The office of Thomas Fowler-Finn, superintendent of Cambridge Public Schools, sent a letter to thousands of families this January, touting the district’s high school while portraying the charter school as limited in scope and poorly organized.

While most Cantabrigians agree that the city’s public schools need improvement, they have found themselves polarized by a new charter school that will offer an alternative to the current system.

The Community Charter School of Cambridge (CCSC) will open its doors this August to 180 7th and 8th grade students, including 150 from Cambridge.

The school plans to eventually double in size to accommodate both middle and high school students.

A charter school is a public school—it receives a charter from the state and funding from taxpayers—meaning students must meet state educational requirements.

But charter schools operate outside local school districts, developing their

own curricula and making their own own curricula and making their own personnel and budget decisions.

Administrators at CCSC say their students will be able to thrive in a more personalized environment, with close advising and a low student-teacher ratio, in contrast to the large, academically struggling Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS), which is located just blocks from Harvard Yard.

But prominent Cambridge officials say they doubt the school will be any better than traditional public schools, and accuse CCSC of draining funds from the school district.

Further complicating the matter is the background of the principal of CCSC, Paula M. Evans, who resigned from her post as principal of CRLS in 2001 after a brief but controversial tenure.

Despite the contention surrounding the school—and the fact that the fledgling institution still has no building or full faculty—the administrators insist that, come August, school will be in session.

THE LEARNING CURVE

CCSC administrators say a major benefit of the charter school will be its intimate learning environment.

Students at CCSC will have daily “advisory” meetings with teachers. In addition, the school will not divide students into courses by academic performance, a practice known as “tracking.” Rather than stratify the student body, students of all ability levels will share a uniform curriculum.

“We know that in schools that are tracked, kids in the lower tracks get less and do less than kids in the higher tracks,” says Evans.

Taking this egalitarian principle one step further, classes will be project-based and students will be judged on individual learning over the course of the project.

How students of different abilities will be assessed has not yet been conclusively determined, Evans says.

Students at CCSC will also be required to complete a 100-hour internship in their junior or senior years, an ambitious program that would be impossible at a larger school with more scheduling restrictions, according to CCSC associate principal Emma Stellman, also a former CRLS faculty member.

But the personal attention of CCSC comes at a price.

“One of the challenges of a small school is you give up the multitude of [academic] options a large school has,” Stellman says.

“We’re not going to have the myriad clubs and sports teams,” Evans adds. “If you’re headed to the NBA, you might not want to come [to CCSC].”

This admitted shortcoming is one of the central issues behind the official opposition to the charter school.

In a letter sent to thousands of families in January, the Cambridge school district touted CRLS’s facilities and extracurricular activities, contrasting them with what they considered to be CCSC’s vague and smaller-scale promises.

“Small charter schools find it nearly impossible to offer the same depth and breadth of course selections,” the letter read.

The letter also alleged that CCSC had approached Harvard and MIT seeking an educational partnership, only to be rebuffed.

But Evans disputes this claim, saying, “We never asked for the University’s endorsement, nor would we expect it.”

Mary H. Power, Harvard’s senior director for community relations, acknowledges that the University has communicated with CCSC. However, she characterizes the talks as “information-sharing,” rather than containing any concrete proposals.

“We were interested in hearing, and [CCSC] was interested in talking,” Power said.

But the CCSC charter specifically anticipated a relationship with Harvard, based around the College Opportunity And Career Help program (COACH), a mentor program run through the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) to prepare high school students for college.

Larsen Professor of Public Policy Christopher Avery, who founded COACH, says the program would not even consider working with CCSC until the school expands to accept high school juniors and seniors.

But before CCSC can expand to take older students, basic planning for this year has to be completed.

In fact, CCSC has no building, no chairs, an incomplete faculty, and an undetermined curriculum, although Stellman says she is optimistic that a lease in Kendall Square will be negotiated soon, and that faculty hiring and planning will follow soon afterward.

PASSING THE TEST

Another argument for the necessity of the charter school is the widely reported poor student performance in the Cambridge school district.

At a presentation at the Kennedy/Longfellow School last Wednesday, Cambridge Public School District Superintendent Thomas Fowler-Finn said Cambridge schools ranked 311th out of the 373 Massachusetts school districts—a list that includes both districts and individual charter schools—on the statewide MCAS exams required for high school graduation.

