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Supreme Court won't take up lawsuit over Boston exam-school admissions
By adamg on Mon, 12/09/2024 - 11:30am
The US Supreme Court today formally declined to consider a lawsuit by White and Asian-American parents against the way BPS now uses Zip codes as part of its algorithm for determining who gets offered admission to Boston's three exam schools.
The decision to deny certiorari lets stand a ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston last year that BPS could continue with a post-Covid policy to use a blend of standardized test scores, grades and Zip codes weighted by family income as a way to help ensure demographically diverse student populations at Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy and the O'Bryant School without specifically looking at the race or ethnicity of applicants.
The justices voted 7-2 to reject hearing the case, with justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas saying they would have heard the case. However, Justice Neil Gorsuch, part of the majority, also wrote that the vote doesn't mean the court won't take up the issue of possible anti-White bias in a future case, just that the Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence ultimately did a bad job with their specific arguments, and that he didn't necessarily disagree that two rulings by the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston that upheld the new policy as not racially discriminatory were wrong and, in fact, a sort of cancer spreading through the judiciary that needs to be stopped.
The parents and students do not challenge Boston's new policy, nor do they suggest that the city is simply biding its time, intent on reviving the old policy. Strictly speaking, those developments may not moot this case. But, to my mind, they greatly diminish the need for our review. ...
Our decision today, however, should not be misconstrued. A "denial of certiorari does not signify that the Court necessarily agrees with the decision (much less the opinion)" ...
And, in fact, JUSTICE ALITO expresses today a number of significant concerns about the First Circuit's analysis, concerns I share and lower courts facing future similar cases would do well to consider.
In their dissent, Alito and Thomas first brought up the infamous 2020 School Committee meeting on Zoom at which the chairman, not realizing he wasn't muted, mocked the names of Chinese-American parents testifying that night, and at which two Latina committee members exchanged texts about "Westie whites."
The two justices pointed to that meeting, plus the fact that Black and Hispanic enrollment at the exam schools has gone up since the change in policy as proof of "overwhelming direct evidence of intentional discrimination." And they blasted the Boston appeals court for its role in spreading what they consider a dangerous holding that " facially race-neutral" policies - such as BPS's use of income-weighted Zip codes - could not be discriminatory.
Alito, who wrote the dissent, said the high court should have stopped such nonsense when a school district in Virginia tried something similar and by failing to do so, meant the idea had now "metastized" to the parts of New England and Puerto Rico overseen by the Boston appeals court.
In making such an error, the First Circuit rendered legally irrelevant graphic direct evidence that Committee members harbored racial animus toward members of victimized racial groups. As the Committee members made "explicit," they worked to decrease the number of white and Asian students at the exam schools in service of "racial equity." That is racial balancing by another name and is undoubtedly unconstitutional.
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Comments
They need to stop trying to rig the finish line
No matter how you dress it up in the end you're creating a system where one kid will get an exam school seat despite having lower qualifications than someone else. It's not "technically" race based admission, but it's set up in a way to get closer to race based goals (i.e. have the demographics of the exam school match that of the city's student population).
I like the idea of using the census data to improve BPS, but I think that it is completely misguided to use it to manipulate the acceptance to the exam schools.
The data should be used to address early education, because that's where the lower tier census tracts have a huge disadvantage compared to the higher ones and where you can have much greater impact on final education outcomes. Take a selection of four year olds in tier 1 and tier 8 and you're going to see a huge disparity in things like reading skills already developing.
That's what they should be trying to fix. Let's say the kids in the lower tiers all got guaranteed seats in K0 as well as free before and after school care that comes with additional educational services. As an example, that way the kid who spends most of their time in a home where English is not used will be able to boost their proficiency in English to at least be much closer to their peers who live with it as their language at home. Middle class parents are also more likely to be doing things like reading with their children, so there are opportunities for things like that to happen.
There is data out there that shows that the kids who are behind in kindergarten have until about second grade to catch up to proficiency. If it doesn't happen by then the odds of graduation are stuck in the lower realm.
In the world of politics long term efforts are risky because the election cycles come far before the results. However, an investment in early education like that could not only shift the demographics of the exam schools to closer match the city's demographics, but with a single playing field for entrance, it could also raise the performance at all of the other high schools in the city.
/diatribe
Renting an apartment in Brookline
Remains a back-up option if the kiddos get excluded, right?
Anywhere that’s not Boston
Needham, Newton, Wellesley, Milton, Westwood. All close, all have excellent schools that consistently rank in the top nationwide. And spend about half of what Boston does per pupil. Wild.
Lol
I do not understand why white people would want fewer less well educated black people in the city and country?
Don't most of the complaints about black people stem from us neesing or asking for a hand out? But when we try to actually go to school, get good gradess and try to access good schools (whether it be BLS or Harvard) and advance despite our uneven circumstance you don't want that either.
