Boston has several elite high schools where admission is determined by test scores. The most famous is the Boston Latin School. The Boston school board debated the admissions policy at length and voted unanimously to change it, to open the way for less advantaged students.
The Boston School Committee on Wednesday night unanimously approved the biggest overhaul of the city’s exam school admission process in more than two decades, adopting a new system that should give disadvantaged students a better chance of getting in…
The effort to change the admission requirements had generated heated debate among parents and a backlash over last-minute political meddling that initially influenced the proposal presented to the School Committee two weeks ago.
Hours before the meeting started Wednesday, Superintendent Brenda Cassellius stepped into the fray, releasing final recommendations that rejected a politically influenced measure reluctantly advanced by a task force that would have reserved 20 percent of all seats to students with the highest ranking composite scores citywide. The remainder would have been allocated in rank order within tiers based on geography and socioeconomic factors.
Instead, Cassellius favored the task force’s original desire to allocate all seats for Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the O’Bryant School of Math and Science through eight tiers based on census tracts. The approach would group together qualified applicants from areas of the city with similar socioeconomic characteristics in an effort to reduce the likelihood that a low-income applicant would compete against an affluent one.
The task force abruptly abandoned the measure at their final meeting two weeks ago after its cochairs warned that they were under political pressure to create the 20 percent set-aside for students with the highest composite scores citywide and that the consequences of not doing so could be severe for the school system.
The political interference created a backlash among many parents and advocates who pushed to get rid of the 20 percent set-aside, while other parents advocated for a citywide competition for all seats. Cassellius said the backlash factored into her decision to drop the set-aside in an effort to restore public trust in the process.
”What is being considered tonight, I believe to be a huge step forward for our students, especially our students who have not been able to access our exam schools through no fault of their own,” Cassellius told the School Committee as she introduced the final recommendations. “While some of us might wish for a sweeping mandate that would dismantle, you know, ages of privilege and create equitable opportunity with one vote of the School Committee . . . I also know that holding out for a perfect solution could possibly lose this moment.”
The new admission policy replaces a far simpler process that has been used for more than two decades and allocated seats to applicants citywide in rank order based on an equal weighting of their grades and entrance exam scores.
Under the new policy, grades will carry greater weight, comprising 70 percent of the composite score for admission and an entrance exam will make up 30 percent. The entrance exam will be suspended again this fall for those seeking admission for fall 2022 due to disruptions caused by the pandemic, and only this upcoming school year’s grades will be used.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Oh, the humanity!
We are just a hop skip and jump from communism. E communus unum
Unfortunately, the debates about exam schools usually avoid facing, much less addressing, the central problem of inequity in both students lives and in how schools are structured and funded. Maybe there is discussion worth having about the best way to address the needs of kids who are extraordinary. Having well educated and well off parents is not the criteria for extraordinary intellect. That’s just luck of birth. So, the exam school debate is more about how to allocate access artificially scare resources in a horribly inequitable system.
Agree. Selective exam schools are a teeny bandaid on an inequitable public school system, just like charters. The intent sounds great: a way up and out for gifted but disadvantaged students. Similar to the argument for charters. Both hiding other agendas. I lived in NYC for a couple of decades. Among my middle/ upper-middle-class friends, the magnet schools (and open enrollment in general) were all about retaining middle&up-class families with kids as NYC residents. It’s what kept them from moving to the suburbs. Proof of the pudding can be seen in demographics of most selective high schools. Charters (dominated as they are by Success Academy) are a bit different: offering generally smaller classes, and imposing a strict order on behavior; they seem [perhaps are] ‘safer’ options for lower-mid/ working-class/ POC compared to zone schools.
I was a baby boomer subjected to “tracking” in the ‘60’s. It was a way of dealing with way-too-big classes. Magnets, open enrollment & charters strike me the same way– not always about way-too-big classes, but about allowing some to escape a lower quality of ed for the majority.
Those in charge stoke this debate purposefully as an excuse not to address the central problems.
HOORAY for Boston School Board!!
