Elizabeth “Lizzie” Hudson

Quick Facts

Current Position: School Committee Member
Candidate Status: Required signatures submitted: 71 (69 verified)
School Committee Page: Elizabeth Hudson
Phone (text/call): 617-397-0589
Cambridge.vote: elizabeth-hudson

From the Candidate

Platitudes & Progressive Policies – But No PROGRESS.

(Hi – I’m Lizzie Hudson. Last cycle was the first time I ran, and now I’m running for re-election. My contact information is all here; reach out any time).

Why you care about the schools – even if you don’ t have kids in school:

Our schools represent a third of Cambridge’s municipal budget ($285 of $991M). Whether you’ve got kids in school, or you’re watching your tax bill, or you want better or more services elsewhere, for yourself or your neighbors — you care how well our programs perform.

What’s happening this election cycle:

Last election, we talked about math: The district had removed Algebra from 8th grade in the name of equity, holding back kids who were ready, to cover for their failure to prepare the rest of the class for a course that’s standard across the U.S. (offered in more than 80% of districts). This past term, we reversed that mistake — Algebra is back — and we replaced the Superintendent under whom decisions like this were allowed to persist (with a great Interim leader). But that was just one example of a larger pattern.

For decades, we’ve ignored the basics. We don’t consistently hire and keep great leaders, and we don’t swiftly remove those who don’t meet the bar. We don’t get kids to school on time. We let classrooms descend into chaos — kids standing on desks, throwing laptops, hurting others — in which it’s hard to teach and impossible to learn. And we consistently promote students who haven’t yet mastered all the material for their current grade onto the next higher grade. And then we act surprised when there are vast differences in abilities that persist into the middle schools and high school. And then we paper over these differences in preparedness and ability with whatever the new trendy education policy is at the moment and call it closing the achievement gap.

For example: The District eliminated deadlines for homework and attendance requirements at the high school (a program called “Grading For Equity,” now partially reversed but entirely a bad idea). We axed advanced academic tracks in both middle and high school (not just math) and refuse students the materials necessary to work ahead (because that would mean they’re not “aligned” with their peers). The City went into debt to create middle schools (vs. the old K-8 schools) because someone told us it was the “thing to do” in education at the time, to close achievement gaps (it didn’t). And we tolerate faculty with race-based rules about who speaks first in class – to “disrupt entrenched power dynamics.” None of this stuff works. Half the kids were below grade level twenty years ago – and that same half is below grade level today. (By the way, kids are smart; they know this is theater.)

(Graph shows proportion of kids working at or above grade level, on the main state standardized test – the MCAS. Here for visual simplicity, I’ve averaged English, Math and Science scores, over all tested grades, 3-8, but for avoidance of doubt the pattern is the same, for every subject and for every grade.)

And you can’t say these programs don’t work because we didn’t fully invest in them. Indeed, we’ve doubledour school staff (the vast majority being educators, not administrators). To make that happen, we now spend $100M more every single year to operate the District, versus what we did 20 years ago — with no change in the number of students. (For avoidance of doubt, we spend little on things like software or consultants; 90% of our budget is employee payroll/benefits.) Our student to staff ratio went from 8:1 to 4:1 (the lowest in the nation) but teachers still report being swamped, and our test scores haven’t budged. We’ve got our eyes on the right problems, but we fail because we have the wrong solutions, and atrocious execution.

(I voted against both budgets in the last term. Not because the schools aren’t the City’s most important investment – but because no one can tell you where our manhours are spent today, and why they’re not making the impact we predicted when we originally allocated funds to them.)

“Equity” isn’t new initiatives and PowerPoints – it’s teaching kids reading and math.

Now let’s make this concrete – what did we accomplish last election cycle and what will we do next?

What we got done:

Returned Algebra to 8th Grade (it was removed for equity in 2017, but it’s back, starting fall of 2025)
Replaced failing Superintendent (we’ve got a spectacular Interim, and are hiring a permanent now)
- Whereas School Committee leadership has been awful at communication – and has made some questionable decisions on background/reference checks, we have two very good candidates, including our Interim Superintendent, who is spectacular. I look forward to voting for one.
Removed cell phones during CRLS school day (bell to bell, starting fall 2025)
Closed least in-demand school (program & building to be revamped; for context, zero families ranked it as their first choice last year)
Added seats to two of our most popular schools (MLK and Baldwin) which have been requested by many more families than we can accommodate, every single year, for almost a decade
Opened the new Tobin Montessori, in a new larger building (one of our most in-demand programs, and one of the only to demonstrate the ability – empirically – to lift up kids regardless of their family’s circumstances)
Improved GPS tracking of buses (the only thing worse than being late is not knowing HOW late; it stresses kids out, causes them to miss learning time, and burdens parents who can’t afford to be late to work)
- More to do here though…
Roll out of free universal preschool for all 4 year olds and some 3 year olds
Required creation of an AI policy (students are already using it to complete coursework…)