Moreover, Cambridge schools spend more per pupil—about $15,000—than the vast majority of public schools in the state, which average around $9,000 per student.

But while Fowler-Finn admits that MCAS scores need improvement, he disputes claims that the school district is underperforming and cost-inefficient.

He says that student-faculty ratios in Cambridge are low and that the top half of students at CRLS are high achievers on the SAT. Part of the high cost, Fowler-Finn says, goes toward kindergarten and special education—which are not guaranteed at other Massachusetts schools.

MULTIPLE CHOICE

In addition to defending the education available in the school district, local officials say they do not believe charter schools offer a solution to public education’s problems.

But two Harvard experts on public education say the main claims of city officials are not supported by current research.

Contrary to Fowler-Finn’s assertion, Professor of Economics Caroline M. Hoxby ’88, whose research focuses on economics and education, says studies show that charter schools significantly outperform local district schools once they have been up and running for three to four years.

She adds that at charter schools established for more than six years, scores are more than 10 percent higher than those in the district.

Fowler-Finn’s other main critique of charter schools--—that they divert funding from the school district—is shared by Cambridge Mayor Michael A. Sullivan, who chairs the School Committee.

Sullivan says that if all the students that leave the school district to attend the charter school came from only one school, then the city would be able to save money by cutting back on teachers and utilities. But as the students will be drawn in “dribs and drabs” from 12 elementary and middle schools, he says it is unlikely that any one school will lose enough students to make cost-saving teacher cutbacks possible.

However, Shattuck Professor of Government Paul E. Peterson, who is the Director of the Program on Education Policy at KSG, says such claims are specious.

“This is one of those claims that is always made that I think has the least merit,” Peterson says. “All the money is doing is following the child. If you don’t have the student, you don’t need the money.”

Peterson says the belief that the district will suffer disproportionate losses is based on the false assumption that the school cannot adjust its expenditures to reflect the changing number of students in the district.

“[Fowler-Finn] basically is saying that most of his costs are fixed. This is not true. Most of your costs are personnel costs,” Peterson says. “The percentage of children leaving the district to go to charter schools is a trivial number compared to the changes in demography every year.”

PRINCIPAL CONCERNS

Both critics and supporters of the new school admit that Evans’ history as principal of CRLS from 1999 through 2001 has added a personal element to the debate.

“There are some underlying issues...regarding the conditions under which she both ran the school and left it,” Sullivan says of Evans’ leadership at CRLS. “In some cases, it is described as disarray.”

During her administration, Evans attempted far-reaching changes to CRLS. One such reform was the abolishment of the traditional house system. Students used to choose a smaller community in which they took most of their classes.

Evans saw the house system as a place where de facto segregation along ethnic and economic lines prevailed.

In place of the houses, Evans created schools within CRLS, academic communities to which students would be assigned in order to create a racial and socioeconomic balance.

But the plan to eliminate parental choice in school assignments—one of the key parts of Evans’ restructuring—was very nearly overturned by the School Committee in 2000.

In a 2003 essay on her tenure at CRLS published in the magazine Phi Delta Kappan, Evans cited this battle with the School Committee—in addition to other actions that she deemed “micromanagement”—as “the last straw,” after which it was impossible for her to continue as principal.

While Evans’ proposals had aroused controversy, her detractors say that her resignation effectively abandoned CRLS in a sea of half-finished reforms.

In 2003, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges placed CRLS on probation, citing flaws in leadership, organization, and vision. Once on probation, a school that is found unsatisfactory can ultimately lose its accreditation.

Fowler-Finn blames Evans for the probationary period.

“Cambridge Rindge and Latin went on probation when Paula Evans did all the paperwork,” he says.

And while Fowler-Finn has indicated that CRLS is likely to have its probation lifted later this year, a sense of betrayal lingers.

But Evans defends her tenure at CRLS, even as she prepares to open CCSC.

“When I was at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, I made important connections with students, and parents, and some faculty,” Evans says. “Every single one of them knows I was committed to those students.”

—Staff writer Brendan R. Linn can be reached at blinn@fas.harvard.edu. —Staff writer Alan J. Tabak can be reached at tabak@fas.harvard.edu.