“through eight tiers based on census tracts. The approach would group together qualified applicants from areas of the city with similar socioeconomic characteristics in an effort to reduce the likelihood that a low-income applicant would compete against an affluent one.”
Does that mean they divide the district into 8 equal parts by population, and take the same amount of students from each area? This seems like a good idea. I would call it geographic affirmative action.
If they have the students ranked on economic status or race, they could divide prorata on that basis, depending on how accurate that data would actually be.
“based on an equal weighting of their grades and entrance exam scores.
Under the new policy, grades will carry greater weight, comprising 70 percent of the composite score for admission and an entrance exam will make up 30 percent.”
So 50-50 grades and exam to 70-30. Sounds reasonable.
Now they’re only thirty percentage points away from making the entrance exam count for the right percentage. The pandemic percentage is the right percentage, zero. Getting better.
Why would increasing the weight of GPA help the disadvantaged student who struggles with test taking. GPA and test scores typically have a very strong correlation. If anything we tend to see the smart but less motivated student who has test scores that far exceed GPA. and rarely the other way around.
Don’t mistake rationalizations for reasoning.
Boston Latin School is so selective that the only students who get accepted will be those who have elite GPAs and elite test scores. This is all for show and is inherently racist to boot. If i were a Black parent, I would reject the notion that my kid was not smart enough or prepared enough to compete against Asians or whites.
They fiddled with a similar plan in NYC when the city was proposing to scrap the SHSAT with a hybrid of state exam scores and GPA, with a cap on the number of students who could attend from any one school (a de facto throttle on the number of white and Asian students). The proposal slightly overweighted GPA over test scores, not because of some principle, but because that was the weighting that got the demographic projections where they wanted them. That’s all that’s going on here: running models and tweaking inputs and weighting until the projected demographic output is acceptable.
Lake Wobegon Syndrome
RageAgainstTheEdu-Meddlers,
If I were a parent at an exam school, I would reject the notion that my kid is not as good as any students at that school who got higher exam scores, but is superior to all the students at the exam schools who got lower exam scores.
If I were a parent at an exam school, I would not support my kid being banned from all higher level classes at that school unless my kid had one of the top 20% exam scores, because i would not agree with RageAgaionstTheEdu-Meddlers that the students at exam schools with lower exam scores are so inferior to the students with higher exam scores that they should not be in any of the same classes.
The absurdity that a test score is absolutely important — right up to the second that a student gets into the school – is laughable.
I think those exam schools should simply call parents’ bluff. Ban all but the students with the top 25% exam scores from all advanced and honors classes for 4 years.
According to Rage’s argument, exam schools should be using the 8th grade exam score — and only the 8th grade exam score — to identify those students worthy of being in higher level classes at exam schools and those who will be forbidden from taking them.
It’s actually the 6th grade score. The 3 exam schools serve grades 7-12.
Thanks, Christine, I didn’t realize those schools started early in Boston.
There’s an entire test prep industry that has grown up in Boston specifically for the test previously used, the ISEE. Its clients spend thousands of dollars in pursuit of any tiny edge in score.
Then, there’s an entire, much larger group of parents who have no idea that such resources exist, nor do they have $5 to spare to do so.
If test prep can raise your score, then it isn’t about academic ability or excellence, is it?
To go back to the ISEE for a moment, its owner, the Educational Records Bureau, notified the Boston Public Schools that its test had not been validated for our school age population. Nor was there any correlation between the materials on the exam and the curriculum taught in our schools. Instead, it was based on curriculum commonly used in private and parochial schools. Nonetheless, BPS continued to use the test until ERB refused to provide it any longer.
This fact has been somewhat overlooked because covid precluded administration of the exam last school year.
I really feel as if this is an easy solve. Just require a baseline score on those exams that demonstrates the ability to handle the work, with all scores over that treated equally. There might be 5,000 or 10,000 students who could get that score or even more. There would not be a set limit.
A student might prep a little, but there would not be the same need to prep if the point of the exam was just a baseline score that students who are academically inclined should be able to easily meet without prepping.
