underlie our democracy. They’re keys to fostering civic excellence.Our schools are the primary place where kids learn to be in a community. if you don’t have diversity, you don’t have equity, you don’t have inclusion in those settings, then kids don’t see it modeled and don’t learn it. That’s not the administration of an office issue, but a broader one, and it’s a shame that the term has been turned into a dog whistle for grievance and division. Public schools need to resist the demand that our kids don’t look at those things. They don’t appreciate how diverse a country we have or even the community itself, that they don’t understand that equity, that giving people an equal shot, is important. I don’t think they should be turned away from including others, that’s the very definition of a community. They’re all our kids, that needs to be our orientation to DEI.
You said it’s a shame that some are asking our kids to push back those values. Is anyone in Newton doing that?
I don’t think anybody is going that far. There are places where people have bought into the idea that if you have equity, that it comes at the expense of academic excellence. If you think about some of the other things I’ve said about practices in classrooms and all that, I don’t think that’s true. I understand everybody wants what’s best for their kids.
How would you respond to a parent that says the reason they think equity is opposite excellence, is because prior to Anna Nolin, NPS administrators told them that changes that reduced traditional academic robustness were done for equity.
I would say that’s really unfortunate.This is a place where, as a candidate, there’s a bit of a learning curve. I am hearing when I talk to people [about] academic issues, special needs, things like that come up with younger parents and parents who still have kids in the schools. They have very specific issues depending on whether they have a kid who’s really accelerated in math or has particular special needs.
But then there’s an age bracket of parents who don’t have kids in the schools, their kids graduated maybe 10 years ago, that are telling me a very similar story that they were unhappy with responses that they got from past administrations. I don’t really have a way to place that, but I am finding it interesting.
[As in all other interviews, Mr. Murphy was asked for any concluding comments not covered previously. He stated that he was planning to discuss a broad-vs-narrow scope for the role of a School Committee member, and he noted that he had already addressed that topic.]
Ed. Note: We corrected a transcription error, NEP to NAEP.
