With federal funding for public schools rapidly declining, ramping up the Cambridge Public Schools Department’s budget may seem counter-intuitive—but that’s exactly the decision the City Council made on April 1st. The proposed budget for the CPSD this upcoming fiscal year represents a twelve million dollar increase from the previous year, reaching 280 million dollars total. Although this might sound like a lot, it pales in comparison to last year’s 9.5% increase of 25 million dollars, which was motivated by an initiative to close the achievement gap and increase teacher salaries across the board.
At a round-table city council meeting in late February, Vice Mayor Mark McGovern emphasized some issues with how the CPSD budget is usually managed. “We try something for a year or two, it doesn’t necessarily show the results right away, people say we gotta get rid of it, so we change to something else … Very often, not moving the money, just adding,” he said, referring to the implementation of new curriculums in response to seeming ineffectiveness. The quality of public education in Cambridge should far exceed that of the nationwide averages, with teachers receiving generous salaries, the proximity of some of the best educational institutions in the world, and an excess of funds. But as a climate survey from last year demonstrated, CPSD actually falls into the lower percentiles of many key factors. In recent years, the CPSD budget has been consistently inflated as new curriculums, promising to solve persistent issues such as the race achievement gap, have been implemented and replaced after a lack of results. As McGovern emphasizes, this process just creates a gaping hole for cash to drain into, and the only way to patch it is giving new programs time to breathe.
Furthermore, the Trump administration is putting additional strain on the budget for public schools. “It’s gonna get worse before it gets better with this administration,” McGovern said at the meeting. “We’re gonna have to be smarter.” Although federal funding only provides a meager 3% of CPSD funds under normal circumstances, the withdrawal of funds is a concern when every dollar matters. And every dollar does matter. While Cambridge’s economy is still in post-COVID-19 stagnation, the approved budget for the city is now close to one billion dollars, putting strain on education and comprising over a quarter of the total budget. And although it keeps going up, as McGovern and various local policy makers agree, the effect is almost negligible. “We have, over the course of 20 years, doubled the amount of money that we are spending on the school system. You know, that’s a 50% increase over and above the rate of inflation, and student achievement hasn’t really budged,” said Elizabeth Hudson, School Committee member. Now, Cambridge needs to examine how their money is being spent more than ever, but with both the CPSD budget and city-wide budget for the 2026 Fiscal Year already approved, it’s unclear how Cambridge will handle the economic strain.
This article also appears in our April 2025 print edition.
