On steps of Boston Latin, parents rally to keep the exam in exam schools; across street, other parents rally against it

I'm not sure I buy this "racist history" bit. When I went to Boston Latin from a neighborhood school in the pre-busing early 70s it was the most integrated place I had been up to that point and I was all the better for it. Nor was there a single issue of a racial nature in all the time I was there. The school itself and it's policies were pretty horrendous (in my opinion), but race or integration was not among it's problems at the time. People just got on with things. It was still all boys mind you, so you might want to make something of that. But I was still there in 1972 when girls were first admitted and the biggest problem I remember was what to do about bathrooms. This was remedied by taping up handwritten signs that said "boys" on some bathrooms and "girls" on others. Problem solved. If the girls didn't mind urinals in their bathrooms.

demographics of BPS against the racial demographics of BLS? What should be compare is the racial demographics of all the students in Boston (whether in BPS or not) to those of the exam schools. Why are those people discounting BLA and O'Bryant which are also good exam schools?
For entrance into 7th grade, BPS should be looking at the number of 6th graders throughout the City, not the entire number of students throughout the City. Does BPS even have an accurate count of the number of non BPS students in Boston?
There is no easy answer to getting more black and Hispanic students into BLS (since BLS seems to be all that anyone is focusing on). But there is an answer that has been ignored for decades: Improve how those students are taught beginning in kindergarten!! If that means longer schools days, longer school year, more individualized attention, tutoring, family supports, why hasn't BPS and the City done this already??? If they truly cared about those students, they would have done this. Penalizing some 6th graders for years of BPS and City failings is unfair.

Until you experience it you'll never understand. The exam schools have a very small acceptance rate for black children especially BLS. You guys live in alternate world where nothing is a problem because it doesn't effect you and that is the problem. Stop hiding and lying and face the truth. Black folks have been forced to accept it, the rest of the world does too.

Stop giving the millions of dollars each year to the school because it’s not going to be the school you all long supported.

In my opinion the only way to truly even things out is to force all students taking the test to have attended a Boston public school for at least 2 years prior.

You cannot expect students who attended most of our Boston public schools to do as well on these tests as students who went to nice private schools and had their parents pay for tutors.

I'm surprised that it took this long to happen.

The fundamental error here is the belief that the quality of the Latin School is independent of the students who attend it and the families who send them. Test or no test, the reputation of BLS rests not on the qualities of the teaching or administrative staff but on the young people sitting in the seats, behaving themselves, working hard, obeying their parents, competing with each other, striving to make something of themselves. The test and grades are a reasonable, but not infallible, straining device for just such students. The admission process can — and should — be improved, for example, by student essays or other demonstrations of readiness and seriousness. A book, The Exam School Dilemma, offers some very useful comparisons (BLS refused to participate in the authors’ research).

Another error: if selective results do not map exactly with racial-group percentages, ergo racism. Q. E. D. No. It is the home culture, not skin color or geographic ancestry, not zip code, that matters most here, and that culture is not indexed by wealth.

True, the Latin School did not always have an entrance exam. But then it had a rigorous, often cruel, process of elimination: one out of three were said to make it from Sixie year to graduation. Summer Redstone declares in the opening of his autobiography that this very feature of BLS made him the hyper-successful man he became. Many others have claimed the same.

So, how far do we go with this cult of “inclusion?” Should we all be included in everything, no one excluded from anything, regardless of qualification? For this is nothing more than evading the moral requirement of recognizing that not all are equal in terms of achievement and striving, though all are equal under the law and the gaze of Heaven.

If the School Committee makes this decision, it will be yet another brutally Rawlsian cop-out: what all can not have, none may have.

For the people who are upset that too many Asian students are attending BLS, do you mean children whose ethnicity is Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese? What if these chldren's parents or grandparents are from Laos or India or Thailand or all of the above? Is that okay with you? Exactly which Asian ethnicities in what percentage do YOU deem acceptable at BLS? So if a child whose ethicity is Korean tests into BLS and earns a seat, would you tell them: no not you, we already have too many Asians! You don't see this as racist??