The second most frequently mentioned issue in the election has been the quality of the city’s middle grade education—a debate that has divided district leaders for decades.

Because Cambridge has no standalone middle schools, most students attend sixth, seventh, and eighth grades at one of the city’s 11 K-8 schools.

Critics of the current K-8 system contend that educational programs at each school vary in quality, which is in part due to an imbalanced distribution of students across the district.

Parents, teachers, and administrators have complained that the city’s smaller schools—some of which have no more than 50 pupils in a single grade—have created socially isolating environments for students and staffing challenges for faculty.

These issues were formally examined for the first time in the 2007 Blue Ribbon Commission, which called on the superintendent to propose specific solutions to settle the middle school debate.

This process was delayed by the sudden departure of then-Superintendent Thomas D. Fowler-Finn and the school committee’s resolution to table any decision-making about the issue until his successor was selected.

Current Superintendent Jeffrey M. Young, who was elected last spring, had originally committed to presenting concrete proposals to address the concern by October, but he announced last month that this would not be possible. He has since promised to solve the issue once and for all by April 2010, which leaves the fate of Cambridge’s middle school education in the hands of the newly-elected school committee.

Grassi, who co-chaired the Blue Ribbon Commission, said that the middle school debate is “the biggest issue the school committee is going to have over the next term.”

Indeed, all of the other candidates who are currently on the committee said they agree that the problem warrants ongoing discussion.

But Stead, Steinert, and Turkel, none of whom sit on the committee now, said they believe that concern about the middle grades is largely a non-issue.

Turkel said that the established K-8 system “reduces pressure to grow up too soon” and “allows for the continuity of relationships between students and faculty,” as well as “between families and school personnel.”

CONTROLLED CHOICE

Many candidates have also listed Cambridge’s Controlled Choice Policy as one of the primary concerns in their platforms.

Controlled choice, the city’s method of assigning kindergarten students to elementary schools, was initially established to create racially-balanced student populations but was later revised to address socioeconomic diversity.

The program currently allows parents to submit a ranked list of preferred schools but ultimately uses an algorithm to place students according to set demographic ratios.