CAMBRIDGE - In one corner of the classroom, two students, ages 4 and 5, knelt on a rug and learned to add and multiply by playing a game with glass beads. Across the room, a 3-year-old scrubbed a plastic dolphin in a basin filled with water she had poured herself, taking care to mop a small spill on the floor.
Welcome to "casa di bambini" in the Tobin Montessori School, a public school where teachers refer to students as "friends," classical music plays softly in the background, and children are free to draw, read, or serve their own snacks. There are no rows of desks, no blackboard, no teacher standing in the front of the classroom - in fact, there is no front of the classroom.
Montessori education, a discovery-based method long popular in private schools, will soon become an option for parents through the Boston public schools, part of a national trend by public systems to adopt the approach as a way of enticing middle-class families into urban schools.
Cambridge opened the Tobin Montessori last fall. Springfield just added its second public Montessori. And Boston's new superintendent, Carol Johnson, would like to open to two Montessori schools by fall 2009.
"While I don't expect all of our schools to be Montessori schools, I do think there are parents who would choose the Boston Public Schools if Montessori were available to them," said Johnson, whose first principalship was at a public Montessori school in Minneapolis.
But it's not as simple as tacking Montessori to a school's name. Public schools have struggled to meld the method, which discourages grades and testing, with federally mandated standardized testing.
In Cambridge, the Tobin School routinely landed at the bottom among parents' school choices before it opened its Montessori program for 3- to 6-year-olds. Enrollment had dipped in recent years, and so had test scores, said its principal, Paulette Jones.
And even though the school is located in a West Cambridge neighborhood near Fresh Pond, most middle-class families in the area chose to send their children to schools in other parts of the city. Nearly 60 percent of students enrolled at Tobin were from low-income families.
Following the Montessori conversion, the school is now the No. 1 choice in the city among families with preschool-aged children, Jones said, and it has a waiting list of 60 students. The school will expand the Montessori program each year until students reach the eighth grade.
Kristen Jackson, a former teacher, said she wanted her 3-year-old son to receive a specialized education that she did not think public schools could offer. She was determined to enroll him in a private preschool but jumped at the public Montessori opportunity last year. Now, she says she is the envy of parents in her North Cambridge neighborhood.
"All my neighbors are like, 'You're so lucky you got in,' " said Jackson, who marvels at the independence and confidence her son has gained at school. He can write his name, dress himself, and is no longer shy about approaching older children at the park.
"We now have more middle and upper-middle class parents, particularly white parents, who have gotten the word and want their kids in," said Jones, who fears losing the diversity that Montessori had brought as more affluent, white parents are drawn to the school.
Tobin's parent liaison, in turn, is knocking on the doors of housing projects to draw a wider interest from low-income families who may never have heard of Montessori, named for an Italian physician a century ago who worked with destitute children, and who would not otherwise have access to this type of education; private Montessori schools cost between $7,000 and $17,000 a year.
Springfield has longer experience with Montessori. Nine years ago, a Montessori conversion transformed the Alfred G. Zanetti School in Springfield, the first Massachusetts school system to create a Montessori school.
Once one of the worst-performing schools in the city, it was nearly shut down. Nearly all of the students at the predominantly black and Hispanic school came from low-income families.
But test scores rose slowly after the first four years. The school's racial and ethnic demographics now better reflect the city: approximately 50 percent Hispanic, 30 percent African-American, and 20 percent white, said principal Sandra Wyner Andrew. More middle-class families began choosing the school, making its population of low-income students drop from 98 percent to 66 percent, she said. And student attendance and parent involvement have spiked.
But as more public school systems move to create Montessori schools, specialists warn them to proceed with caution. It takes teacher commitment and rigorous training to truly adhere to the Montessori philosophy, something that not all teachers unions readily embrace, said Bonnie LaMothe, director of the New England Montessori Teacher Education Center in Goffstown, N.H.
"There's a big difference between convenient Montessori and authentic Montessori," LaMothe said. "Convenient Montessori is whatever sells."
The Holliston public schools created a Montessori program in 1979, but it became difficult to stay true to the philosophy while following the mandates of education reform, with its emphasis on standardized testing, said Tim Cornely, assistant superintendent. So the district scaled back its program, working to transition students to traditional schooling by the fifth grade.
Public Montessori schools became popular in the late 1970s in large part because of desegregation efforts. Urban systems typically opened the schools in depressed neighborhoods in hopes of attracting higher-income families, said Dennis Schapiro, editor of Public School Montessorian in Minneapolis.
Research comparing Montessori students in Milwaukee public schools with those enrolled in regular public schools showed that the Montessori children performed better on standardized tests in reading and math, had better social skills, and showed more concern for fairness and justice.
Johnson said she wants to start sending teachers to training this spring and to visit public Montessori schools. She has not determined which Boston schools would be converted.
Several Boston parents with young children said they would consider staying in the city if a public Montessori school were available.
"I'm all for it, but one is just not sufficient if we're thinking about fight or flight here in Boston," said Kristina Cherniahivsky, a Jamaica Plain mother of 3- and 5-year-old boys. "Everyone's going to want it so the chances of me getting in is like a drip in the bathtub."
Tracy Jan can be reached at tjan@globe.com.
