The MCAS picture looks bleak now. But just three years ago, Cambridge was the center of attention when the state announced the results of the very first MCAS tests.

That year, the Morse school scored well on the test--surprisingly well for a school with many low-income students. And the state picked Morse when it chose an elementary school to host the announcement of MCAS scores that year.

"They were rather in awe of the fact that we, as a school whose demographics indicated we would do poorly, did well," says Jim J. Coady, who was Morse school principal until he retired last year.

Under Coady's tenure, the school became the first to use Core Knowledge, a standardized curriculum produced by a national firm and tailored to individual schools' needs.

Now, D'Alessandro is working to standardize curriculum in Cambridge. But in 1995, when Morse started using Core Knowledge, no other school in the city used a standardized curriculum aligned with state guidelines.

According to Coady, that made a difference for Morse's MCAS scores, and MCAS scores made a difference for the Morse school.

In the past several years, the school began attracting more middle- and high-income families, he says.

At the same time, though, the school's MCAS scores have leveled off. Coady attributes that mainly to students transferring in, who have not gone through the school's curriculum during earlier grades.