Interview: Ben Schlesinger for Newton School Committee Ward 5
September 16, 2025
During August, Fig City News conducted interviews with each of the 10 School Committee candidates who are running in competitive elections. This notice was sent to all candidates prior to the interviews. All interviews were completed before any were published.
Why did you decide to run for School Committee?
I’m passionate about education. It’s the proven pathway to prosperity in America and elsewhere, and investing in it is the best thing we can do for future generations. I’ve enjoyed coaching kids for decades now, helping them grow and mature. I work in tech startups, which entails thinking about what tomorrow is going to look like and how can we build a better world for the people who are coming behind us? That set of skills and experiences prepares me to help. I have an MBA from MIT, and spend a lot of time thinking about communications, solving big problems, and working in complex organizations. In my career as an executive, I’ve been making complicated prioritization decisions and communicating with groups of stakeholders. I see a lot of parallels to what the School Committee does.
I’ve been involved in this community continuously since I was born. I grew up and coached on the north side, and I’ve lived on the south side for the last nine years. I’ve excelled at problem solving, breaking apart a problem into its component parts, finding common ground with people, where we disagree and agree, and building on agreement to get a resolution that makes us all happy enough. And managing complex financial organizations: This is a $300 million organization we’re talking about, and the taxpayers are entrusting the School Committee with two-thirds of the City’s budget, and that’s just an enormous responsibility, and you need people with financial savvy to do that.
You’ve said you want to bring NPS back to being one of the best school districts in the nation. Why is it not presently one of the best school districts in the nation?
I don’t pay a lot of attention to rankings. It’s still a strong school district, but has lost some of its edge, especially in the last five years, and I believe that Dr. Nolin feels the same way. Our kids haven’t been in school enough – that’s a starting point. My son just graduated from Zervas. He got the state-mandated 180 days in three of his six years. When I was a kid in NPS, that was automatic. We need to get back to being reliable. I think that Dr. Nolin is on a bit of a turnaround effort. It seems like there’s been some atrophy in the Central Office. She talks about how we just haven’t invested enough in building curriculum and in developing our educators, and that has led to a lot of frustration on their side and a lot of rework. We have different educators building their own curricula at the school. Dr. Nolin has said we are a system of schools and not a school system, and she’s working to build a centralized curriculum. Opportunities come when you make the system more effective, especially making educators happier, and that will translate to outcomes for the students.
Outcomes for students is the last piece of this. We don’t measure enough, and Dr. Nolin has said [the district] is putting in active measurements this year for the first time. I got three reading reports on my elementary school kids, and two math reports that weren’t there before. Now I can see their progress on paper, I understand what topics they are doing well at and where they need extra work, and I can work with them and communicate more effectively with their teachers. I think we follow Dr. Nolin’s lead, and we’re going to get back to what we’re used to thinking of NPS by building a more outcome-oriented system.
If Dr. Nolin already has what you’re saying are positive things on track, why do you need to be on the School Committee, if they’re already happening?
To ensure that they retain priority. Others in the community have other topics they would prioritize. There are voices that loudly say things like measurement and outcome-orientation is not good. I think the superintendent is responsive to the School Committee and the priorities they set. Those items I just listed are important to have on her radar, and some of them are a pivot away from what the past administration was focused on.
Are there any public examples of organizations or people in authority who, in your view, pushed back on measurement?
At a public forum at Zervas with the mayor and School Committee members, probably in March, Dr. Nolin mentioned she was very concerned that she used to be a member of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) and she feels like they have lost their way. She said they oppose efforts at measurement of outcomes, in line with the ballot referendum last year to push out MCAS as a high school graduation requirement. That’s an example of one of the voices that’s out there.
In your campaign platform, you talk about AI, and one of your goals would be to work with the district on AI policies. Can you talk more about that?
I think about AI as opportunities and risks. It has to be done thoughtfully, with teacher buy-in and partnership every step of the way, from selecting and implementing the tools, collaborating to use the tools, and sharing feedback. We need to help teachers use AI. We have to use AI as a lever and not a crutch. We want to teach kids critical thinking skills, organizational skills, analytical skills, and not have all that done by AI.
