The School Committee Under Fire

For Cambridge's more than 7,800 elementary and secondary school students, test results haven't been so good lately.

Scores for standardized examinations are mediocre, leading some parents and administrators to question whether Cambridge's School Committee is adequately performing its job.

Since Massachusetts school committees have the power of the purse, many educational observers believe the School Committee should be tailoring a solution to Cambridge's problems--including low test scores.

Indeed, Massachusetts's educational reform bill (signed into law in 1993) holds the committees accountable for their district's performances on standardized tests.

However, current School Committee members say they have more pressing problems to focus on, and that they are limited in what they can do to improve test scores.

With elections for the six seats of the School Committee less than a year away, other issues are coming to the fore, including declining enrollment, diversity and parental influence.

Report Card

Although by no means the worst in the state, scaled scores for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test administered in 1997 put Cambridge at just below the 50th percentile.

Since 1995, average SAT scores have declined for Cambridge Rindge and Latin School juniors. Mean SAT math scores are a full 35 points below the state average.

And the performance of third graders on the Iowa Grade 3 Reading test shows that while 47 percent of third graders statewide were deemed "proficient" readers, only 38 percent of Cambridge's third graders made that mark.

Meanwhile, at least two Cambridge elementary schools have many empty desks. Citywide enrollment is dropping as parents are choosing private schools and young families are moving to Boston's burgeoning suburbs.

Last week, the Cambridge School Committee unanimously approved a $102 million dollar budget for the next fiscal year.

It is heavy on administrative development, and allocates less money for teachers. Nearly $200,000 is budgeted to enlarge what the city calls its "Office of Student Achievement," a program aimed at raising test scores, among other missions.

With this money and the fiscal power it has, it seems the School Committee has the answer key.

State's Orders

But despite the fiscal power granted to the School Committee by the state, members say they are facing difficult choices in balancing state regulations with district priorities, particularly with test scores.

"I think right now, there are issues around state educational reform and all this testing and how Cambridge is going to react to all these state mandates," says Alice L. Turkel, a member of the School Committee.

The tougher state mandates began in 1993, after an intense battle with teachers' unions and education lobbyists, when state legislators passed a comprehensive educational reform bill. The bill essentially made school committees more accountable for the performance of schools in their districts, giving them added autonomy--and responsibility--in this area.

It outlined a seven-year plan designed to toughen standards for students and teachers. For districts considered under-performing, the state's educational bureaucracy would take over some of the school committee's duties.

The bill also abolished the "general track system," where all students took similar courses, regardless of aptitude or ability.

A New Agenda

With the bill's added responsibility of raising test scores, school committees have been forced to allocate money towards curriculum and testing, and away from development and diversity.

Turkel says the Committee has struggled to define a role for itself in light of the 1993 reform.

"There are rules [now] that didn't exist [before]," she says. "How we respond to these issues is important."

As the school committees have been restricted, school principals have gained power.

The responsibility for hiring and firing teachers now lies largely with the principals, who in Cambridge are overseen by appointed School Superintendent Bobbie D'Alessandro.

Principals now control more of their internal budgets than before the reform. They can make rule changes without school committee and state approval, and can even tinker with curricula.

"It's a double-edged sword" for the principals, says Geneva Malenfant, former president of the Cambridge Civic Association (CCA) and a longtime school activist. "You get to make the decisions, but on the other hand, you're accountable."

Malenfant favors the 1993 educational reform, saying it gives school committees incentive to concern itself with broader issues.

Critics say Cambridge's committee members have resisted the push away from micromanagement. Meetings have focused on textbook distribution at schools, school bus complaints and other day-to-day details of educational life.

Larger issues like test scores deserve more discussion, Malenfant says.

"I think the role the school committee should play now is to support and encourage the superintendent to do those things that would improve the scores," she says.

"The school committee needs to gets out of...the more micro-management of small details," she says.

Other critics are not so judicious. Alfred B. Fantini, who served on the committee for 16 years before losing a re-election bid in 1997, says the current committee is "inept."

On the Slate

But he hopes to change that with a bid for one of the six available seats in the November elections.

Current members Turkel and Joseph G. Grassi have said that they will seek re-election.

At least two current members, E. Denise Simmons, the current committee vice-chair, and David P. Maher, have been looking at a possible run for City Council. And local politicos have also named School Committee member Susana M. Segat as a potential City Council candidate.

Robin A. Harris, elected to the Committee in 1997, has decided not to run.

