Boston Latin School head: Fix other BPS schools; don't destroy the exam schools

An elite education that gives city kids a chance to get into colleges that only rich kids otherwise would.

BPS has a big enough budget, maybe their teachers should do their jobs and teach the kids so they are smart enough to pass the exam and get in.

They allow higher achieving students opportunities for enrichment and engagement that aren’t available in other schools? They give low income students an educational environment that does not exist in their neighborhood? They allow families and students living in the city to attend to schools that rival those in wealthier suburbs without having to move away? They serve as the few sources of pride we can have in our public school system?

I phrase as questions since I neither attended or taught in the Boston schools.

Is hard, but try going through the whole article and not just the headline.

To Brian: a viable education option for parents in Boston who would otherwise live in Milton, Needham, Newton, Belmont, Arlington, Lexington, Sudbury, and so on. Or would send their kids to private school.

When my partner and I were deciding whether to buy in Boston or a suburb, Latin was (and is) the plan. We get to watch and see how things develop over the next six years before our kids get to 7th grade, though we’re already bummed that Advanced Work is out.

Tom Keane’s a pretty crappy marketer. He tells us all the reasons to do away with exam schools, none of the benefits. He offers up this tripe about “illuminating them all” as if that’ll just magically happen when the exam schools disappear. Hey, Keane might be right about that, but without some really compelling reasons to believe, many families won’t stick around to find out.

The exam schools meet the needs of a large group of Boston students - for challenge, engagement, and more. That's why they exist. No other schools in Boston meet this need.

That's one of the reasons why this year's drastic change in the admissions policy is bizarre and shocking. There was no discussion of or plan to meet the needs of students "shifted" (BPS' word) out of the exam schools. The way this decision was made, a closed process with a pre-determined outcome that did not consider the impacts on so many students, is itself a clear warning to families considering BPS.

No honest, knowledgeable person can say that closing the exam schools will have a meaningful positive impact on the open enrollment schools in BPS. Middle class families of all backgrounds leave Boston; others choose charters, METCO, private schools or the many BPS selective admission schools. Those, together, add up to far more students than the exam schools. They could close the exam schools tomorrow and it wouldn't change that, it would only shift families to those alternatives. Which means it wouldn't help the open enrollment schools in Boston. (So consider what this is this really about - political power in Boston.)

It's unfortunate that BLS Head of School Skerritt only now seems to be waking up to the bigger picture in BPS and Boston, after going along with the disastrous admissions plan.

As for the academic study referenced in the article that Tom Keane linked - it's an easy, tired, misleading way for people who don't understand the study to make an argument they already believed in.
https://www.educationnext.org/evidence-new-york-city-boston-exam-schools/

But they seem not to be reading the second part of the article, where the author herself shreds the academic study. Anyone quoting this study either has no understanding of what it says, or is intentionally being misleading.

The study says nothing about most students in selective schools - it only looks at those on the margin of being in or out.

At least for the students just on the margin of admission to exam schools, the schools have no measurable academic achievement or postsecondary outcomes ...

While a strength of the regression-discontinuity design is that we obtain causal effects for students who are just on the margin of admission, a weakness is that we can’t estimate effects for students who were certain of admission [that is, the vast majority of students in the schools]

And the study only looks at a narrow range of outcomes for that narrow range of students: test scores and college admissions. But every parent and student with a clue knows there is so much more to any school than test scores. And on the things that matter most to most parents, the study says nothing:

These students may well be happier, more engaged, or safer at these schools. [But this study says nothing about those critical factors, for schools where students spend 4-6 of the most impactful years of their lives.]

Those linking to this article also seem to have missed this:

But getting rid of the test is not the answer.

While this article guarantees some clicks and attention, it's deeply misleading. Parents and students know better.

I agree it's ultimately a war of statistics. If you disband all three exam schools and scatter the kids who were statistically going to do well (the white, upper-middle, two-college-degree-parent, kids), the statistical "quality" of the other public schools will go up.... because those kids will now have their MCAS and graduation rates and college acceptance rates all counted for those other public schools. Probably not as much of a rise as the people pushing this plan think, because a lot of them will be pushed to charters or there will be a huge rush of housing inventory in the southern neighborhoods as people move, but sure, some statistical rise in the measurements of quality we use to assess whether a high school is good or not.

