City Schools Adjust to Affluent Influx

On March 6, the Cambridge School Committee voted to temporarily increase the flexibility of the system it uses to assign students to kindergarten to accommodate the increasing numbers of affluent families applying for spots in the schools.

The move, which remedied the shortage of seats for students who do not qualify for the government’s free and reduced lunch program, marked the biggest alteration to a system painstakingly negotiated six years ago to ensure that no school’s student body was disproportionately wealthy or disproportionately poor.

Committee members said they thought the need to modify Cambridge’s Controlled Choice Plan, designed to consider socioeconomic background when assigning students to kindergarten, reflected a renewed—and encouraging—commitment to public schools on the part of the city’s families.

But as they wrestled to create a more permanent solution to the influx of wealthy families, those involved said they feared that diversity would fall by the wayside.

THE NEED TO INTEGRATE

The School Committee’s effort to integrate the schools is nothing new.

Throughout the 1990s, Cambridge operated under a formula that ensured that each school reflected the racial composition of the district as a whole.

In 2001, the committee unanimously voted to scrap the race-conscious assignment system because similar programs had come under constitutional attack in recent years, according to Charles V. Willie, a professor emeritus at the Graduate School of Education. The committee replaced it with a plan that focused on socioeconomic diversity.

Willie, who is an expert on desegregation and controlled-choice, said that achieving diversity in the early years of school is particularly important because students tend to remain in the same school through eighth grade.

“If you diversify the entering years then the whole school system will be integrated in succeeding years,” he said.

Under the current system, families select their top three choices from among the district’s 12 primary schools. The applicants are divided into two categories: those who are eligible for the federal free lunch program and those who are not.

Each school must closely match the demographics of the overall district, but may vary by 10 percent in either direction.

So far 69 percent of the applicants for the 2007-2008 academic year come from paid lunch families. But under the prior system they could fill at most was only 65 percent of the total seats, according to Superintendent of Schools Thomas Fowler-Finn.

Under the new rules, student demographics may vary by as much as 15 percent, effectively providing up to 70 percent of the spots to paid lunch students.

Willie, who served as a consultant to the School Committee when it designed a previous controlled-choice plan, said that while he supports the committee’s decision, it should be cautious against changing the band by too large an amount.

“It is very harmful if school districts move to the point where 75 to 80 percent of their students are from one racial or socioeconomic group,” Willie said. “Cambridge ought to recognize the benefits that it already has from diversified schools.”

Some parents said they thought the economic and racial diversity of the Cambridge Public Schools was a selling point.

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, a professor of history of art and architecture whose daughter attends the Haggerty School, said that she wants her “daughter to experience society in a larger way—its variety of backgrounds, classes and races.”

“I didn’t want her to have an elite, homogenous experience because I think that is unreal for a child,” Lajer-Burcharth said.

But she added that she has hesitations about the rigidity of the current system, noting that “in general the idea of socioeconomic balancing is a good one but how you go about it is another matter.”

CHANGING THE SYSTEM

Despite the fact that the Cambridge Public Schools have been plagued by low achievement for years, recent improvements have brought more affluent families into the system, according to School Committee members.

Fowler-Finn said this year saw an increase in the number of students applying for kindergarten, the first such increase since the School Committee voted to close schools in April 2003.

Because of the increase and the need to maintain socioeconomic balance, many paid lunch families would not have been able to receive one of their top choices—or for some, even a spot at all.

“It looks like we are a victim of our own success,” said Nancy Walser, a four-term committee member. “We have a lot of people trying to get into the schools that don’t look like the nine years of students that came before.”

A PERMANENT FIX

While increasing the band will solve the issue for the current year, committee members said it had begun working toward a more long term solution, anticipating that new families to the system would continue to be more affluent than their predecessors.

“We shoot for a target of balance that mirrors the demographics of the K-8 population,” Walser said. “That definition of balance I think is somewhat out of whack with the demographics of young families seeking to get into kindergarten.”

Fowler-Finn said that the district would seriously consider changing the controlled choice plan so that the targets it uses stay more current.

“They want to have further study, to bring Chuck Willie back in, bring others in, so they can consider major changes to the formula,” Fowler-Finn said. “They know that they have to make a change.”

In order to increase the number of paid lunch students placed in one of their choices, the School Committee considered two solutions.

The first option was to change the target for paid lunch from 55 percent to 66 percent, which is more in line with the status of families who applied for kindergarten in January. But they rejected this option fearing that it was regressive.

“Using the proportion of people that apply rather than attend Cambridge schools has the possibility of causing problems because all economic groups don’t apply at the same time,” says Willie. “The first wave of applicants is likely to have a higher proportion of affluent students than subsequent waves.”

Willie proposed that another option would be to base the target for paid lunch students on the previous year’s enrollment—not on an average of the previous nine years as the district currently does—allowing the schools to choose a percentage more in line with recent demographic trends.

Willie said he believes that using student enrollment data from the previous nine years to determine the paid lunch target percent is too inflexible, and that looking only at the previous year’s students “is the safest, soundest and fairest way of doing things.”

—Staff writer Jamison A. Hill can be reached at jahill@fas.harvard.edu.