School Choice Vote Leaves Administrators' Futures in Doubt

Parents are upset. The principal has threatened to resign--and the superintendent of schools has hinted as much. Cambridge School Committee members are swamped with phone calls and e-mail messages.

In what is shaping up to be the most intense education battle in Cambridge this year, four School Committee members have taken on Superintendent of Schools Bobbie J. D'Alessandro and Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS) Principal Paula M. Evans over parental choice within the city's only public high school--and the furor that followed has caught all involved off-guard.

In a surprise move late last Tuesday night, the School Committee voted four to three to reject a proposal by CRLS administrators to continue a new policy--established just this year--that leaves parent choice out of the equation when placing incoming ninth-graders in CRLS' five "small school" learning communities.

Voting as a bloc throughout the combative, five-hour meeting, four School Committee members--Susana M. Segat, E. Denise Simmons, Alice L. Turkel and Nancy Walser--unexpectedly opted to re-establish choice at CRLS next year.

In that vote as well as several others, they created a deep rift with D'Alessandro and Evans, leading both to say they felt seriously undermined.

"You brought me to this system to make tough decisions," D'Alessandro told the committee. "You are taking the recommendation of an entire administrative staff and saying, 'I don't care.'"

Evans, meanwhile, said last week she would resign unless the School Committee reverses its decision and allows the current system of randomization to continue.

The system, part of Evans' redesign of the entire high school, mixes students up randomly and then balances the five houses at CRLS to achieve racial and socio-economic diversity, aiming to make the different sections of the school more equitable.

"We do not want to return to the kinds of competition and stereotyping that existed in the past here," Evans said in a statement she read over the school's intercom system last week. "We do not want to have a small school that represents only a part of the city of Cambridge or one particular kind of student."

Over the past week, fallout from the vote has strained relations between the superintendent and School Committee members. But lobbying and the search for a compromise have intensified in the past few days.

Turkel says Evans' threat to resign has spurred her to meet with the principal and iron out a compromise.

As the potential deciding vote, an agreement between Turkel and Evans could settle the issue.

"I don't want her to leave. I don't think it's good for our school system for her to leave," Turkel says. "She's willing to meet with us. We're talking."

Turkel, who met with Evans yesterday and is meeting with her again today, says she is looking for ways to resolve the impasse but declined to comment on what specific compromise measures are on the table.

"We need to find a way to move ahead together. It's important that people think that we will act responsibly together," she says.

Leaving No Choice

Ever since restructuring discussions began at CRLS in the mid-1990s, administrators have focused on making the different sections of the school, formerly called "houses," more equitable. House A, the Pilot School, and Academy were widely seen as successful. Fundamental, Leadership, and the Rindge School of Technical Arts--where dropout and failure rates were higher--were not.

In starting from scratch, administrators have insisted that the schools be equivalent. But yesterday, D'Alessandro said she wants to return, in part, to the old house system.

According to D'Alessandro, reintroducing choice at this point would mean active parents could find out which small schools had the top teachers and could maneuver their children into those schools.

"Parents in the know would know which schools to choose and we'd go back to the old system," she says.

Instead, D'Alessandro says she wants to ensure uniform education programs in ninth and possibly tenth grade and then actively promote genuine differences among the schools in eleventh and twelfth grade. One school would be devoted to vocational classes, for example, and another would focus on more traditional education.

"I believe we will clearly define those schools," she says. "After ninth grade, houses are going to be very different."

D'Alessandro says that way choice can be an educational decision, rather than a way for parents from the same elementary schools to group together and have their children go to school with their friends.

'We've Got A Battle On Our Hands'

D'Alessandro says she might consider choice in the future under such a scheme.

But at the moment, she still says choice is out of the question--making this Tuesday's vote all the more important.

Unless last week's vote is overturned, D'Alessandro says she will call for a meeting with committee members to discuss her contract and her role as head of the school district.

Though she would not say whether or not that discussion would include talk of her resigning, D'Alessandro said she wants to ensure that she is in philosophical agreement with the School Committee.

"We have serious differences," she says. "We can agree to disagree but what occurred last Tuesday night is not the model I want to have from my School Committee."

Looking towards a hotly-anticipated meeting on Tuesday when the School Committee will reconsider its vote on school choice, D'Alessandro concedes that the fate of her plan is far from certain.

"We've got a battle on our hands," she says.

The debate has inflamed opinion on both sides of the issue, which has been cast as a struggle for the future of public education. Some parents and students say restoring choice is tantamount to endorsing the racial inequalities of CRLS in years past.

"They're going to re-segregate the school. They're going to get rid of the principal," says Emma Lang, a sophomore who joined a handful of other students and teachers last Wednesday to protest the School Committee vote.

But the committee members who voted against extending randomization have defended their decision as critical to keeping affluent families in the public schools--which have suffered a sharp decline in enrollment during the past decade--rather than sending their children to private schools.

"I believe that one of the reasons that Cambridge still has such a diversity in the public schools--and has not become like many other urban centers, a school of last resort--I believe that choice is an important part of that," Turkel says.

Out of the Blue

D'Alessandro was stunned by the vote last week, which she says she "hadn't really worried about." Though she says she had expected opposition, she had been confident the measure would get the votes it needed.

In the wake of the surprising vote, however, school officials scrapped plans for an open house for eighth graders and their parents at the high school that was set for Tuesday.

When the redesign plan was passed last spring, randomization and choice had been a major bone of contention.

At that time, proponents of the redesign said eliminating choice--at least for a time--was key to evening out the houses, which were widely said to serve black and low-income students poorly.

But Cambridge has a tradition of choice in its education policy. The city has a policy of controlled choice that allows parents to choose the elementary schools their children attend--so long as the schools remain racially balanced.

Facing opposition from proponents of school choice, a provision limiting randomization to one year was an important political concession to prevent school choice from sinking the entire redesign package.

D'Alessandro says officials may not have thought enough about the consequences of reestablishing choice after just one year, but she denies that the move was orchestrated knowing that administrators would come back and ask for randomization to be extended.

"I really believed it at the time. I'm very comfortable taking the heat on that," she says. "I don't think we intentionally made bad policy, but if you make bad policy, you've got to correct it."

Looming 'Disaster'

According to Lang, though the mood in CRLS has settled down, the student body was buzzing after Tuesday night's meeting.

"The first day, everyone knew something was going on. People were saying the principal's going to resign. Any rumor that you can imagine teenagers coming up with came up," she says.

Lang says she can personally attest that the redesign has desegregated CRLS. Last year, Lang was in House A, which she says was one of the "whiter" houses with a reputation for better teachers and academics. Now, as a student in School 3, Lang says she has met a more diverse group of students.

After her initial concerns about being separated from her friends by the redesign, Lang says she has grown to like the system.

"We'd just been mixed up and we liked this new system.... Now you're saying you're going to change it. You're going to wreck this fragile social thing that's going on with the kids. It's stunning," she adds.

And if the School Committee upholds its decision--and Evans leaves--Miller, whose youngest child still has three years left at CRLS, says she fears the redesign will fall apart.

"The whole thing's going to go to hell. I can't see anything but serious disaster," she says. "There's not a lot of people who want to be principals of urban schools. I can't believe they would let that happen."

D'Alessandro says she worries that, if Evans resigns at the end of this year, other top administrators new to the school this year would leave. And it could take a full year to find a replacement principal, she says.

"I hate to think about it," she adds. "[But] we would have to do it."

--Staff writer Andrew S. Holbrook can be reached at holbr@fas.harvard.edu.