Paula Evans and the Redesign of the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (A)

Paula Evans is in her second year as principal of the only high school in Cambridge, MA. Her mandate when she arrived was to redesign the high school so that long-standing inequities in academic achievement rates across race and socioeconomic class were removed. In her first year, she succeeded in obtaining approval for her proposed redesign and completing the physical and administrative restructuring of the high school. Now in her second year, the reforms in how teachers teach and how the school operates are fully under way. From early indications, she and her hand-picked leadership team are moving the school in the desired direction. But the school committee has just made a policy decision that Evans and her team believe will undo all of the redesign efforts that have been made thus far. Evans has threatened to resign and now ponders what she will tell her leadership team and the faculty the next day.