Choosing the Right School

At 3 p.m. on a weekday afternoon, school buses roll into the front lot of Fresh Pond Apartments, a low-income housing complex in North Cambridge that looks like a freshman’s worst nightmare the evening before Housing Day—an enormous Mather House multiplied by two, twin brick towers facing each other which rise more than 20 stories high.

The buses come from all of Cambridge, bringing home students who have been scattered across the city through Cambridge’s “Controlled Choice” program, which assigns children to one of the district’s 12 primary schools based on parent preference and income, in a move intended to create and maintain socioeconomic diversity.

But depending on parent choice isn’t as effective as some school administrators would like. School statistics remain buried in official reports, and many parents don’t know what they should be looking for.

In a place like the Fresh Pond Apartments, where parents work multiple jobs or are immigrants unfamiliar with city bureaucracy, this lack of easily accessible information can disproportionately affect their ability to make informed decisions about the future of their children.

A few advocates have taken it upon themselves to prepare booklets and push administrators to create Web sites—the first few steps to narrowing the information gap.

MARKET FAILURE?

Last Friday, The Crimson asked parents milling around the lobby of the apartments, commonly called “Rindge Towers,” how they had decided where to send their children to school. In interview after interview, they were unable to explain the Controlled Choice program or identify which schools in the district were the best academically.

The reasons they cited to explain why their children attended the schools they did were largely personal, based on family ties or proximity.

Saba Adugna, a young 20-something waiting in the lobby that day, said that her daughter attended the Peabody School, located right down the road from the high-rise housing complex, because she had a cousin there and because transportation to the school was easy.

She did not know about “Controlled Choice” and when asked about other nearby schools in the district, Saba was clueless.

Scott Cole, the resident service coordinator of the complex, said he thought the families had difficulty getting information about the schools.

“It’s hard to be a good parent when you’re working two jobs,” he said.

PERFECTING INFORMATION

Ten years ago, as her first child prepared to enter kindergarten, Nancy Walser, now a Cambridge Schools Committee member, could not decide which city school was best, since none of her options had easily accessible information. Without school Web sites or other media, Walser said, she could make a choice, but not a very informed one.

To help increase the flow of information, Walser spent nine months researching each Cambridge school. In 1997, she published her findings in a 192-page book called “The Parents’ Guide to Cambridge Schools.” She also pushed the schools committee to hire a public information officer to develop a comprehensive collection of school Web sites, just a click away from curious parents’ computers.

Justin Martin, director of the district’s public information office, said he is creating small informational packets for each school within the district. Likening them to those used to recruit students to Harvard, Martin said he hopes they will help identify the differences between the district’s schools for every family—whether “paid lunch” or “free.” Several schools had even gone so far as to create T-shirts and buttons to raise awareness, he added.

According to Barbara Boyle, the principal of Graham and Parks, an elementary school located just north of the Quad, attendance at outreach events like family potlucks, kindergarten tours of the campus, and parent conferences is usually high.

But she acknowledged that “some families in Cambridge don’t know much about the Graham and Parks school,” and said the school had arranged for their family liaison to make a special trip to the Fresh Pond Apartments.

Walser also acknowledged there’s still a long way to go before all Cambridge parents know how to take advantage of the “Controlled Choice” program, but she maintained that progress had been made.

“We could always do it better, but I think that we’re really, in terms of what was available to me as a parent entering the system...light years ahead,” she said, adding that schools would have to reach out to families in multiple ways, whether that be over the Internet or in a neighborhood laundromat.

But Cole, who as Fresh Pond Apartments resident service coordinator said he actively encourages Fresh Pond residents to involve themselves more in their children’s education, lacked, like Adugna and the other parents, the tools he needed for the task. To Cole, who had never heard of some of the schools in the district, those options remained light years away.