Piotr Mitros, School Committee Candidate
Register Forum: What distinguishes you from the other eleven School Committee candidates?
Piotr Mitros: I’ve spent the past half decade immersed in education research. In that context, I’ve interacted with substantially every education research community, from people doing very soft project-based learning to psychometrics to constructivist learning to how people work on educational policy, and that brings a certain level of depth of background. I’ve also taught in many of these formats. I’ve taught in small project groups; I’ve taught in formats that were very student-led, very teacher-led, in technology-enabled formats and blended formats, and I’ve worked with schools around the world. … There are a lot of good concepts from all those areas that can come into the school district. I also have a lot of entrepreneurial and organizational background; I’ve been involved in a lot of high-performance [sic] organizations. So I think that that’s a—in many ways—unique combination.
RF: How do you think that the School Committee, compared to past years and this year, could become more effective?
PM: I think there are a few components. One of them is that it needs to start operating as a board-level body and stop micromanaging individual initiatives. The school district has 18 schools; it has fourteen grades, from junior kindergarten to 12th grade. … The School Committee can’t be involved in all of these, so when it tries to, it doesn’t have the depth and it ends up micromanaging. It has to create the climate for the initiatives to thrive, but it can’t direct the initiatives themselves. It needs to start empowering teachers, parents, and students to be change agents in other community members. And one of the core things is that there needs to be a connection to science and how people learn.
There’s a little bit of that, but I would say that it’s very scattershot and it could be done much more rigorously. At this point, we know from many interventions how much they affect student learning and student outcomes; we need to base everything that we do with that knowledge. There’s also the question of focus, which ought to be on our student outcomes and how students do—move away from a lot of the things that are related to local politics, national politics, individual, kind of, unrelated initiatives, and into a very direct focus on how everything translates into student learning and the student experience in the schools.
RF: A big problem—as I am sure you know—in Cambridge, and everywhere in general, is the achievement gap. How are you aiming to close that achievement gap?
PM: So, the achievement gap is actually kind of funny because it’s not, as you had said, a problem everywhere. It’s a problem most places. And there are schools that have successfully either narrowed it or closed it entirely and there are a number of models for doing that. High support, high expectations… So what happens when you have a student coming from poverty to the school, in studies such students come in with half the vocabulary of students from wealthier demographics [according to Cambridge’s Controlled Choice evaluation]. There’s a large gap in prior knowledge and what we need are specific support interventions to target such knowledge gaps. We need to meet students where they are.
There is the [stuff] that Patty Nolan talks about; there’s a very big difference in instructional time in the schools and outside of the schools. So, students from higher income demographics, if they’re enrolled in afterschool or summer programs—or similar out-of-school activities that their parents drive—get roughly twice the instructional time of students who can’t afford those things. I would say a lot of this comes down to a focus on moving towards much more scientific and evidence-based approaches as to what causes the achievement gap and targeting those specific things in a way that is systematic and consistent.
There’s a difference in expectations for students; this has been studied for, well gosh, five decades now… Pygmalion effect, there we go! So this was first studied maybe five decades ago, when we picked out students at random and basically told the teacher—you couldn’t do this experiment today, it would never pass the IRB [Institutional Review Board] reviews—these five students tested as gifted. And then the students would dramatically outperform the rest of the school. So it was later studied as stereotype bias. [Independently, the Lighthouse] Project showed that when school boards genuinely believed that all students can and will succeed—and obviously, we don’t ignore the causes of the gap, but you view those as things to be overcome, rather than reasons for student failure. When you have that sort of high expectations set in place, that has a dramatic impact on student outcomes. So I think it’s that sort of instructional time, learning support, high expectations.
RF: What do you see as a strength of the Cambridge Public Schools?
PM: So, first of all, I’ve been very impressed with almost all of the individuals I’ve interacted with: School Committee members, teachers, administrators, parents. It has very good people. It has a exceptional funding. It has connections to many of the top schools in the world: MIT, Harvard, Tufts, Lesley—all of these schools have excellent programs and education. It has basically everything needed to be a really top-performing school.
