Survey of Parents Reveals School Shortcomings

A long-awaited report commissioned by the Cambridge School Committee to gauge parental attitudes toward the city's school system was released earlier this month, providing hard data to school district officials about parents' concerns and why some families have chosen to leave the public school system altogether.

Worry about the quality of the schools themselves is the key reason that parents leave, contradicting claims by many elected officials, who have blamed the high cost of Cambridge housing for pricing younger families out of the city. The 48-page study also found that parents who have left the system also favor a broader curriculum and less emphasis on testing, and that there is overwhelming opposition to expanding the school day from six to eight hours, as two elementary schools have recently done.

The report also examined attitudes toward Cambridge's controlled-choice plan, finding that parents who have withdrawn their children call for its reform in greater numbers than those who keep their children in the schools.

The aim of the study, which was unveiled last month, is to help the school system diagnose and treat its declining enrollment, which has left district with 1314 fewer students, out of a total of 5673, over the past 5 years.

The School Committee contracted Opinion Dynamics Corporation, a Cambridge-based market research firm, to conduct the study. Opinion Dynamics interviewed 500 parents by phone, 200 of whom have children in the schools, 200 of whom have withdrawn their children, and 100 whose children could be potential students.

Because of the small sample sizes, the survey carried exceptionally large margins of error: just under seven percent for the 200-person samples, and 8.7 percent for the potentially incoming parents.

While the surveyors interviewed parents who have withdrawn their children from the schools, the study has been criticized because parents who had chosen private or charter schools without ever sending their children to the public schools were not surveyed.

“Despite a signed contract saying a major research question is why people opt out, there was no survey done of private school, charter and parochial parents,” said School Committee member Patricia M. Nolan '80. “It excluded about 30 percent of our city's families with children.”

FALLING NUMBERS

The top three concerns of parents who withdrew their children centered on school quality: 32 percent questioned the strength of the academics, 11 percent cited safety and classroom management issues, and 10 percent pointed to sub-par teaching instruction.

An additional seven and five percent respectively said that large class sizes and a lack of gifted education are the primary reasons they left the schools.

While these five issues—accounting for 65 percent of the responses—are intimately tied to the schools' educational quality, only eight percent of respondents said that the high cost of housing was the chief reason that they left the system.

But when asked why they thought other families are leaving the system, a whopping 56 percent of current parents and 47 percent of withdrawn parents cited high Cambridge housing costs. School administrators and elected officials have long contended that the expensive housing is pricing young families out of Cambridge.

At a School Committee roundtable on the enrollment decline last year, Superintendent of Schools Thomas Fowler-Finn and Cambridge Teachers Association President Paul Toner both pointed to the cost of housing as the principle cause of the enrollment decline, and in an interview in March 2006 school district spokesman Justin T. Martin claimed that "the main cause from all the information that we've seen has been the rising cost of housing in Cambridge."

A SHORTER SCHOOL DAY, A BROADER CURRICULUM

Parents of potential students opposed expanding the school day from six to eight hours, as the Martin Luther King, Jr. School and the Fletcher Maynard Academy—two schools that have historically performed near the bottom on standardized tests—have done recently.

The moves are part of a statewide push for longer class days as a means to boost achievement. Governor Deval L. Patrick '78 has appropriated $6.5 million toward increasing the number of hours that students in class, according to The New York Times. Massachusetts 2020—an advocacy group led by former gubernatorial candidate Christopher F. O. Gabrieli '81 and where former School Committee member Ben Lummis serves as director of public policy—has been a strong supporter of Patrick's push for more instructional time.

Still, by a more a two-to-one margin, potential parents said they opposed the one-third increase in the school day that the King and the Fletcher-Maynard have enacted. The study did not disaggregate the data to examine whether parents who applied to the two schools are more receptive to the idea of an eight-hour day.

In addition, parents whose children are currently enrolled in the system interpret the system's shortcomings differently than parents who have withdrawn their children.

While exactly 18 percent of both current and withdrawn parents pointed to the quality of education as the “single most important issue facing” the schools, 10 percent of current parents pointed to standardized test scores, compared to only four percent of parents who withdrew. In contrast, twice the number of withdrawn parents—12 percent versus six percent—said that a better and broader curriculum, including more attention for gifted students, is a key concern.

FREE TO CHOOSE

The survey data reveal that parents who have withdrawn their children from the system are more critical of Cambridge's controlled-choice plan, indicating that parents might leave because they are upset about not receiving one of their top choices.

Instead of drawing boundary lines to determine the student bodies of each of Cambridge's 12 primary schools—a process that many officials say would be too divisive and could lead to de facto segregation—the district allocates students using a plan, known as controlled-choice, that seeks to ensure that the schools are socioeconomically balanced.

Under the current system, applicants to the 12 schools are divided into two categories: those who are eligible for the federal free lunch program and those who are not. Each school must, within a certain margin, reflect the district's overall socioeconomic characteristics. Parents are able to rank their top three choices, but because each school must fit inside a certain range, a number of students each year do not receive one of their top choices.

Fifty-one percent of potential parents believe that the controlled-choice system needs to be reevaluated, while 19 percent favor it in its current form and 30 percent are unsure.

But the parents seem to split after this: while 57 percent of parents who have children in the schools call for a review of the system, this sentiment is shared by nearly 20 percent more of the parents who have withdrawn their children. Likewise, 29 percent of current parents believe no review is necessary, while only 18 parents of withdrawn parents feel the same way.

The disparity in attitudes toward the controlled-choice program also shows up when parents were asked whether they generally support the policy.

Fifty-five percent of potential parents support controlled-choice while 17 percent oppose it and 28 percent are unsure. Among parents with children in the school system, 78 percent support controlled-choice and 14 percent are opposed, while among parents who withdrew their children, 59 percent support it and 33 percent are opposed.

When asked, parents who withdrew their children from the system did not cite “not receiving a top choice school” as a major reason for leaving, but this could result from the fact that the reasons enumerated by withdrawn parents—the lack of a quality education, the lack of discipline, and poor teaching quality—are the very factors that had made the parents apply to other schools in the first place.

The reliability of this data has also come in question because it may be too skewed toward those who did not receive one of their first three choices. When the surveyors asked parents if they had received one of their top choices, 74 percent said they had while 6 percent were unsure. But district data show that 91 percent actually receive one of their top choices.

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