The Brave New World of the Cambridge School System

The Cambridge Chronicle continues its brilliant coverage of Cambridge with this gem: Schools change diversity quotas :

The article commences in a breathless tone:

The Cambridge School Committee recently made drastic[my emphasis, CC] changes to a system originally meant to desegregate the city’s schools in the 1980s.

Gee, I wondered, what "drastic changes " could have put our Chroniclette in such a fret. Could you suppose that the dolts on the School Committee finally decided to scrap their Orwellian "Controlled Choice" program, whereby pupils are assigned to schools on the basis of race and class.

No way!

This was the "drastic" change:

....the School Committee unanimously supported a plan to change the Controlled Choice formula, which assigns students to schools based on a formula of 55 percent wealthy or middle-class students to 45 percent poor students, with a flexibility of 15 percent at each kindergarten.

Schools can adjust the student population for the ratio of poor to rich students by 15 percent in either direction under the new plan. The previous plan only allowed a 10 percent adjustment.

So this was the tweak that put the Chronicle in a twitter!

Once again, a foolish policy covered by a fatuous media.