New Leader to Tackle Troubled City Schools

Newly-hired Superintendent of Schools Thomas Fowler-Finn is regarded by many in Cambridge as a ray of hope for the city’s ailing public schools.

At a recent meeting attended by local university representatives and Cambridge officials, one person even referred to Fowler-Finn as a “messiah.”

Picked by a unanimous vote of the Cambridge School Committee in May, Fowler-Finn has made an impressive record of achievements for himself in his current position as superintendent of public schools in Fort Wayne, Ind.

“We were met by many, many members of the [Fort Wayne] community who begged us not to offer this job to Mr. Fowler-Finn,” Cambridge School Committee member Nancy Walser said in May. “His proven experience was very impressive.”

However, Fowler-Finn is coming to a district afflicted by a host of problems and traumatized by the past year’s events.

He will be charged with solving the district’s financial woes and boosting low achievement levels among minority and low-income students.

Additionally, Fowler-Finn must implement a controversial school merger plan—a task that proved the undoing of the previous superintendent—in a city whose residents have become demoralized and mistrustful of the district’s leadership.

The Crux of the Problem

Nearly every component of the Cambridge Public School system that Fowler-Finn will inherit is afflicted by major problems—almost all of which have been exacerbated by the events of the past year.

Over the last decade, enrollment in the system has decreased by over 11 percent. High rents have forced families out of Cambridge and low public confidence in the city’s schools has led those with the economic means to send their children to private school.

“People are making other choices for their kids and the Cambridge Public Schools are not one of them,” Cambridge Mayor Michael A. Sullivan said last week.

Declining enrollments have played a major role in creating the $3.6 million budget deficit which the school system now faces, as the district expends resources heating and maintaining half-used buildings and employing an unnecessarily large staff.

Among the students who have remained in the system, there remain vast discrepancies in academic performance between tax brackets and racial groups—the so-called “achievement gap.”

Nearly one quarter of all seniors—or about 70 students—at Cambridge’s high school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS), will not graduate this year because they have yet to pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test, a high-stakes, state-wide standardized exam. The school committee has voted to issue certificates of completion to these seniors, allowing them to walk with their class at graduation before they spend the summer trying to pass the test.

CRLS received another blow in April when the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC)—which is in charge of accreditation for New England schools—put the high school on probation for “significant deficiencies.” The report states that CRLS lacks a clear mission statement, standards, curriculum and effective leadership.

The Merger Solution

In an attempt to remediate at least some of these chronic problems—and especially to shrink its budget deficit and to close the achievement gap—in the spring of 2002, the school district decided to consolidate or close several of the city’s 15 elementary schools.

But over the course of the next year over a half-dozen proposed plans were scrapped after vehement protest.

Parents mobilized in an effort to save their local schools, packing into school committee meetings, threatening to vote school committee members out of office, and even performing their own economic analysis of the school system.

Superintendent of Schools Bobbie J. D’Alessandro presented the first merger plan last June, and proposed two additional modifications during the fall.

But parents and committee members rejected each of these proposals, saying that the plans were too drastic—closing popular schools and disrupting programs for advanced students and bilingual education—and that she had failed to create a transparent process that adequately involved city residents.

Deposing D’Alessandro

In November, the school committee not only delayed a final decision on the school mergers, but in a surprise move voted not to renew D’Alessandro’s contract—citing the her mishandling of the merger plans and her lack of a clear vision for the district.

“At times we would shake our heads and wonder what’s up here,” Sullivan said just after the announcement. “There’s been an inability to give a clear, concise vision for our system.”

Some parents lauded the committee’s decision to search for new leadership, but others accused them of unfairly blaming D’Alessandro for their own mistakes.

“The school committee does the dumbest things on the face of the earth and then they need a scapegoat,” parent Jackie Carroll said at the time.

But in spite of her unceremonious ousting, D’Alessandro set to work involving the community in her continued search for the right plan.

But her efforts came to naught, as the school committee rejected the next four proposals.

Nor did her belated attempts to include the community in the planning process win her favor, as crowds of parents flocked to school committee meetings, where they filled hours with public comment—sobbing, banging on tables, chanting and even yelling obscenities.

“Are you going to pay for my kids’ therapy? Because I’d like to see it in writing tonight,” parent Mary Byrne said at one meeting. “I will fight you to the bitter end and then some.”

