As officials consider new adjustments to the admissions policy for Boston’s three exam schools, they run the risk of a new challenge from the Trump administration not only to current practice, but also to a long history of combining academic rigor with opportunity for less advantaged students.
Last December, the US Supreme Court declined to review a lower court ruling against a challenge to the policy filed by a group representing white and Asian applicants. As noted by the high court’s majority, the original version of the policy – for students entering in 2021-22 – had since been modified, with changes including reintroduction of a special entrance exam. But two dissenting justices argued that resulting changes in the racial mix of admissions could be evidence of discriminatory intent.
Though the current admissions criteria combine test scores and grades with race-neutral tiers to ensure socio-economic and geographic diversity, an analysis by the Boston Public Schools (BPS) shows that the policy has altered the racial mix of enrollment. Officials have also hailed the changes for making the coveted schools more “representative” of the city’s school-age population.
Compared with 2020-21, the share of white students invited to the schools to begin grade 7 has gone from 40 percent to 32 percent for the class entering in 2025-26, after having fallen two years earlier to 24 percent. For Black students, the figure went from 13 to 15 percent, after having increased to as much as 24 percent in 2022-23.
Over the same period, “Latinx” invitations went from 21 to 26 percent, while the figure for Asian students went from 21 to 20 percent. The 7th grade invitations for economically disadvantaged students rose from 35 to 43 percent, while those for multilingual learners went from 20 to 30 percent.
In summarizing an analysis of the policy at the June 17 School Committee meeting, Colin Rose, BPS senior advisor for strategy and opportunity gaps, said, “Compared to this year’s student body, for all three schools, I’ve seen an overall student demographic to be more reflective of the city, with BLA (Boston Latin Academy) and (John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science) continuing to be much more reflective than Boston Latin School.”
The policy has also given applicants extra points based on their housing status and where they attended school. According to the analysis, the extra school-based points made it difficult for some students in tiers with high numbers of applicants to receive invitations, even if they had high composite scores. While doing little to make exam school invitations more representative, officials found, the points based on enrollment could also pit one school against another.
At the same presentation, Monica Hogan, BPS assistant superintendent for data strategy and implementation, reported, “We’ve heard a lot of feedback on the school-based points, that they’re both hard to explain and understand, and can make it mathematically difficult for students with high composite scores in some tiers to receive an invitation.”
Because there continue to be more applicants from the city’s higher socio-economic tiers, their admissions rate has been lower and the necessary composite scores have been higher. Since 2022-23, the number of applicants in the six lowest tiers has increased by a combined figure of 47.6 percent, while those in the two highest socio-economic tiers have declined by 26.3 percent. For the 2025-26 enrollment, the number of tiers was reduced to four, each one combining pairs of earlier tiers, and with the numbers of invitations for each tier being roughly equal, regardless the number of applicants.
One possible change to reduce the disparities between tiers in required scores would be to set aside 20 percent of the seats for applicants with the top composite numbers, either in total, or at each school. In suggesting another way to reverse or slow the drop in applications in the highest tiers, some parents have called for basing the number of invitations in each grouping on a percentage of the number of applicants.
One adjustment proposed for consideration by school officials was to have all tiers based on equal numbers of applicants. Because the tiers could only be determined after applications are received, officials warned that it could delay invitations past the deadlines for committing to other schools. They also cautioned that the change could make admissions less geographically representative of the city’s neighborhoods.
From 2019 to 2024, students admitted to all three exam schools under the new policy experienced larger declines in MCAS scores for at least meeting expectations, as opposed to students admitted previously. The declines were most dramatic at Boston Latin Academy.
As noted in the policy analysis, officials plan a study of student experience at the exam schools. Following the presentation on the analysis, the School Committee chair, Jeri Robinson, voiced concern about outcomes for students.
“When they’re all sitting in seventh grade math,” Robinson asked, “are they all ready to do seventh grade math, or are we finding even kids who’ve gotten into our exam schools are really doing fourth grade math? I guess I’m trying to understand overall our preparation for our students to be successful no matter where they are.”
BPS Superintendent Mary Skipper said that under the policy changes, exam schools did not have a significant change in the number of students leaving, and she attributed falling MCAS scores to the larger trend associated with learning disruption from the pandemic.
“I think we’re seeing that same bubble move up through the exam schools,” she said, “which coincides very much with the data on the exam school policy. So again, we’re not seeing anything different there than we’re seeing in just broader BPS data or broader state data.”
Rose denied seeing “anything in the data that’s remarkably different” from the past. “But,” he added, “I also think as a district, as we grow, we need to be able to support all students in all of our schools, so I think partly that’s on us. If we’re looking at the student experience data correctly, it’s not just about who’s entering in exam schools, it’s about how are we supporting every kid in an exam school to do the best that they can.”
Throughout Massachusetts, socio-economic gaps in MCAS results have persisted for decades. As to the BPS, Skipper detailed steps to narrow gaps and expand access to advanced classes, through tutoring and preparation, including programs for English language learners. “And what we found,” she said, “is that by providing and changing our adult behavior and giving the right supports, we have more students than ever that represent the demographic and the socioeconomic (mix) of our district who are doing fine.”
After eligibility for applications was tightened in 2021-22, the number of exam school applicants declined by 56.1 percent in 2022-23. Since then, the numbers have increased modestly for applicants from the BPS, charter schools and private, parochial, and METCO schools.
The policy changes have also made the socio-economic mix of applicants more balanced, with applications from the six lowest tiers up since 2022-23 by 47.6 percent, but with the figure for the two highest tiers (since merged into “Tier 4”) down by 26.3 percent. Though recent modifications in the policy have increased the odds of admission for students with high composite scores, and more are contemplated, independent education consultant Will Austin concluded that the drop in applications from the highest tiers might signal a reaction to changing odds.
