‘Equitable and fair': BPS leaders weigh significant changes to exam school admissions policy

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Any change would require a vote by the board and would come about five years after the district completely overhauled admissions to the three schools: Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the John D. O'Bryant School of Math and Science. Tuesday's presentation
will lay out a timeline of community engagement throughout the summer followed by a potential superintendent recommendation and committee vote in the fall.
The current policy was intended to make the exam schools more demographically similar to the city's schools as a whole. The three schools had long enrolled larger proportions of white, Asian, and non-low income students than the rest of the district.
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'The exam school admissions policies have been largely successful at making the student body at the exam schools more representative of our communities geographically, [in] racial and ethnic diversity and [in] socioeconomic background,' Mayor Michelle Wu said in an interview Tuesday, prior to the meeting.
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But the policy has also resulted in large disparities in admission rate based on where students live in the city, she said. Some years, there were 100 percent admission rates in certain neighborhoods and less than 50 percent admission rates in others. The simulations outline potential policies that would preserve the socioeconomic tiers but ensure all students have a chance at an exam school seat, regardless of where they live or go to elementary school, Wu said.
'Every policy within BPS, we have to look at to make sure it's equitable and it's fair,' Superintendent Mary Skipper said. 'We want all students to see themselves in the exam schools.'
The review
of the exam school admissions policy
comes a month after the Trump administration
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'We're aware of many lawsuits at this point that are happening around selective schools and in process,' Skipper said. 'This was in the courts [and] it came out that the process we've used at the time was considered valid.'
The Supreme Court last year
Under the district's current policy,
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Applicants receive a composite score out of 100 based on their grades and entrance exam scores. Students can get 15 bonus points if they live in public housing, are homeless, or are in foster care, or a varying number of points if they attend schools where at least 40 percent of students are low-income. The school-based bonus points vary by tier from two points to 10.
As part of the review, the district found bonus points have not had a significant impact on invitations, Skipper said, as most applicants attend BPS schools that get bonus points. All the simulations prepared for Tuesday's meeting eliminated the bonus points.
Skipper said district staff would analyze versions with the bonus points in the future if the School Committee
requests it, but they found the points make the policy more confusing, create a sense of competition between schools. They also have even created unattainable admissions cutoffs in some cases for students without bonus points.
The idea of scaling the tiers by number of applicants, rather than the number of eligible students, is a frequent demand from some parents. The most affluent tiers have historically had the most applicants, but
since
all tiers get the same number of seats, admission is particularly competitive in those areas.
New data released Tuesday show that distinction has faded somewhat, with application rates falling in Tier 4 (the wealthiest area), and rising in Tier 1 (the least affluent area). Still, the admission rate ranged from 59 percent in Tier 4 to 77 percent in Tier 1, and the minimum scores for Grade 7 admission remained significantly higher in Tier 4.
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The latest year's data also showed fewer Black students earning admission than in the prior years. Skipper said district staff are still exploring the data for explanations.
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Under the simulated policy that equalizes tiers based on applicant numbers, the admission rate would have been about two-thirds in each tier. Two simulations with different versions of a citywide pool of seats each result in the wealthier areas having the highest admission rate, around 70 percent.
On the other hand, district leaders again rejected a different frequent request in Tuesday's presentation. School Committee member Brandon Cardet-Hernandez has repeatedly called on the district to abandon school-based bonus points and instead award bonus points based on individual students' socioeconomic status.
In a memo for the committee, Skipper said individual bonus points are not feasible due to operational challenges and because some low-income students do not participate in programs used to determine eligibility for immigration status reasons.
Wu and Skipper underscored in the interview that while the exam schools are highly-sought after and serve a large and growing proportion of the district's teenagers, they cannot be the only focus.
'The driving goal is for BPS to be the first choice for every family in the city of Boston, and that means making sure we have high quality student experience at seats in every high school,' Wu said.
Christopher Huffaker can be reached at

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