D’Alessandro resigned before the end of her term in February to lead a $150 million research initiative on urban school leadership.

During her five-year tenure she had bolstered technical and special education in the district, but she had failed to solve the fundamental problems facing the city’s schools—and her departure left Cambridge without a merger plan or a leader to guide the district.

The Aftermath

Following D’Alessandro’s departure, the school committee tapped Deputy Superintendent Carolyn Turk to act as the district’s leader until a permanent replacement could be found.

And in April, the school committee approved a merger plan—voting to close three elementary schools and merge five others.

Although some parents and committee members remained opposed to the plan until the very end, others were persuaded by the district’s worsening financial situation and the need to take action in order to implement the changes in time for the next school year.

“We’ve allowed our educational system’s achievement gaps to last for decades,” Sullivan recently told The Crimson. “To me that was not acceptable.”

However, as a high-powered—and highly expensive—Chicago firm searched for a new superintendent to lead the district, the high school’s administration also came into question.

The appointment last summer of elementary school principal Sybil Knight to take over at the helm of CRLS, which had recently undergone drastic reorganization, was regarded as a hopeful move by many city residents.

But this spring Knight shook the confidence of Cambridge parents when she fired five of the high school’s 10 deans—including some of the school’s most popular leaders.

“These series of actions have made me feel that my vision and energy would be better appreciated elsewhere,” CRLS science teacher Tad Sudnick said in May.

But Knight maintained she needed to take charge of the school’s leadership.

“I must make some tough decisions. I need to have a leadership team that is unified around purpose. I am moving forward,” she said in May.

But parents and city officials say that CRLS still lacks vision as an educational institution.

“What do I say to the parents of a seventh or eighth grader? What is it that CRLS has to offer? I want to be able to say, ‘Come visit this year. It'll look the same next year when you send your child,’” school committee member Alice L. Turkel said in May.

New Era of Leadership?

The 10-month long merger process and the turnover in leadership have badly shaken public confidence in the district’s ability to guide the city’s schools.

“What ended up happening was the credibility of the system was on the line, and I think still is today, because of the inability to communicate,” Sullivan says.

At a recent meeting with representatives from local universities to discuss Cambridge’s schools, Turkel said that although she thought city schools are actually doing better now than they were 10 years ago, in the public’s eyes their credibility has plummeted.

“If we can’t turn around public perception we will lose middle class families and our university families,” she said. “We will lose our ability to be anything other than a school system of last resort.”

Parent Mark McGovern says the district needs new school committee members—leaders who will have a clear vision and let the new superintendent do his job.

“You would watch these meetings and it was almost like children squabbling with each other,” says McGovern, a candidate for the school committee in this fall’s election. “The result was that not much got accomplished. There didn’t seem to be any kind of leadership or clear academic goals.”

Fowler-Finn will inherit this legacy when he takes the helm this fall.

“I really think we’re choosing the best among the greatest,” Turkel said. “I think we will see real change that we need in the system.”

Fowler-Finn currently runs the public schools in Fort Wayne, Ind., an urban district that is much larger in population but demographically similar to Cambridge.

He is credited with having improved public confidence in a cash-strapped district and improving minority achievement. He has said that he will apply his experience in reducing the achievement gap in Fort Wayne schools by 30 to 40 percent when he arrives in Cambridge.

“The problems of public education are the same across the country: student achievement and closing the achievement gap,” he said just after he was offered the post. “I think I can make a huge difference in the lives of those students.”

Fowler-Finn will restore “credibility, integrity, and faith in the system,” Sullivan says.

Fowler-Finn’s contract ups the superintendent’s salary to $175,000 a year. More importantly, his contract will give him unprecedented authority over the district.

“We have no authority over anything anymore,” Turkel joked last week. “Basically he’s employing us instead of us employing him!”

Still, Turkel cautions that Cambridge’s schools will need a lot more than just a new leader to turn them around.

“There is this tendency to say, ‘Don’t worry, the messiah’s coming,’” Turkel said. “There’s many reason to think the guy can do what he’s done before, but it’s going to take more than one miracle worker.”

—Jessica R. Rubin-Wills contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Claire A. Pasternack can be reached at cpastern@fas.harvard.edu