What we’ll do next:

Put a GREAT program into our largest campus – the former Kennedy Longfellow in East Cambridge (the one we temporarily closed for investment). Expand on what’s working elsewhere and add specialties we don’t yet have (STEM; Music; Art…). This is a great opportunity, and a decision that this next School Committee will make.
In the same vein, further expand the existing programs parents rank highly in the school choice lottery – like our Montessori program (expand into middle school grades), and our language immersion programs. Parents tell us every single year what they want for their kids (in the lottery), and we don’t listen.
Review every Assistant Superintendent, Principal, and all academic leadership. After the Superintendent, these are our most visible and important leaders. If you’re not great – you’re out. We’re running a school district, not a jobs program.
Put our best leader in charge of the middle schools, and let them loose. Our middle are rife with behavioral issues. And this is where we start to hold kids back, academically, because we failed to help their peers learn the basics in elementary school. Ask high school faculty about the preparedness of their incoming students.
Find our spine and address the small number of faculty who really need to go. Everyone knows who they are – they generate (legit) complaints from parents repeatedly, year after year. Give them the benefit of real evaluations (including but not limited to their ability to improve their students’ academic achievement) and then, if there’s no improvement, make hard decisions.
Give faculty more routes to relay information directly to the Superintendent. Too much gets lost in translation; mostly inadvertently, but sometimes by administrators looking to duck responsibility for their own decisions and hard conversations.
Eliminate programs and positions that aren’t able to demonstrate a clear impact – even if they soundnice! – and use those resources to better compensate and support our best educators. It won’t be enough to make an enormous dent – but it’s a start. (Again, we have 1747 employees; it costs a lot to make a noticeable dent in take-home pay. Anyone and everyone talking about compensation to do the cold hard math for you.)
Get kids to school – and parents to work – on time. There’s only ONE bus vendor in the area (and they’re bad), but we also make the job harder than it needs to be. We can add vehicles (we run 39 busses today for general education, plus the special education vehicles; adding is just a question of cost), simplify the routes (by reducing the number of different start times at different schools; we have three tiers of start times that buses serve, and they don’t have enough time between them), and improve everyone’s day. You can’t fret about the achievement gap if you don’t bother to make sure kids aren’t missing class time.
Do a tip-to-tail review of our technical and vocational programs. Technical programs teach valuable skills, no matter a student’s next step (job market or post-secondary education). We need to ensure that ours are focused on the most economically valuable and attractive skills, that they’re effective (students are thriving, post-graduation, and not having to do remedial work), and that they’re advertised to ALL students.

And finally – important questions to ask ALL candidates:

(You can get elected with nice words alone, but you can’t get things done with nice words alone. Make people show you they have the guts to make tough calls, and the ability to convince others to join them. Both are required.)

If you say you’ll be a responsible steward of the budget – be specific! What would you cut, what would you expand, and what would you change? Are your cuts big enough to pay for your additions? (If anyone tells you we can pay for staff raises by axing a few ‘highly paid administrators, they haven’t done the math.)
1. If you’re proposing an expansion of the budget overall, speak to how you’re going to convince the City Manager and City Council.
If you say “high standards for all students” – how do you make this happen in practice? Easy to say, hard to do! If a teacher has a class with abilities at nine different grade levels – on whom does he or she focus first? What do you do with the others in the meantime? If a kid is working grade levels ahead – would you approve giving them materials from the next level course, or grouping them with other kids who are ready for more? (Today the district’s answer is an explicit “no.”)
If you say you’re going to better support staff – how? Compensation? Time for planning? Be specific and speak to HOW you’ll make it happen. (You either need the Superintendent to agree, or you need four Committee members agree to vote to make something happen; you can’t do anything alone. If you’re talking about expanding the budget – versus moving stuff around within it – you also need the City Manager and City Council to agree.) CPS staff can’t pay their bills with your good intentions. You also need to be able to make things happen.

And a little about me:

My husband and I moved to Cambridge for the schools (specifically, for the Mandarin Immersion Program, at MLK). We have three sons, and in a few weeks, a fourth child. I’m a neuroscientist by training (did my PhD building models to decode MRI data), worked in public policy at Yale Law School, and then in engineering (industrial robotics). For the past few years, I’ve been the CTO at a biotech venture capital firm, and now I’m working on something new. When I’m not at my day job, I’m an Intelligence Officer in the Navy Reserve (I support Maritime Expeditionary Security Squadron 8, in Newport, Rhode Island), and I serve as the Vice Chair of the Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. (The Harvard Astrophysics Department’s also a Smithsonian Institution. At 800 scientists, they’re the largest astrophysics group in the world. They took the first photograph of a black hole, built part of what is now the fastest moving manmade object in the Universe – the Parker Solar Probe, which flies at more than 400,000mph – and they operate multiple NASA missions. All of this is headquartered right here on Garden Street in Cambridge).

You can reach me @ 617-397-0589 (text or call)