There are opportunities for personalized learning. AI can observe learning, figure out how students learn, and devise plans for feedback and stylized presentation to address learning gaps. Someone this morning was telling me about Khanmigo, they believe that that’s a really effective tool. It can save teachers time and facilitate lesson planning. It can do stuff like slide building. It can correct writing assignments and exams. You can imagine a teacher saying to the AI: fix it, or edit, correct, and mark up the spelling, grammar, and sentence structure in this essay.Teachers then can read that essay and think about what content do they want to give feedback on? They don’t have to worry about the spelling and the grammar; the AI has already done that piece of work. Their time can be spent on making magic with their students, on their interactions, making their students better.
For careers of the future. there’s different camps on this, but I believe AI will fundamentally reshape a lot of jobs, and that analogies to the personal computer and the Internet are not overblown. We need to teach students how to use AI without becoming subservient to it, so they walk into a future where they can participate and contribute to society.
The risks are really important. If teachers aren’t properly trained or bought in, it becomes a distracting negative instead of a time-saver. Students are using it as a crutch to do the work for them. My sister is an educator in Worcester, and she says that it’s been a time sink because she spends so much time trying to catch the kids cheating with AI, which they do constantly. She’s using AI to look for AI-written assignments, and she says, so far, this is the biggest impact on the job. Kids will be inclined to use it to feign knowledge, and teachers will have to try to use it to detect the fakes, and we need to figure out what are the best ways around that. We may wind up back with blue books. I don’t necessarily know the right answer here. But there’s an MIT study that shows that there’s less brain activity when papers are written using ChatGPT. So I don’t have any doubt that it’s not good having the AI do all the work. We just have to figure out the right way to leverage it as a tool.
Also, AI learns too much about our kids. Can we sandbox the data? You think about “The Anxious Generation.”The data says that living more online is hurting our kids. I’m not sure [AI] will be as damaging as social media, but we have to pay attention to the brain-changing behaviors. Are we spending more time on screens in ways that are hurting attention or other brain development?
Finally, there’s ideological bias. You ask ChatGPT something, and it can just give you a wrong answer. That’s obviously dangerous, and you have to worry about bias. Look at what the social media corporations have gone through in the last 10 years. They can put the slightest finger on the scale and change opinion, change the national conversation. Can we ensure that either the AI companies are not doing that, or the AI itself isn’t starting to build a mind, trying to create ideology in people? There’s real risks here. This thing is coming, and we can’t stick our head in the sand on it. We have to tackle it head on, and be thoughtful about it. We have to identify mitigations for all of those risks and make it something that helps us be a better school system.
Can you connect all of the global issues you just raised to what you specifically would do on the Newton School Committee?
I would ask that we develop a clear AI strategy that helps educators to understand the opportunities available for them to use it, and how they should deal with students using it, and that should involve having a conversation with the educators to learn what are the issues they’re facing. I’ve spoken to educators who have this issue top-in-mind. So it should be a collaborative process where we get to a more fleshed-out policy than the one that we have today. Since I work in this world, I would be an active voice in making sure we are thoughtful in addressing the risks.
On your campaign website and now, you emphasize your business experience. If someone were to say “NPS is not a business, so I don’t think that that’s very relevant,” how would you respond?
[MIT’s] Sloan School of Management makes the point that management is broader than business. They teach a valuable skill set, whether you’re working in government, or in a nonprofit, and communication is very high on the list. It’s broader than just how to speak clear sentences. It’s about how you build relationships and how you understand, how you listen. That’s at the top of the list of what I bring.
I’ve also dealt with complex problem solving, and watching the School Committee wrestle with complex problems over the last five years, there have been moments where I thought they weren’t structuring problems as effectively as people in the business world. I mentioned the $300 million budget, and you have to be comfortable making big financial decisions. True, it’s not a business, but you can still think about an ROI (return on investment). Dr. Nolin says this, and there is pushback on that idea, but we’re spending taxpayer money, and we have to be thoughtful about it. NPS is not a business. It is a large organization with a large budget, and I’m not a CEO. The School Committee is the oversight, and our job is to ask questions of the superintendent and to make sure that she’s managing the operation effectively. I have a lot of experience doing that in business.
What are your views on how to handle the NPS budget situation?