In my humble opinion…. you gotta pick a side.
if you're a person who is anti-black people getting help getting into good schools then you shouldn't be one to complain about all the other programs that exist to help close the various gaps in our society.
I also don't really understand how so many white people are more than fine with affirmative action for women, but not for black people
Nobody wants less educated people
Well, except Trump because he needs them as voters. The issue is in how entrance is set up so that depending on your zip code you can be excluded with a higher score than those who get a seat. That's what the parents are objecting to and you would likely feel the same if your child was the one denied.
Read my comment above. Instead of focusing on the exam schools I propose a system that would invest in early education using that data where far more kids in the lower census tracts would have a better outcome in their education.
If the exam school seats are a lottery win then what I describe above is investing in a 401(k) early in comparison. An investment in those census tracts for early education would have a compounding effect on educational outcomes in the city. That would have far better results overall for Boston's black community than shifting a small percentage of kids into the exam schools.
It would probably lead to more representative demographics in the exam schools as a side effect too.
Is there a law
In all seriousness is there a law that exam schools have to accept the people just with the highest test scores?
I wonder this was colleges too. Are they bound to just the students who apply with the best grades?
And a public school, shouldn’t you be obligated to serve all of the kids who wanna go and live in the district? Is there nothing that could be pursued legally if your disproportionately keeping black and latino kids out of a school in their district with different resources, teams, extra-curriculars, and edcuational standards?
And as a private -university or college- shouldn’t be allowed to admit, whoever you feel is best for your culture and your campus?
so your point, Boston Public school already does a whole bunch of things to try to even playing field and try to provide the best education that is possible. But it’s well known they have a separate system of alumni giving, different types of teams, educational standards and available to those you can go to exams schools.
The thing is you cannot fix a kids life chances just in early childhood education, that's the most important area but it doesn't stop when they're 11/12 years old, that's just logic.
Overall, the lawsuit just speaks to a pervasive ethos or an attidue that has really normalized internalized that Black or Latino people should just be accustomed to,and accept having less. At least from my Black POV. Like ‘how DARE they to get back into this school in a system where they comprise 75% of families’. Sad.
"In all seriousness is there
"In all seriousness is there a law that exam schools have to accept the people just with the highest test scores?
I wonder this was colleges too. Are they bound to just the students who apply with the best grades?"
No, there is not - and as even an academic paper written about the data uncovered in the SFFA v. Harvard litigation, 43% of white Harvard undergrads in the 2010s were one or more of the following: a legacy, a recruited athlete, a child of important people (royalty, billionaires, like that), or a child of Harvard professors... and that, based on their analysis about 70% of them would not have gotten into Harvard were it not for those factor(s). In other words, roughly 1 in 3 white Harvard students are not admitted on academic merit. Which admittedly is an improvement from the 1970s, when Harvard wrote an amicus brief for the DeFunis anti-affirmative action case in which they openly admitted that not even 1 in 8 students were chosen strictly on their academics.
Of course there's not a law
But what's the point of an exam school if you're going to say that the exam scores and high academic performance don't matter and it's based on some other criteria?
A recent Globe guest guest column discussed how lumping all of the academic tiers together in Newton has not worked out well, for any level of students in the classes or the teachers.
Yes, and part of my point is that by advocating only for the black or minority students who are within spitting distance of an exam school entrance score to get in you are doing a great disservice to the majority of the black students in the rest of BPS instead. If your concern is about "all" of the kids then you are ignoring the majority of the kids in the entire system by focusing on the exam schools.
I never said you could fix a life's chances just from early education, but that the dividends from that investment are far higher than an equal investment in those few who manage to get the boost into the exam schools. That also never implied that the investment in non-exam school kids should stop in middle/high school. However, the kids that are way behind when they are young are more likely to get frustrated and give up before they graduate so driving that population down is a key step to better outcomes later.
Let's say my plan above worked as described and improved the outcomes of the non-exam schools of BPS system as well as shifted the demographics of the exam schools at least significantly closer towards a representative population. Wouldn't that be a better meeting of the obligation to serve the city's students than getting the lucky few who were already doing pretty good on their own a boost into an exam school?
Yes the exam schools have advantages due to alumni giving and other things. That's a completely different topic though as we're talking about the period from early education to getting in the door there. That can be discussed on a different day.
Newton article
Thanks for highlighting the article about the failed effort in Newton. Other Boston suburbs have implemented the same plans in recent years, and our kids have been experiencing the same dismal results. I say this as a parent who wants leveling because some of our kids can handle honors and some can't. Our kids who wouldn't be in an honors class have had a terrible time in classes with kids who should be in honors. There's lots of talk about how advanced students are "bored" in this model, but surprisingly little talk of how the more typical students are intimidated, frustrated and unlikely to ask for help in these settings.
Put simply, throwing all students together (particularly after the learning loss from Covid) has been a disaster and is closely related to another Globe article from earlier this year -- the one about families in wealthy, progressive suburbs long known for their public schools increasingly sending their kids to private schools. The uptick is the result of well-intentioned, but failing, policies in public schools. This rigging of the finish line for the exam schools is just another example. Meanwhile, the local private schools are doing better than ever.
