DEI Hiring: Cambridge Public Schools

In a Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education document titled “Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Schools and Classrooms Profile Series,” it highlights Cambridge Public School’s efforts to recruit, hire, and retain teachers of color.

District staff state that not having a staff that identifies with the majority of the student population is a “concern for achieving equitable outcomes and culturally responsive schools.” Therefore, the district reformed its recruitment and hiring practices such as looking at “job postings to identify language that unintentionally signaled a white, male-dominated culture.”

The profile also shares that district administrators worked with “school-level leaders” to “help them understand the implicit biases that were often at play in hiring decisions.” The [former] diversity administrator interviewed in the document states that “It is essential for school leaders who make the final decisions to understand that we’re all biased and operate within systemic racism, but also that systemic racism is created by individuals who enact and design policies that make our organization unwelcoming, centering whiteness and marginalizing others.” They continue: “One big piece was disrupting the notion of culture fit – if you have an organization that is 76 percent white, then whiteness is part of the culture and not being white means you’re not a cultural fit.”

As part of its retention programming, the district also operates “Employee Resource Groups” or “affinity groups,” for staff.

As part of the district’s 2017 approved three-year plan, objectives include the implementation of the “Dynamic Diversity program to recruit, hire, and retain a CPS workforce that reflects the diversity of Cambridge.”

Additionally, district outcomes include increasing the “percentage of teachers of color by 7 percentage points to 30%.” Strategic initiatives involve embedding “ongoing cultural proficiency professional learning for all CPS educators” and implementing the “Dynamic Diversity program to recruit, hire, and retain a CPS workforce that reflects the diversity of Cambridge.”