Boston exam school admissions policy ire hits school committee

Five months have passed since exam school admission under the district’s new policy came out, but parents aren’t moving on.

“You know how hard it is, not to be angry at you for willing to continue with this policy as it is?” said BPS parent Mano Katsompenakis. “This is my daughter you’re talking about. First you call her an unintended consequence — she’s a human. And now this proves that all her hard work was for nothing.”

BPS adopted a new exam school admissions policy in the last year, intending to increase diversity and opportunity in the schools.

On top of a student’s testing score and GPA points, the new system awards 10 additional points to students who attend a school enrolling 40% or more economically disadvantaged students and 15 points to students who are in state care, in affordable housing or homeless. Students are broken into eight socioeconomic tiers based on the demographics of where they live, and each tier is allocated the same number of seats.

BPS data on exam school admissions for the 2023-24 school year showed progress in expanding the schools’ geographic, racial and economic diversity — though, Skipper noted, little to no change in students with disabilities and multilingual learners — but some stark barriers for certain groups.

For instance, committee member Brandon Cardet-Hernandez noted, the cut-off for Boston Latin School was a score of 100.2% for Tier Seven students, meaning regardless of their individual background, no students without bonus points from the tier were admitted.

“I feel for the families, poor families and families of color, who are at these seven schools which didn’t make the threshold,” said Cardet Hernandez. “And I also feel really, for lack of a better word, icky about a policy that privileges wealthy families for going to school with poor kids.”

The committee member, who called for a discussion on the topic, noted the committee has delayed discussing these issues for five months.

Several parents also noted the hopelessness of the “bureaucratic inertia.”

Parents expressed a number of frustrations with the system, from how few upper-tier students had a shot at getting into the schools, to how the system ignored the backgrounds of individual students, to the “crudely drawn” tier maps.

“We live in Tier Seven, but literally across the street from us is Tier Four,” said BPS parent David Barstow. “So if we lived in 246 instead of 245, my daughter would have sailed into BLS no problem.”

Like others, the father called for seats to be allocated to each tier proportionally to the number of applicants in each tier.

Others called for changes like lowering the number of point from 10 to two or three or finding a way to allocate points based on the students socio-economic status rather than the families.

District speakers indicated there is no clear way to measure a student’s economic background, and committee members O’Neill and Tran noted they would oppose a system that relied on self-reporting family income.

Superintendent Mary Skipper discussed the challenges with changing the system at length, noting that the policy was based on months of work and dozens of public meetings and calls for a review only after five years.

“We don’t know the full impact yet, because we don’t have multiple years of data to tell the whole story,” Skipper said. “The one year of complete data we do have is revealing impacts that this committee, the public and my own team have raised is concerns about, that we need to understand further.”

Many argued that the issues call for immediate action.

“If we know that there are concerns in the data, then we should be talking about policy recommendations here,” said Cardet-Hernandez. “And my fear, my suspicion is that will not happen. We will not be having policy conversations here. We’ll just wait for a recommendation from someone to tell us what to do. We’ll vote yes. And we’ll wait another year, or we’ll wait five.”

BPS will hold two virtual information sessions on the 2024-25 exam school admissions processes at 6 p.m. on Oct. 12 and Nov. 2 with links available on www.bostonpublicschools.org/exam.