“I think after a couple cycles of this,” said Austin in a later interview, “folks who are in Tier 7, 8 – now Tier 4 – understand that the acceptance rate in that tier is more or less a raffle, that you’re having a lot of kids that basically tie for seats. And if you have a family that has more social capital, more socio-economic means, they’re a lot less likely to leave things up to chance, and they’re just going apply to other schools instead.”
At the meeting, a Dorchester parent, Deirdre Manning, told committee members that some particulars of the policy—such as grade conversions for composite scoring and conditions for the entrance exam—could disproportionately burden applicants from outside the BPS.
A Charlestown parent, Kathleen Chardavoyne, commented that the policy analysis “accurately captures the concerns that families have been raising to everyone.” Encouraging officials to “explore creative solutions,” she said, “A tier size based on the number of applicants is the fix-the-math solution that parents have advocated for over four years. It’s the only scenario that addresses what the memo now acknowledges, that the policy allows students, including those in lower socioeconomic statuses, to be disadvantaged based on where they live. And that’s a situation that directly contradicts the district’s stated values.”
The policy review calls for more engagement around admissions data between officials and the School Committee over the summer, with final recommendations by the superintendent and a vote by the committee in the fall. “If we choose to make a change,” Skipper said at the meeting, “I would recommend a robust community conversation to gather feedback from the committee and from the community.”
But race-neutral policies to diversify exam school access are facing a challenge from the Trump administration, with the US Department of Education (DOE) announcing a Title VI investigation of the policy adopted in 2020 in Fairfax County, Virginia, for the prestigious Thomas Jefferson (TJ) High School for Science and Technology.
Prompted by the state’s governor and attorney general, the investigation of alleged civil rights violations follows a decision last year by the US Supreme Court not to review a lower court decision upholding the policy, as would later be the case with Boston’s policy.
Top state officials in Virginia denounced the policy as illegal discrimination by race. In a May 21 press release, US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the policy “appears to be both contrary to the law and to the fundamental principle that students should be evaluated on their merit, not the color of their skin.”
The policies in Virginia and Boston had both been challenged in lawsuits represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation. On the foundation’s website, its senior attorney and lead litigator in the Virgina case, Erin Wilcox, acclaimed the federal and state investigations for “shining a much-needed spotlight” on exam school policies around the country that, she argued, kept “qualified kids” out of the country’s best schools because of their race.
“Hard work and talent—not skin color,” she insisted, “should determine who is admitted to schools like TJ, Stuyvesant High School in New York City, or Boston Latin School in Boston.”
The policies in Virginia and Boston were put into place following efforts to remedy disproportionately low admission rates for Black and “Hispanic” applicants and students with disabilities. And, in both cases, critics of the policies have raised concerns about a possible downturn in student outcomes.
Though the Virginia policy changed TJ’s racial mix, its supporters in the Legal Defense Fund said that the Asian American admission rate was in line with historic trends, and that more of those students who were admitted were from low-income families. “Asian American students attending middle schools that had been historically underrepresented at TJ,” according to the fund, “saw a sixfold increase in offers for admission.”
The TJ policy was also defended in an op-ed for The Hill by Jonathan Feingold, an associate professor at the Boston University School of Law. “The new investigation,” he contended, “tracks Trump’s disregard for courts and his tendency toward bluster over substance. But in important respects, it also exposes that Trump’s war on DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) lacks any moral and legal basis.”
In contrast to the situation in Boston, TJ’s policy since 2020 does not require applicants to take an entrance exam. Though applicants to TJ are partially judged on “experience factors,” the race-neutral policy raised the minimum GPA required and increased the number of applicants overall. In Boston, admissions are based on socio-economic tiers and points for housing and school factors, with 30 percent of the remainder of composite scores determined by exam results and 70 percent by GPAs.
Before 1972, Boston had separate “Latin” schools for girls and boys. Under a federal court order in 1975, Boston’s exam schools had to set aside 35 percent of their seats for under-represented minority students. The policy was struck down in 1989, after a federal lawsuit.
The oldest exam school and the country’s oldest public school, Boston Latin (BLS), is the best known for rigorous standards and academic drudgery that have led many students to exit without graduating – but also for a roster of distinguished graduates from underprivileged backgrounds that reflects the city’s changing demographic profile. It’s a composite reputation familiar to BLS students and alums, including Austin.
“I think there’s kind of a longstanding tradition where access to that school has opened up more and more over time,” he said. “That seems to be kind of the direction of the school. But it has its inherent conflict, because it is selective and so, by definition, the school is discriminatory. And each kind of generation gets to decide what they’re trying to achieve with those factors.”
With Boston’s exam school policy having been readjusted every year since 2020, the BPS analysis acknowledged that it was “difficult to understand.” In the first reaction after the June 17 presentation, School Committee member Chantal Lima Barbosa wondered, “So how many policy changes are we going to do every year in order to get it right? So that is my big concern. But I’m hoping that, with the different simulations that you all have, with all this data that we do have from the past five years, we can make a decision that doesn’t feel like a bandage.”
In his “Boston Focus” newsletter just days after the meeting, Austin went further. “At a certain point,” he concluded, “it makes sense to stop talking about how to build a better gate and just let more kids in. This is why in the past I have advocated for the expansion of exam school enrollment, specifically at the O’Bryant, whose shared facility with Madison Park sits on one of the largest public school sites in the entire country.”