It also has a lot of diversity within the school district. I don’t think it makes very good use of that diversity; people sort of sit in separate parts—that’s actually another part of the diversity discussion. I think that a lot of the … approaches that the school district takes to conversations around diversity end up being divisive rather than integrative. And there’s a lot of very nice research about how that impacts achievement gaps as well, but we should actually leverage that diversity to learn about how to interact with different cultures and learn from each other. That’s a very big strength of the school district if it can start to leverage that advantage.
A lot of the way that I developed was by exactly doing that. I spent three months in India as a graduate student; I spent three months in China; I went to Nigeria a few times. I learned a lot from those cultures and that was within a framework—before I went to India I went through a course on, essentially, anthropology and cultures that was extremely effective and that let me make proactive use of that trip to develop myself. And I think that a lot of those kind of supports are missing in the Cambridge School District. Even though there’s a lot of diversity, I don’t think that translates into many of the benefits that diversity could have.
RF: I was going to ask you about what you think is a weakness in the Cambridge Public Schools that the Committee could address… I don’t know if that was your answer or—
PM: Nope, that wasn’t my answer! I mean, the biggest weakness in the Cambridge Public School District is organizational. The biggest weakness is that the structure is very top-down and that individuals aren’t empowered to effect changes or solve their own problems. … The role of the school administration should be to support people trying to do that, to identify best practices. So if you want to effect a change, you can do that around you pretty easily … One of the things that work very well are teacher-mentorship programs where teachers spend time in each other’s classrooms. This is a very soft way of being able to see how different places, how different classrooms, or how different people teach and to learn from each other how different students learn.
That sort of process of knowledge dissemination throughout the district between schools, between classrooms, between school and after school… I think a lot of those processes are not in place. So, first, enable people to effect change, transparency mechanisms to identify what works, and dissemination mechanisms to spread what works. That, I would say, is the biggest weakness. If we can get those in place, I think everything else will fall out of the way. I mean, virtually all the problems that the school has—I’ve been excited—are solved somewhere in the school district. Not necessarily very widely, but almost all the problems that the school has are solved somewhere in the school district. And if not, they’re solved somewhere else in the world.
RF: You talked about how you spent a lot of your past doing research in education. You touched on this, but how has that changed or shaped your beliefs about how students need to be educated?
PM: Fundamentally, there are a few things that are important in learning. One of them is that students are actively doing something. … Whether students are watching a teacher talk, watching a video, or even reading, students learn a lot less. … It’s something we know now with a tremendous amount of rigor. … Second of all, students need a lot of feedback as they’re learning. … That feedback needs to be very continuous.
Students need to be met where they are. Students come in with different background levels. The Cambridge School District talks about learning styles… I’ll get a lot of flak for this, but this is a very strong scientific result: … Learning styles were scientifically debunked—to the extent we can measure, students don’t have different learning styles. There is a [research] paper [on this]: “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence.” … What does happen is that students come in with different specific backgrounds. So you might know more about one subject; I might know more about a different subject. And when students have the knowledge gap or misconception, it’s important to be able to target that and remediate that. And that can be, you know, again, technology, that can be a peer, that can be a parent, a teacher. There are a tremendous number of different ways of doing that. … But having mechanisms to do that is very important.
Students can also learn dramatically more quickly than they do [in conventional lectures] most of the time. Now, when I’m in a class, if I’m, for example, teaching in a lecture format, I sort of lecture to the bottom 20th percentile. Because one day you might be sick [and] if you miss something, that’s a very big problem. And that’s not the bottom 20th percentile of the students, that’s of where any particular student in that class might be that day. So students develop knowledge gaps.
And a lot of that kind of learning capacity is wasted. That, in turn, translates into boredom. And if you can let students move at their own speed, they end up moving much, much more quickly most of the time and end up being less bored.
So, it’s that sort of thing. You need to seriously believe, genuinely, that every student can succeed at whatever they’re trying to do. That’s what I mean by high expectations.