And no trick questions. I never understood the point of that. The test is supposed to demonstrate whether students can comprehend reading passages or have a basic level of mathematical understanding. It should be a very straightforward exam. It would weed out the students who struggle academically, but not weed out students who don’t with unnecessarily tricky or ambiguous questions.
If half or 75% of the students who take it “pass”, that’s great. At that point, the results are thrown out and either a lottery or GPA comes into play.
Using elementary (3 – 6?) grades for selection to the three Boston (7 to 12) exam schools sounds like a complete crapshoot, and one that can be even more easily gamed by parents. They need policies to help the legions of “late” (12+ yo) bloomers as much as the disadvantaged.
It’s like picking college baseball players based on their t-ball stats.
I assume there’s a little more to the selection process beyond academically pigeonholing 11 year old children.
The notion that grades are less game-able than standardized tests is just silly.
Well, yes; here’s an example: of the 69 students who applied from one religious school for exam school admission, 61 had GPA’s of A+.
Within our public schools, such a number would raise red flags about the school, the principal and the teachers. That information is public.
Also, student success once admitted to an exam school is easily tracked and can be correlated to previous achievement or lack thereof.
It’s important to always remember that standardized tests have their roots in eugenics. They were and are designed to define what is “standard” — wink, wink. There are many examples of where people of non-standard cultures, nationalities, and home languages are thrown by the tests. I always remember an SAT question about the word ‘porcelain’ for which wealthy students got it right because they defined the word as fine chinaware, and poor students got it wrong because they defined it as a toilet bowl. Grades are better. They are better predictors because they include a much more comprehensive combination of knowledge and effort. They are better because teachers know their students better than testing companies and can assess their students without so many cultural and language biases. They are better because teachers don’t have to purposefully throw in nonsense questions to make sure that the desired number of test takers miss perfect scores. And they are better because, well, Señor Dwayne Swacker can fill you in, if he wishes, on whether the tests are accurate. They’re not.
Test scores correlate with grades, but too loosely to make test scores matter for individuals. Good tests only get an idea of how large groups of students are doing when the statistical sample size is large enough.
This is the outcome of some five years of struggle to dismantle the so-called meritocracy identified by standardized tests. In October 2020, scholar and Professor Ibram X. Kendi, recently named founder of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research testified before the Boston School Committee on the effect of standrdized testing as a gatekeeper to these schools:
Why do Black and Latinx children routinely get lower scores on the standardized tests? Either there’s something wrong with the test takers or there’s something wrong with the tests. Why are Black and Latinx children routinely under-represented in the exam schools? Either there’s something wrong with the Black and Latinx children or there’s something wrong with Boston’s admissions policies. To say there’s something wrong with Black and Latinx children is to say racist ideas. And those who say racist ideas, typically deny their ideas are racist.
It’s well worth your time to read all of his testimony.
https://www.bosedequity.org/blog/read-ibram-x-kendis-testimony-in-support-of-the-working-group-recommendation-to-suspendthetest
The Superintendent, Brenda Cassellius, is on record stating that she wants to move Boston towards becoming an anti-racist district.
The Exam School Task Force volunteered more than 100 hours of their time in this attempt to set a new course. The co-chairs were Michael Contompasis, former Headmaster of Boston Latin School and a former Boston superintendent; and Tanisha Sullivan, head of the Boston chapter of the NAACP. Other committee members were heads of the exam schools, parents and students. The hours of public comment they heard was overwhelmingly in favor of changing admissions policy.
But a group which calls itself Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence https://bpcae.com/home
has entered the fray to threaten a lawsuit. According to dark money expert Maurice Cunningham of UMass Boston, their funding comes from the Cato Institute and their fellow travelers are the Walton-funded Parents Defending Education, which seeks to become the Project Veritas for public education. https://defendinged.org
BPCAE has worked at creating an alliance between White and Asian parents against Black and Latinx parents to oppose these modifications. However, their efforts have been complicated by public advocacy for the new policy by the president of the Boston Teachers Union, Jessica Tang; Sung Joon Pai, a parent, teacher, and principal; and Rosann Tung, parent and educational researcher. All three identify as AAPI and have made it clear that Boston’s Asian community is no monolith while rejecting this attempt at division.
