But educators and parents worry that consolidation will throw the system off balance because of pressures to keep students displaced by the mergers together and offer parents a choice of where to send their children.
“That could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Harding says.
Don Watson, principal of the Tobin School, says he worries that schools labeled as under-performing—which are also predominantly black and lower middle class—will be closed before they’ve had a chance to improve on their own.
“It’s about the haves and have-nots,” he says. “It’s a system mired in class.”
‘Big Bitefuls’
Even as tensions run high over school closings, other issues are edging their way onto the agenda.
“There’s a tremendous focus on these mergers and that can’t take our attention away from the schools,” says school committee member Alice L. Turkel. “It’s really important that all of this very anxiety-producing stuff doesn’t get in the way of making sure that high quality education is going on.”
While D’Alessandro’s consolidation plan will focus on elementary schools, CRLS also faces its own organizational turmoil this year. After the high school was restructured two years ago, the principal who engineered the new program quit. This summer the district named one of its own administrators, Sybil Knight, to the helm.
Restructuring did away with the five “houses” that had made up CRLS, each with its own teachers and teaching philosophy. The houses had become segregated by race, income and academic achievement—and the so-called “small schools” that replaced them two years ago were supposed to even out those discrepancies.
But some educators in the district say the new small schools are already tending toward the inequalities of the previous system and say they are not sure how to combat the problem.
“There’s already a tension,” Price says. “The tension is, do we stay the course and do what the faculty and administrators have suggested is the path to a better high school, or do we have reason to do other things that make it harder to stay the course?”
Along with the rest of the state, Cambridge education officials must also confront the imminent repercussions of Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), which will be come a high-school graduation requirement next year.
MCAS has come under fire across the state—most recently in a lawsuit filed in Springfield by six students, a suit that local school officials say they are watching closely.
“The lawsuit in Springfield lays out all the right grounds,” Price says. “I think the [Department of Education], that has been unwilling to meet with and listen to communities, is now going to have to slow down and meet its burden in a court.”
Opposition to the tests has been particularly determined in Cambridge, where one-third of high-schoolers regularly fail the exam.
Less than a year ago, the school committee voted to defy the education department and grant diplomas to students who do not pass MCAS, but D’Alessandro says she does not know how that decision will play out next year without a “viable diploma” for the students who have failed MCAS.
MCAS looms as just one of several high-stakes issues confronting the school committee this year. As the committee faces the contentious merger process and resolve continuing trouble at CRLS, committee members anticipate a school year filled with strife and contention.
“It seems like we’re back into our mode of taking big bitefuls to chew,” Turkel says. “These are tough times and we have to do these things, but it’s not the best way to build public confidence.”
—Staff writer Claire A. Pasternack can be reached at cpastern@fas.harvard.edu.