School Choice:

Although participating in Weld's plan could prove lucrative, Cambridge is sitting it out for the moment, for fear of endangering its quality school system.

Ten years ago, Cambridge school administrators pioneered a new system of school organization--a program which, in the wake of President Bush's Education 2000 plan for school choice, has become a model for like structures around the country.

The "controlled choice" program which they developed is widely recognized as having solved the problem of racial imbalance in Cambridge public schools by means of peaceful, voluntary desegregation.

But now Cambridge faces another tough school choice decision: whether to participate in the Weld administration's new statewide program.

The state scheme supported by Gov. William F. Weld '66 parallels the controlled choice system in that it allows parents in participating districts to send their children to other public schools besides their neighborhood one and would probably prove lucrative for Cambridge.

The plan transfers state education funds out of the treasuries of school systems which lose students and into the treasuries of those which attract students.

But for the moment, Cambridge is keeping its distance from the statewide program, choosing not to risk compromising its own high educational standards by letting in students from neighboring cities and towns.

"We have decided that at this time there are too many unclear issues," said Mary Lou McGrath, superintendent of Cambridge schools. "We'll wait a year and then reconsider the plan."

A Model System

The Cambridge choice system sprang to life 10 years ago, when School Committee members realized their system was in trouble.

Unless they could find a way to meet state racial balance laws, Cambridge's schools would have faced court-mandated desegregation--a course which had caused chaos across the river in Boston a few years earlier.

Rather than face the street rioting and bus stonings which had plagued Boston, the committee decided to scrap the old system of assigning students to neighborhood schools in favor of a radical new program they called "controlled choice."

The program, which allows parents to choose any of Cambridge's 14 public elementary schools, has met with such success in the years since that educators across the nation are praising the system as a model of successful voluntary desegregation.

Cambridge's controlled choice plan drew attention because it wipes out traditional school districts and replaces them with a system in which parents list three of the city's 14 elementary schools as their top choices. Students are then assigned to one of the three, provided that the racial balance of the school remains on keel.

Since the program went into full effect in September 1981, performance on basic skills tests has improved and attendance in the elementary schools is up, said Robert Peterkin, who was superintendent of Cambridge schools from 1984 to 1988. Peterkin now heads the Urban Superintendent's program at the Graduate School of Education.

And the positive effects seem to be filtering up to the city's one public high school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin, said Albert H. Giroux, the spokesperson for the school department.

"We're looking at students who entered the system in 1981 and are now in high school as indicators of how it's working," Giroux said. "We're finding that success of those students is determined a lot by the strength of their elementary school programs."

The program does have its flaws--each year about 10 percent of the students within the system are shut out from all three of their top choices and are forced to attend another school.

Still, Giroux said he credits the controlled choice program with playing a significant role in raising Cambridge SAT averages from 770 in 1980 to 841 in 1990.

Dropout rates have improved as well, from 9 per cent of the student population in 1980 to about 5 per cent last year, Giroux said.

But whether the idea of letting parents choose one school over another can translate to success on a statewide level may prove a different story.

The Big Picture

The state program, which was passed in July and went into effect on September 1, is designed to improve the quality of Massachusetts public education by forcing schools to compete for students.

As of September 24, only 25 school districts have opted to participate in the plan, but state legislators hope that eventually more towns and cities will join.

So far about 600 students across the state have changed schools through the new program.

Cambridge received between 10 and 15 phone calls per day during the summer from parents in neighboring cities who were interested in switching their children to the Cambridge school system, Giroux said.

And from a purely financial standpoint, the city might be wise to join in, Peterkin said.

"Cambridge would definitely find the program attractive," he said. "It could draw some revenue from other districts because of the quality of its program."

But right now Cambridge is more concerned with giving its own students a top-notch education than with profiting financially from the statewide program, Giroux said.

Cambridge's school budget is about $70 million for this fiscal year, which boils down to about $9000 per student for each of the system's 7700 students--a figure which Giroux calls "extremely fortunate."

By contrast, Boston spends only $6679 per pupil each year and Somerville only $6199, according to the Massachusetts school department commissioner's office.

These gaps in the figures mean that if a Somerville student wanted to switch to a Cambridge school, under the new state system Somerville would be required to hand over an additional $2800 for each transferring student--pushing an already financially strapped school even further into the hole, Giroux said.

"How can you justify asking a school system that spends $6200 per student to send $9000 to another system?" asked Peterkin. "This is just the rich getting richer."

In addition, the participation in the statewide program might have hidden costs for a city like Cambridge.

"It takes money to bring students from worse school districts into better ones because you have to bring them up to par," Peterkin said. "Some--not all--of the students coming from the worse districts will have academic needs that the students already in the system don't have. At least some of the funds would have to go to helping these youngsters catch up."

Cambridge already has experience in dealing with non-resident students entering its schools.

While Cambridge Rindge and Latin does operate a program under which tuition-paying students from outside districts can attend classes, Peterkin estimated that 10 to 15 per cent of the high school's current students are actually Boston residents sneaking into the system from across the river.

Questions of Justice

Central to Cambridge's decision on whether to participate in the state program will be moral considerations about the fairness of the plan, McGrath said.

"Whether we get outside students or not, we would continue to keep improving the quality of our education," McGrath said. "My issue isn't a problem with being a receiving school, but rather what [the program] would do to the schools whose students would be leaving."

Some families would be better able to avail themselves of the system because they could afford the transportation costs of commuting to another school system, she said.

And McGrath said she also worries about whether once a student was admitted from another district to the Cambridge system they would be able to stay. If the Cambridge population or racial balance were to shift, outside students might be forced to leave, she said.

"It's difficult to maintain the standards of controlled choice when you're bringing in students from the outside," Giroux said. "We're hard-pressed to accommodate all the students in Cambridge."