We’ve got a long way to go on this, but a paradigm shift is a process, not an event.
Prof. Kendi provides an overly simplistic strawman argument by suggesting that there is either something “wrong” with the tests or something “wrong” with the Black and Hispanic students taking them.
Then he claims if you think that there is nothing “wrong” with an objective standardized math test, then you must be a racist. Seriously?
Blacks make up 13+% of the US population, yet are under represented in medicine (5%), science and engineering (5%) teaching (7%) and in orchestras (2%). Is there something “wrong” with Blacks or is there something “wrong” with the systems?
The explanation is much more complicated than Kendi claims as he ignores the many variables that potentially limit academic success:
cultural priorities, generational poverty, dysfunctional single parent families, undereducated parents, chronic absenteeism, drug and alcohol abuse, generational dependence.
Kendi would bet better off putting his efforts and considerable intellect into figuring out how to prevent nearly 8 out of 10 Black children in our inner cities from growing up without a father.
This is the problem with anti-racism generally. Every policy, every action, is either racist or anti-racist, depending on whether it results in racial disparities. No policy or action is “not racist.” It’s a tyrannical logic.
Here is a proposal by Kendi for how to fix inequality. It is totalitarian and insane.
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/
“Kendi would bet better off putting his efforts and considerable intellect into figuring out how to prevent nearly 8 out of 10 Black children in our inner cities from growing up without a father.”
Yep, there it is.
“Kendi would bet better off putting his efforts and considerable intellect into figuring out how to prevent nearly 8 out of 10 Black children in our inner cities from growing up without a father.”
Hello???
Um, how about that Kendi has already found the answer to this — RACISM!
What does that mean “growing up without a father”? Are they dead because of the effects of poverty? Imprisoned for much longer sentences than whites?
Obama grew up without a father. But he didn’t live in abject poverty. LeBron James grew up without a father, but he escaped that poverty on sheer talent and work ethic to hone that talent into something that provided financial rewards.
Is it proven that children of lesbian moms will likely live in poverty because they suffer from “growing up without a father”?
Growing up without a father is not nearly the problem as growing up ravaged by poverty and a society that expects children to lift themselves by their own bootstraps, unless they are rich and privileged in which case they should be coddled and standards lowered so they can get into their “father’s” alma mater, or at least the college their father donated so much money to.
This conversation actually demonstrates that Kendi has a point.
I am too late to the discussion to be read, but just had to plug in a contribution (for posterity 😉 )
The point about growing up without fathers is not a contradiction of Kendi.
These four stats paint the picture:
23% of US children are raised in single-parent households [we lead world in that statistic]. Single-parent households are 4x as likely overall to be led by women than men– but 8x more likely among Blacks. Single mother-led households are 4x more likely to be in economic crisis then single father-led households.
We can infer effects on ed outcomes; virtually all stats tie economics of household to ed achievement.
Sure, racism is at base (who could argue that?)– mainly institutional racism via long practices/ norms/ laws. I don’t agree that Kendi should spend his energy on examining how to change those factors. Plenty of other folks are doing that. Kendi has chosen to stake out one corner: changing the conscious & unconscious attitudes of children through education. I expect there’s some merit to it, but I don’t like his methods. I think the approach in general is too abstract for children, and inevitably in practice falls into the trap of being taken personally. That’s due to his philosophical underpinnings which to me are binary and unproductive [as in you will not change minds this way], i.e., you’re either a racist or an anti-racist.
“I think [Kendi’s] approach in general is too abstract for children, and inevitably in practice falls into the trap of being taken personally.”
Precisely the problem.
And if you were to expand on, “personally”, the picture gets even darker and completely counterproductive. Adults have spent far to much psychological capital in the form of angst and anxiety on our children. Nothing was worse than the “school shooter” panic post Lakeland. To whit, the number of mass shooting in New York State schools in the last 100 years: 0