Secret BPS task force on changing Boston Latin admissions not sitting well with BLS alumni group

When I see these BLS articles I almost wish there was a filter that would block commentators who did not attend/did not send kids to BLS. The suburban busy bodies with no experience at BLS, or BPS for that matter, sound like utter morons.

The people on here thinking that the BLSA is some small time PTA group raising a few bucks at a bake sale should really take a seat.

Zoey Jane: I attended BLA from 1984 to 1990, when it was across from Fenway Park in a dilapidated old mail building. BLS had a gym and an audtorium...we had an ersatz gym and/or had to go to the Fens. Everything was falling apart, but that didn't stop me or any of the others from getting a better education than from, say CM or any of the other high schools. (The bonus, though, was watching the Red Sox screen during baseball season until the teachers rolled the window shade down).

Rigor is a harsh and immediate reality at these exam schools. From the second you step in as a seventh grader ("sixie"), teachers will expect far more from you in an exam school versus a non-exam school. It was a very regular occurrence for those who couldn't hack it to leave or be kicked out. Some people couldn't care less; others saw it as a mark of shame, but ended up doing much better elsewhere.

The alumni association knows this very well - and if they're concerned that these groups are attempting to undermine the exam schools, they have every right to voice it. Their opinion that they money they're donating may eventually be wasted or misused matters a LOT when it currently helps others to succeed.

I wonder who you think this handle belongs to. A friend of yours, perhaps?

I don't talk about my biography online, but I will tell you I have never lived in rural Pennsylvania or West Virginia. Nor have I, or anyone else in my family, ever attended a school without black children. That is really not a problem for me and mine.

I believe in the mission of exam schools, in Boston and elsewhere. I believe that academically gifted kids of every background deserve a place to learn that meets their needs, instead of pitching classes to the lowest common denominator.

If you closed exam schools, or removed accomplishment and merit from their admissions protocol, the children most hurt would be poor children. Rich kids would just keep going to private schools, or wealthy suburban schools.

So why do you hate smart poor kids so much, that you want to take away their best hope? Why do you hate Boston so much, that you want to give the middle class another reason to leave?

From the links your search pops up:

First in line, a study showing that test scores are not the only measures of academic accomplishment correlated with socio-economic status.

Finding 2: Income gaps in other measures of education success have grown as well.
Academic achievement, as measured by standardized test scores, is not the only education outcome for which disparities between high-income and low-income students have been growing. The college-completion rate among children from high-income families has grown sharply in the last few decades, whereas the completion rate for students from low-income families has barely moved (Bailey & Dynarski, 2011). Moreover, high- income students make up an increasing share of the enrollment at the most selective colleges and universities (Reardon, Baker, & Klasik, 2012)—even when compared with low-income students with similar test scores and academic records (Bailey & Dynarski, 2011; Belley & Lochner, 2007; Karen, 2002).

A related trend during the last 20 years is the growing social-class gap in other important measures of adolescents' "soft skills" and behaviors related to civic engagement, such as participating in extracurricular activities, sports, and academic clubs; volunteering and participating in community life; and self-reports of social trust (Putnam, Frederick, & Snellman, 2012).

So your first support for your argument instead demonstrates that test scores are actually not an outlier in terms of academic achievement; many other measures show the same difference related to SES. Thanks! I didn't know that.

Second up, the abstract of a study associating child poverty, brain development, and academic performance.

Results Poverty is tied to structural differences in several areas of the brain associated with school readiness skills, with the largest influence observed among children from the poorest households. Regional gray matter volumes of children below 1.5 times the federal poverty level were 3 to 4 percentage points below the developmental norm (P < .05). A larger gap of 8 to 10 percentage points was observed for children below the federal poverty level (P < .05). These developmental differences had consequences for children’s academic achievement. On average, children from low-income households scored 4 to 7 points lower on standardized tests (P < .05). As much as 20% of the gap in test scores could be explained by maturational lags in the frontal and temporal lobes.

