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From Open Enrollment to Controlled Choice: How Choice-Based Assignment Replaced the Neighborhood School in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2019

Hilary J. Moss
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Abstract

In 1981, Cambridge, Massachusetts, became the first school district in America to replace its neighborhood schools with a “controlled choice” assignment plan, which considered parental preference and racial balance. This article considers the history preceding this decision to explore how and why some Americans became enamored with choice-based assignment at the expense of the neighborhood school in the late twentieth century. It argues that Cambridge's problematic experience with open enrollment in the 1960s and 1970s created a vocal, consumer-oriented, and politically active class of parents who became accustomed to choice and, by the early 1980s, dependent on its benefits. Moreover, controlled choice proved especially attractive in this university community because Cambridge had a constituency of well-educated, middle-income parents who possessed the social capital to identify the best educational opportunities for their children, but lacked the economic capital to use real estate to gain access to their preferred schools.

Keywords

neighborhood schoolcontrolled choicenorthern school desegregationopen enrollmentCambridgeMassachusettsschool choice
Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 313 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © History of Education Society 2019 

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References

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117 Willie and Alves note that, “it is the ‘forced choice’ dimension of policy that gives controlled choice its existential power. Just as parents must think about why they should enroll their children in certain schools, each school must face the question of how to become more attractive to students on a desegregative basis.” Alves and Willie, “Controlled Choice Assignments,” 79.

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121 Peterkin, Robert S. and Jones, Dorothy S., “Schools of Choice in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” in Public Schools by Choice: Expanding Opportunities for Parents, Students, and Teachers, ed. Nathan, Joe (St. Paul, MN: Institute for Teaching and Learning, 1989), 136–37Google Scholar.

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123 Gia Kim, “Cambridge Schools Fail to Achieve Racial Balance,” Harvard Crimson, Feb. 18, 1992, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1992/2/18/cambridge-schools-fail-to-achieve-racial/.

124 “Educational Choice Success,” Oct. 11, 1988, White House Workshop on Choice folder, box 4, John Klenk Files, 1988–1989, White House Staff and Office Inventories, 1981–1989, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA.

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126 Scott S. Greenberger, “Cambridge Eyes Income, Not Race, for Desegregation,” Boston Sunday Globe, Dec. 16, 2001, 1.

127 Richard, Alan, “Cambridge Becomes Latest District to Integrate by Income,” Education Week 21, no. 16 (Jan. 9, 2002), 11Google Scholar. For a thorough evaluation of Cambridge's decision to implement socioeconomic integration, along with the implications of this policy, see Kahlenberg, All Together Now.

128 Tracy Jan, “An Imbalance Grows in Cambridge Schools,” Boston Globe, July 23, 2007, 1.

129 Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, xxiii.

130 On Boston's busing crisis see, for example, Lukas, J. Anthony, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York: Vintage Books, 1986)Google Scholar; Delmont, Matthew and Theoharis, Jeanne, eds., “Rethinking the Boston ‘Busing Crisis’ Special Section,” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 2 (March 2017), 191–293CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Formisano, Ronald P., Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On “busing” in the American imagination, see Delmont, Matthew F., Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

131 Gary Orfield, “Forward,” in Jennifer B. Ayscue and Slyssa Greenberg with John Kucsera and Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, “Losing Ground: School Segregation in Massachusetts,” (Los Angeles: The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, May 2013), vi-vii, https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/losing-ground-school-segregation-in-massachusetts.

132 On contemporary urban experiments with choice and re-segregation see, for example, Dana Goldstein, “San Francisco, A Hard Lesson on Integration,” New York Times, April 25, 2019, 1; Michelle Chen, “New York's Separate and Unequal Schools,” The Nation, Feb. 20, 2018, https://www.thenation.com/article/new-yorks-separate-and-unequal-schools/; and The Century Foundation, “The Benefits of Socioeconomically and Racially Integrated Schools and Classrooms,” April 29, 2019, https://tcf.org/content/facts/the-benefits-of-socioeconomically-and-racially-integrated-schools-and-classrooms/.