More than a decade after it began, Cambridge's nationally touted controlled choice program has yielded both successes and failures. While the original aim of racial balance in Cambridge's public schools has been for the most part achieved, students, parents and administrators alike say that socioeconomic diversity remains the educational vision, as opposed to the reality.

Cambridge was spurred to act on school choice in 1977, when the courts mandated desegregation of the schools in neighboring Boston, providing the basis for the Cambridge Controlled Choice School Desegregation Plan that has been in place for the past eleven and a half years.

"Before we were cited by the state and got involved in court action, we decided to get involved in forming a program acceptable to all members of the city," says Albert Giroux, director of public information for Cambridge's public schools.

"We basically tried to balance out the schools," Giroux says. "As population changed, we have more and more minority students."

Policy makers saw school choice as a way to accomplish the task of balancing, while adding value and pleasing customers.

"The one thing that parents kept saying was that they wanted to choose the school that their children were attending," says Eileen Bacci, registrar of the Cambridge schools.

During the years of 1977 and 1978, parents had the opportunity to do just that. Community-based committees of parents and staff members brainstormed ideas for the citywide desegregation plan, channeling their proposals to a citywide planning committee directed by the Director of Elementary Education, now Superintendent Mary Lou McGrath.

"We had two years of meetings...One benefit was that we were watching Boston, along with the rest of the nation, and knew how not to do it," says Bacci, a life-long resident of East Cambridge who served as a representative for Harrington School during the planning years.

The controlled choice plan that resulted included city funding for transportation of students to schools outside their neighborhoods.

At the beginning, school choice depended on availability of space in the school and on the impact the move had on the racial balance of the institutions involved.

School Choice Today

After a period in the 1980s of redistricting and emphasis on neighborhood schools, Cambridge arrived at the current plan, whereby each student and his or her parents would chose at least three of the 14 schools, in consultation with the Parent Information Office and parent coordinators who staff each school.

Students get their choices depending on the impact on racial balance of the schools of choice, the space available, the presence of siblings and the location of the school in relation to the child's home.

School officials say that roughly 10 per-cent of students are assigned to schools they don't choose, and they say that is evidence of the success of the system.

"My experience has been that there is a good amount of people who get into their first choice school," says Harrington School parent liaison Donna M. Sousa.