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. Fellow candidate Victor Lee, who showed up to watch the discussion, was invited to participate. And Newton South freshman Ana Ciric was there to give a student’s perspective on things.

Absent was Jason Bhardwaj, who’s running to fill the Ward 3 seat on the School Committee, with current seat occupant Anping Shen unable to run due to term limits.

The only competitive race represented was for Ward 8. Murphy and Lee are both running for that seat, against incumbent Barry Greenstein.

Leveling up (or not)

A lot of the conversation focused on the students’ individual journeys through NPS and how those journeys are set: through tracking and multi-level classroom instruction.

Tracking refers to separating students by skill level and academic ability, typically for all or most of their classes. Multi-level classroom teaching, which has been controversial in Newton, involves having students from various skill level groups in the same classroom.

Ciric said the multi-level learning system (which mixes advanced college prep and honors students) leads to honors students having to do more work.

“It doesn’t really help with targeted support,” Ciric said. “Targeted support would work a lot better if you had separate level classrooms.”

Indeed, the issue has been a hot one for NPS families, with teachers insisting it’s not working and some students saying they feel left behind.

“The research shows that, when it comes to mixed levels, it’s a mixed story,” Lee said, noting that some evidence suggests multi-level teaching in English language arts (ELA) could work better than other subjects, like math, but those cases involved specific professional development for teachers.

And while some students find the work too rigorous, others find it not challenging enough.

How would Lee work through this?

“You do need to have some degree of leveling again, especially if there are gross disparities between where kids are,” Lee said.

And leveling, Lee said, is not the same as tracking, and he’d like to talk with the superintendent about automatic enrollment for students into designated skill levels, based on past level placement and assessment.

“For all kids who meet the proficiency level, instead of them saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to give you options to decide whether or not you’re going to go to the next advanced class,’ we’re going to automatically enroll you in there,” Lee explained. “We expect you to be able to perform at that high achievement level, because you already demonstrated that’s the case.”

Victor Lee, candidate for School Committee, and Newton South High School student Anna Ciric discuss academic level placement at a forum hosted by Progressive Newton on May 20, 2025. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

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.”

School Committee candidates Bruce Hedison and Jenna Miara discuss NPS issues at a forum hosted by Progressive Newton on May 20, 2025. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

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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