We need to stop these fights every spring. There are a bunch of levers. The biggest nut is the pension funding. It’s eating $50 million or so in the City budget right now, and it’s headed towards $70 million. We’re funding the pensions to a target of [Year] 2031. I hope that the Retirement Board will agree to extend that deadline out, so that the $50 million comes down some each year. The new mayor may find another instrument, like bonding the pension obligations, so we can pay over a longer term.
Second, I’ve spoken with experts who think the mayor is keeping the right amount of free cash, and others who think you should keep less, and the next mayor will have an opinion. The superintendent also has ideas for grants and corporate donations.
Less likely items, in my opinion, include changing the state’s core reimbursement formula for Special Ed expenses. The circuit breaker doesn’t adequately reimburse us. This is something [School Committee Chair] Chris Brezski is talking about. And the Chapter 70 formula, the state’s funding of our schools that accounts for 10% of our budget, is a black box. The formula is not serving us very well, so I think there’s a conversation to be had with our statehouse delegation. And there are other levers, and folks in the mayor’s office are going to have a lot more ideas around this.
School fees are something that we have to look at. We have to consider other fees that we could or should be charging to people who are actually using services inside the school. But eventually, you’re going to get to the override question. Raising people’s taxes should always be the last resort. Newton has a lot of seniors on fixed incomes and an affordability crisis on housing. We’re in a tough spot. We had inflation running 7% or 8%, and revenues were running 3.5% or 4%. Federal or state funding to schools could be reduced. Also, this generation is paying for the sins of past generations of Newtonians via pension funding. So we need to play these other cards first, but it seems fairly likely that in the next couple of years a new mayor will seek an override.
If you’re on the School Committee, what would your decision process be to decide whether or not to endorse an override?
First, have we pulled all the other levers? Dr. Nolin has been clear that she feels she has cut overhead costs to the bone. I will look at that myself, but I have a lot of faith in her. She created five scenarios. Simplify it to two: What will our school system look like if we don’t get the override? And what does it look like if we do? The City is going to have the same lens, but broader because they may put some money into roads, police, and fire. There would need to be items in an override to appeal to more citizens than just the parents. I’d ask if that justifies asking people to increase their taxes?
What were your experiences as a parent during the teachers strike? And how do we prevent another strike?
It was terrible for the kids, and it was the most terrible for the most disadvantaged kids: special-needs kids went two weeks without their services, single-parent kids, whose parents had to decide between working and caretaking, and low-income families. My family was pretty fortunate. My children love school, and my son cried every night when that phone call came in and said he wasn’t going back to school. It was triggering PTSD from COVID when somebody said, “You can’t go to your favorite place in the world anymore,” because the grown ups can’t figure out how to get you there.
Yes, it was a complicated and nuanced situation. We can get into all the weeds, but the summary is that the adults failed, and the kids and the families were the ones who took the pain. That can’t happen. I’m running for the kids first, I’ve said over and over, the strike did not put the kids first. So I was not comfortable supporting the strike. And in my race that’s a big difference with my opponent, who was very public praising the union, and attacking the Mayor and School Committee. That’s a different point of view.
How do we prevent another strike?
The strike had a lot to do with respect. The prior administration left the union and many teachers feeling disrespected by the way it talked to them. Professional development was allowed to atrophy at the expense of the teachers. The School Committee failed to find a constructive working relationship with the union and in the year (2023) leading up to the strike, I’ve heard those negotiations were unproductive. The Mayor didn’t join the negotiating sessions. I don’t think that was helpful. We had many opportunities for fresh starts, from Dr. Nolin’s entry, to the turnover of the School Committee Chair when Chris Brezski took over. We can treat everybody with respect. Chris [Brezski] and Emily Prenner have been on a listening tour. I think we have to continue that. They go to the schools and meet with different educators, show their faces and allow a touch point, share views, and ask questions. From everyone I’ve spoken with, relationships have improved a lot in the last year. So we negotiate the next contract from a point of mutual respect.
In the past school year, the NPS office of DEI was downsized, folded into the HR department, and at least based on public memos from NPS, became more staff-facing rather than student-facing. Do you agree with those changes? How do you see the role of DEI in NPS going forward?