Fantini, Michael Harshbarger--the son of the former state attorney general--and parent Nancy Walzer are three non-members who have expressed interest in running.

Voting

Due in large part to Cambridge's complicated voting system, the School Committee slate is far from fixed.

Under the city's proportional representation (PR) system, voters rank each candidate. Once candidates have garnered enough first-place votes to exceed an established quota, first-place rankings are shifted to the voter's next-highest-ranked candidate.

"Cambridge is like a puzzle, especially with the PR form of voting. Little segments of the population have more influence that would normally have," says Roger O'Sullivan, president of the Cambridge Teachers Association (CTA).

Although many political observers decried the bitterness of the 1997 campaign, "I didn't really experience it that way," Turkel says.

"I think that it's a funny electoral system we have. We run against people we are going to serve with. And in some cases, you are running against people you want to serve with," she says.

Although the city is officially non-partisan, most elected officials belong to either the Alliance for Change or the CCA.

When the city was racked by crime, segregation issues, chronic homelessness and other problems in the late 1970s and early 1980s, political distinctions were more clearly delineated.

That is no longer the case.

All the candidates are progressive, agreeing that a diverse student body requires a variety of instructional methods and teaching strategies.

With the similarity of candidates and the range of issues, those with a stake in the race say a single issue will not decide the race.

Still, current committee members and candidates differ on what they emphasize.

"We've been wrestling with issues around equity, racial equity

and class equity," says Harris, who stressed diversity issues in her 1997 campaign for the seat.

As for test scores, Harris says that the low scores are endemic "in some areas, but if you look at those scores and they vary by school and by program."

"Test scores can give us any information they want to give us," says Harris, who is currently completing her principal's certification at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Harris says that the Committee ought to follow its heart, and not relinquish its educational philosophy to the state.

"We have a lot of smart kids...do we want our children to be global and able to adapt, or do we want them all be sorts of physicists?" she asks.

As Malenfant puts it, "The problem with all testing is that it kind of depends on where the person is starting out. If I can already knit, I can probably make Argyle socks more quickly," she says.

But Fantini says he disagrees that low test scores can't be effectively handled by the School Committee.

"I think that you have to set into place a system that's going to deal with it," he says. "We have to do better on MCAS testing."

Fantini sees other looming problems with the Committee's emphasis.

"Cambridge has the worst [vocational] educational program in the state. We have the richest bio-tech city in the state, and yet we don't have a bio-tech program at the high school," he says.

Fantini concurs with School Committee supporters like Malenfant on one point, though: that meetings, held twice a month, tend to get bogged down in trivialities and minutia.

"It takes them eight or nine months to agree on an attendance policy," Fantini says. "The superintendent [Bobbie D'Alessandro] isn't strong enough [to change the agenda]."

While not all the candidates assess the situation so harshly, most say they would prefer the Committee to shift its emphasis.

Walzer, a longtime parents' advocate and author of the Parents' Guide to Cambridge Schools, believes the Committee should focus on improving communication between parents and schools.

Regarding test scores, Walzer says, "I think that scores are an issue to a certain extent. If we focus on school reform, that we make sure that all our schools have well-defined philosophies and are communicating, the scores will rise."

"I don't really think that MCAS told us much that we didn't really know before," she adds.

Another issue that concerns Walzer is declining enrollment. Between 1000 and 1500 seats in the school system are empty, according to city statistics.

"I think we're going to see the merger of some elementary schools. Our enrollment in them has steadily declined. Our kindergarten enrollment is below 500 students," she says. "We know that we've lost kids as they go up through the grades, so we need to confront the problems of can we affect enrollment, can we keep them in the system."

The Parental Vote

City parents are already lining up behind candidates. Richard Freierman, whose son attends the Callahan School, says he is supporting Walzer. He has already volunteered to serve on her campaign staff.

"I like what she says, [about] making the schools and school systems accessible to parents," he says.

The hot-button issue right now is how much input parents should have in union negotiations.

Currently, the Cambridge Teachers' Association is holding weekly talks with the city aimed at ironing out a new contract. O'Sullivan, who as president of the CTA represents 1000 city teachers, declined to comment on the status of the talks.

But, he said, the CTA will closely follow the School Committee race, sending out questionnaires to candidates asking them about the various issues.

Parents like Freierman say involvement in the negotiations is crucial to the educational welfare of their children.

Some of the issues at stake include "the school calendar, the length of school day, how [teacher] evaluations are carried out," he says.

--Edward B. Colby and M. Douglas O'Malley contributed to the reporting of this story.