Conclusions and Relevance The influence of poverty on children’s learning and achievement is mediated by structural brain development. To avoid long-term costs of impaired academic functioning, households below 150% of the federal poverty level should be targeted for additional resources aimed at remediating early childhood environments.

Is it possible that you would rather argue against directing resources to remediate early childhood environments? It sounds like a great idea to me, with much better potential than just ignoring test scores.

Third comes the abstract of a study about MCAT and bias, whose results include:

This analysis showed that black and Latino examinees’ mean MCAT scores are lower than white examinees’, mirroring differences on other standardized admission tests and in the average undergraduate grades of medical school applicants. However, there was no evidence that the MCAT exam is biased against black and Latino applicants as determined by their subsequent performance on selected medical school performance indicators.

Subsequent performance meaning that when they accepted kids who did poorly on the MCAT, they did poorly in med school too. Unfair?

Next comes a study about vocabulary development and SES, which states:

One way in which parents’ SES may influence the next generation is via early vocabulary development and subsequent educational attainment. That is, parents’ SES has been linked to children’s academic achievement and cognitive and language development...

This makes sense, given that a huge part of these standardized tests is vocabulary and word usage. If you hang around with a bunch of PhDs all day, you will hear more words, used correctly, than you will hanging around with a bunch of dropouts. Also, books.

Then comes a fascinating study linking student performance and the "greenness" of the area around the school.

Overall the study results supported a relationship between the “greenness” of the school area and the school-wide academic performance. Interestingly, the results showed a consistently positive significant association between the greenness of the school in the Spring (when most Massachusetts students take the MCAS tests) and school-wide performance on both English and Math tests, even after adjustment for socio-economic factors and urban residency.

I have my doubts about this one; I'd like to see how well they adjusted for socio-economic factors and urban residency, since common experience tells us that richer schools have more trees around them. But if the study is right, then kids could get a boost on the MCAS just from planting more flowers around the schools!

So thanks for that link (I honestly didn't know there was such a thing as "google scholar." I'm too old.)

The studies go on, and they look like fascinating stuff - you should read some of them sometime. What most of them have in common is that they look for reasons that test scores correlate with SES. The correlation is there, but - contrary to your dogmatic assertion - the studies all show tests aren't just measuring SES. The studies show that the tests measure the result of social factors that are also correlated to SES (but not entirely determined by SES).

The studies you linked to here show many factors that go into test scores, including the vocabulary children learn, brain damage caused by the stress of poverty, the positive effect of a greener environment... yes, these root causes of the poor scores do correlate to SES (and let's not forget we fund schools in this country mostly by local property taxes). These factors result in less knowledge, and worse reasoning skills, which is what the test results then display.

The best conclusion to reach from this all is that we should focus on the causes of low test scores, in their correlation with low SES. Declaring that the tests don't matter is a complete cop-out. It lets bad schools off the hook, it codifies low expectations for poor kids, and it consigns further generations to failure. These test scores do measure something. They measure the knowledge and reasoning skills resulting from our current system. Instead of writing poor kids off, like you propose, we should expect more. More from kids, more from parents, from teachers, from schools, and from society.

You're right - METCO money comes from the state and the recieving communities. I was mistaken about the funding source.

I'm not accusing you of meaning it, but the way you wrote it really could be taken the wrong way. Think 'kimono'

In the public schools of Burlington, VT, where I learned alongside a handful of black people, even fewer Latinos, but a bunch of folks from Bosnia and Vietnam.

Did you read "The Blind Side?" Best part of the book was about the demographics of Memphis. "Millions of people, making hundreds of millions of individual choices, yielded a result not much different than what forced segregation had created."

Two things stop non-white people with the means to do so from living in Lexington:

1) Racist banks and/or landlords

2) The lack of desire by non-white people to live in Lexington

I'm sure there's no shortage of enterprising lawyers around here who would quickly pounce on 1, and the government has no business in 2.