Yes, I agree with the changes. I think we have a hard time when we talk in broad buzzwords. DEI can kind of mean anything to anyone. For a period of time, I think that [DEI] office was empowered to be anything to anyone that it wanted to be. And now it’s just become coded as good or bad, depending on your politics, but let’s talk about what I think matters: Are we making our schools safe spaces? Are all of our students building a sense of belonging? Are we talking about issues in an age-appropriate way? No kid should feel like they don’t belong in NPS. I love when I see something as simple as the picture book collection at Zervas, where my kids go. The books they read are about all kinds of people: different races, nationalities, sexual orientations, disabilities. That’s helping grow kids’ perspectives, and gives everyone a chance to see themselves in a book.
We’ve had some excesses and misfires over the last few years. One of my kids came home from first grade, asking if white people are bad, and the other one came home from third grade one year and asked my wife, who immigrated here from Mexico, if we should move back to Mexico because Latinos aren’t welcome in the U.S. Both children had been forced to feel that they don’t belong, but one for being too white and the other for not being white enough. I’m certain those weren’t the responses their teachers were aiming for, but kids are impressionable, and sometimes simplistic. We need to make sure that age appropriateness is at the heart of what we’re doing.
Finally, we need to make sure that we don’t cross the line from teaching how to think and teaching what to think. I’ve heard examples from parents of DEI programming that went pretty far toward imposing a political position on students, and as Dr. Nolin says, that’s not what we’re here for.
The last thing you said about imposing a particular political message, what do you think that message was?
Again, I don’t want to use buzzwords. I don’t [believe] that there are a lot of teachers pushing MAGA in the public schools. I think that there have been very progressive ideologies that have been promoted to the students. We should work a little bit harder when we have to try to be more down-the-middle in a community where most of us, myself included, are liberals and Democrats. I think we have an obligation to present kids with the opportunity to come to their own conclusions instead of telling them what the conclusion is.
Is there anything you’ve observed at prior School Committee meetings, where you said to yourself “I would have done that differently”?
I thought that most of COVID was a mess, and decisions on trying to form a medical advisory committee: We have Ashish Jha, Rochelle Walensky living in Newton, and they are ready to be on this committee to help us get schools open, and NPS said no. I think that exemplifies a closed mindedness and a sense that, you know we have the answers. I’m somebody who likes to reach out and talk to a lot of people and take in a lot of information, and have this humility, I don’t go into a situation knowing the answer. I go in knowing that I need to figure out what questions to ask to help me form an answer.
Is there anything we didn’t cover that you’d like to convey to voters?
I do want to take a minute to address anti-Semitism, which is a problem here. Last year, the Newton Police reported 74 hate crime incidents, and 59 of them were anti-Semitic. Three were anti-Asian, and no other group accounted for more than two. That was from the Mayor’s newsletter in February. We know anecdotally about swastikas in Newton middle schools and high schools and various other incidents. I’m concerned when people don’t take it seriously. I believe that the current Presidential administration is weaponizing this wave of anti-Semitism for its own purposes, but two things can be true: that they’re doing that, and also there is a reality of anti-Semitism and we shouldn’t be looking past it.
The reason that I focus on anti-Semitism is because the Massachusetts Teachers Association was hauled onto Beacon Hill for a hearing, where it was revealed that they were promoting vulgar anti-Semitism in curricular resources. We need to have zero tolerance, none, for letting that garbage into our schools. I don’t believe it’s made its way in yet, and I have a lot of respect for the Newton Teachers Association, and a letter that they wrote standing up to the MTA earlier, and I want to make sure that we side with them in making sure that this stuff does not make it into our schools.
And if I see the MTA promoting some other “-ism” – Islamophobia, racism – then I will make it a policy to make sure that doesn’t infect our schools. I’m Jewish, and [after]I finished my MBA, I moved to Jerusalem, and worked for a nonprofit that teaches coding and entrepreneurship to Palestinian and Israeli high school students. I was the entrepreneurship instructor. I learned a tremendous amount, and I have deep and nuanced thoughts about the complexity of the conflict there, and how it ties to anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the U.S. It’s important to me that there are voices on the School Committee who understand the depth of that situation and the trauma on both people, as this continues to be a prominent topic of the day.