But did anything at the other schools ACTUALLY change or ACTUALLY improve? Did they suddenly get AP classes and invested guidance councilors and high level curriculum (and the supports to actually achieve it)? Did the schools start managing to address the variety of social ills (aka POVERTY) that aren't their job but are the real driver behind these statistics, and so now the kids who weren't doing better suddenly are?

Maybe instead of having conversation 930482093842 about the fucking exam schools, some of these would-be champions of justice should call up English High, whose teachers and admin have been working tirelessly and without ANY recognition to raise the graduation rate from like 50% in 2015 (FIFTY PERCENT) to nearly 80% this year, and ask them what they want and need, and give it to them!! Start THROWING RESOURCES into ACTUALLY helping the kids who were not going to "do well anyway" instead of thinking spreading out the 'sure-thing' kids is going to suddenly give students with issues three meals a day and a stable roof on their head and a parent who can help with homework and etc etc etc all the statistical factors they're saying make the exam schools irrelevant.

It's not coincidental at all that the people who decried the loss of "neighborhood schools" to bussing also relentlessly defend a system that diverts top scoring students out of schools across the city into magnet schools. People will use whatever defense of segregation happens to work at the time.

If you look closely at the so-called "statistics", the authors compare students who barely made the cut-off for the O'Bryant with students who just missed the cut-off. Arguably, those students are less prepared than those who are comfortably within the cut-off for BLA, and much less prepared than those who are comfortably within the cut-off for BLS. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison that fails to capture the diversity of academic ability within each school.

There's also the point that under-prepared students from Holy Name are skewing these results by benefitting from extremely generous grade inflation. In an ideal world where GPAs are standardized across the city, the exam schools would be arguably more diverse and their impacts would be much more evident.

Furthermore, the authors measure academic success using just MCAS test scores, which, like most other standardized tests, have been subject to much criticism for being unfair to (non-Asian) minorities. On page 178, the authors also write that there is no evidence of "racial composition effects" (i.e. no benefits from being in a racially-diverse environment). In other words, those who want to change up the existing admissions system, such as abolishing the exam to promote greater racial diversity, are actually contradicting themselves by citing this study...

then what would be gained by un-selectifying the schools anyway?

I attended BPS the whole way through and graduated from BLS. It was a relief not to be constantly distracted by disruptive conduct. And it was great training for navigating drudgery and obstinate authority figures—I mean this sincerely, those are useful skills that many people I met in college had not developed.

I would be interested to see what University A's analysis of a student from an exam school, versus a non-exam school, would have on the overall effectiveness of said school to prep the student. Said differently, wouldn't a university have a profile of high schools that would level the playing field across exam and non-exam schools? Wouldn't this play into "effect of the exam schools on college attendance, college selectivity, and college graduation."

The study comparing "cusp kids" is odd to me. I am not sure it really concludes anything other than being the small fish in the big pond is about the same as being the big fish in the small pond, and I'm not sure what that proves anyway. (The result was that being the lowest scoring kid at the higher tier school is the same as being the highest scoring kid at the lower tier school, and therefore the actual school had no effect?) If we liken this to sports, we would say that the best performers in Division II are just as good as the worst performers in Division I, but does that mean Division I does not hone and sharpen players at the top? The study makes no statements or conclusions about those who were comfortably selected (non-"cusp").

People talk a lot about the exam part of the exam schools, but the exam is only the beginning. Once one is in an exam school, they are in an environment of co-opetition, which, although not clear in the first years, is made clear the year they start handing out the class rankings. By pooling the top kids together, they are made to compete with one another and thereby push each other. Does that produce more able kids? Similarly, does pooling all the best athletes into leagues like the NFL or NBA not produce the best play?

Schools across the country have declining enrollment simply because of the 2009 recession and subsequent drop in the birthrate, which never went back up.

They need to keep selecting kids via testing in order to keep testing well. I graduated from BLA and now work as a high school teacher elsewhere - there's nothing special about what that school is doing, they just have a student body made up of kids who test well.

Yes, let's fix the problem. Let's give every Boston Public High School a $65,000,000 endowment that generates enough income to fund $2,410,083 for expenses "designed to supplement funding of programs in technology, library, the arts, music, drama, athletics and the general academic program" at each high school. And let's pay the President of each of these "Associations" more than the Head of School.

https://www.bls.org/BLSA/BLSAForm990yearendJune302019_web.pdf

There are 33 high schools in Boston. 32 need endowments x $65,000,000 = $2,080,000,000. Only 2 billion dollars! Problem solved.