Don't get too stuck on the name
Don't get too stuck on the name "exam school" unless you really want a so-called "educational institution" whose claim to fame is that all of its students scored in the top n percent on some test. That's a pretty feeble accomplishment.
Here's another way to look at it. For a given school, you have x seats available in the incoming class, and y candidates, where y > x. Now, if you can't find x students who have the ability to succeed at that school and contribute to the educational environment, well then you have a problem -- but let's assume that is not the case. More likely, you have more than x students with the ability to succeed. You can choose any of those students based on any criteria you wish, and they will all succeed. So why should you use such an arbitrary criterion as a test score? Unless you truly believe that the test is an infallible predictor, not only of academic success but of academic success at THAT school, why would you make that the sole determinant? Are you really going to take the kid with the higher test score over the kid who speaks two languages fluently, or who invented a better mousetrap, or something else?
No, but there’s a law against
No, but there’s a law against racial discrimination.
Even if we all agree that race- or income-based affirmative action is a good idea, preferences by zip code are a really bad way to attempt it. It lumps in poor areas with rich areas, so some people who are supposed to be helped are instead being hurt.
Zip code used for poverty vs race
Can’t the argument be made that these preferred zip codes are an attempt to combat those more economically disadvantaged than racially motivated? I am assuming this without looking at an overlay of the two categories.
If the kids can handle the rigors of an exam school...
Eliminate 11th and 12th grade options and channel those students to a community college or Umass Boston for the final two two years (for free) then reallocate those 11th and 12th grade teachers to teach other grade levels, thereby creating more enhanced and expansive learning opportunities for an even larger segment of Boston students for a fraction of the cost of White Stadium
Ta da!
One problem
Community colleges don't have enough instructors as it is. Dumping BPS students into that system would be a disaster - as well as an abandonment of responsibility by a local government required to provide that education.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/08/13/massachusetts-free-community-colleg...
Very good point!
And we use this as an opportunity to give all those adjuncts and ABD's full time benefited jobs.
Ta da!
As the parent of a sixth grader
I get the use of geographical info. It’s surprisingly vast- I’ve got 3 different tiers within a 5 minute walk from my house. Of course, we’ll see how the system is set up when a very well placed family a block from me hits exam school time. They are currently tier 7.
Overall, I think it should be exam only. No grades, as grade inflation is a thing, while M.A.P. test results are objective.
The old test was definitely unfair
The old test was the same one that is used for a lot of private school entrance, including the popular Catholic high schools around here. That meant that the kids in parochial elementary school were being taught towards doing well on that test which gave them a huge advantage over the BPS kids who were on a different curricula and testing.
That definitely needed to be addressed, but I think they went too far and should have seen how the admissions were impacted by shifting to the MAP test first before anything else.
In technical troubleshooting you never want to change multiple things at once because then you cannot be sure which particular element made things better or worse. It's a similar notion here where I think that they made far too many changes and it's made things far less clear.
I disagree
That said, an test that every BPS- and Boston Catholic Schools, by the way- take every year provides less of an advantage to anyone who thinks "test prep" is the way to go to get a good score.
I did want to give a link to the Tier System in case people were curious. It's done by census tract, not zip codes, which means you have to be a level of stat geek to appreciate the geography. We are in tier 8, unfortunately, but we border tiers 2 (Beech Street Projects,) 5, 6, and 7.
No tests are objective. None.
No tests are objective. None.
The demographic they all most closely correlate to is income.
Every person trained in education measurement knows this.
Without tests, there's no metric for measurement
And this is where I note 2 things. First, the school committee was cool with the M.A.P. test being used in places of the SSAT or whichever test was used before. Second, grade inflation is a thing. A teacher could easily bump a kid up or down a grade based on their views on who they think is smart. The M.A.P. doesn't care about your race, gender, income, school attended, immigration status, or anything else people sometimes think is very important.
OT: Justices Alito and Thomas
Are bought and paid for by special interests who have no desire for an educated non-White workforce. If their workforces are educated enough to realize how badly they've been exploited they would choose not to work in those environments and possibly organize for better conditions and pay if they remain.
Back to exam schools:
Exam scores should be the most important condition for admission; Other mitigating circumstances should also be considered though.
Wealth
If the Tier/census track system is meant to adjust for the overwhelming advantages of wealth, I’m all for it.
If it’s also meant to enhance the educational experience at exam schools by virtue of a more diverse student body, mark me for a yes.
What I’m against is the overwhelming disparities in what’s available to exam schools and every other high school in Boston.
Reverse systemic racism
"Systemic racism" is the term used to describe underhanded policies that are not overtly racist, but still have racist outcomes. That was the entire point of this zipcode-based admissions policy. It wasn't driven by the neighborhoods kids were coming from. The entire discussion was over race. The policy is 100% reverse racism.