RF: A big topic that has been brought up with closing the achievement gap is that there are students who wouldn’t end up being challenged. And you were talking about—
PM: Yes, and that translates to behavioral problems, that translates into a sort of emotional development. … When students are not challenged, that translates into very serious issues. I think a lot of that is neglected in the district. The school district does very well for students towards the middle; it does very poorly for students below and above the middle. And I think that a lot of the approaches to it are very common. That’s exactly about meeting students where they are.
The problems that a 3rd grader learning algebra has are very similar to the problems that a 12th grader learning algebra has. It’s not that different. You need the same sort of things in terms of support mechanisms for knowledge gaps. A 3rd grader who got there themselves or a 12th grader who is learning at a 7th grade level… Both of them went through a nontraditional route where they might have many more knowledge gaps and misconceptions. Once you put in those mechanisms, you end up helping both populations. Basically everything outside of the center, I think, is not very well targeted by the schools, and a set of mechanisms needed to address that is very common.
RF: So how can we meet students where they are without creating more separation among different students of different levels?
PM: There are different types of project-based learning that do exceptionally well for this where, to the extent you have a diversity of skillsets among students, students can learn from each other. It’s very rare that one student is worse than another. That happens when you put one number on a student. At MIT, when I was an undergraduate, I worked on a robot. And some of the students were great electronic engineers, some were programmers, some were mechanical engineers… We all learned from each other. Students are very diverse. And it’s about that sort of thing. In other disciplines, technology actually does pretty well.
A lot of schools in California have a blended-learning model where students spend a lot of time in certain types of math and physics classes going through an intelligent tutoring system on a computer, and a lot of time one-on-one with an instructor, a little bit of time in peer groups. And models like that can also meet students where they are. But broadly speaking, I don’t think that there’s any friction between these. I think that what actually ends up happening is actually sort of the reverse. What happens right now in the school district is that there’s this battle between the advanced learners and the achievement gap people and they butt heads, and that leads to a lot of divisions and those divisions end up splitting the school, versus an integrative approach.
RF: What’s your idea of an integrative approach?
PM: In general, anything that is project-based like that allows students to learn from each other across different age ranges, across different backgrounds. A second [example] is self-based learning, whether that’s through a technological approach or otherwise. Most of the more modern approaches that are not lecture format are not lockstep. Students don’t learn well lockstep. No one learns well lockstep. The middle doesn’t learn well lockstep but it kind of works more or less for the middle. Anyone outside of the middle, it doesn’t work for.
Now, one of the big problems of the School Committee is the high-level body; it’s a board-level body. It can’t just say, “We are moving to this.” That’s what the Innovation Agenda [launched fall of 2010] was and a top-down change like that doesn’t work. What the School Committee can do is create an environment where that change can happen. What the School Committee can do is create mechanisms [for change]… These mechanisms are different in a junior kindergarten classroom than in a 12th grade classroom. They’re different when you’re learning to communicate than when you’re learning mathematics or when you’re learning science. So what the School Committee can do is put in practices by which, when things like that work, they’re identified. Teachers are recognized for that. And where there are processes for dissemination where when you have a process like that which works, other students can visit that classroom and see how that works. Where, at that point, that can be disseminated.
So it’s that sort of transparency and dissemination mechanism tied back to what we know about learning. That’s the process for effecting that change. And that’s not about the School Committee saying, “Hah. Now in 7th grade, we will all do algebra in intelligent tutoring systems and in 12th grade, we will all learn communication by having a high school newspaper.” That might be how I would teach it in particular, but that’s not appropriate. The School Committee doesn’t operate at that level. It’s about enabling that change within the district.
RF: Is there anything that you want to add?
PM: Sure! I think that it’s very important that people research who the candidates are, what their concrete policies are, what their qualifications are, and go out and vote. And vote based on [your] research, gain the understanding, and be civically engaged, going beyond the … yard signs; actually get very civically engaged. It’s very important, not just in the School Committee, but in the City Council elections as well this term. Cambridge is in a very dynamic period of change. Everything from housing prices, to schools, to a lot of other things, and that sort of involvement can be very impactful.