Boston is home to three elite exam schools: Boston Latin Academy, Boston Latin School, and the John D. O’Bryant School. These schools, although public, are different from their counterparts as they require excellence in academic grades and high scores on a standardized test in order for students to attend. They have also long been contested as adding to the inequities of disadvantaged students of color, who are largely disproportionately represented at these elite schools, especially at Boston Latin Academy.
This year, because of the pandemic, those requirements had been put on hold, and a “Zip Code Quota Admission Plan” had been put in place. Rather than using test scores and grades, this new system “apportions a specific number of admission seats to the exam schools to each of Boston’s 29 zip codes.” The zip code quota admission plan states that “Each zip code in the city is allocated a number of seats based on the percentage of school-aged children in the city of Boston living in that zip code. Invitations are distributed in 10 rounds with 10% of each zip code’s seats allocated in each round. Zip codes will be ranked according to median household income, and seats will be allocated to the zip codes with lowest median household income first in each round.”
However, these plans have been put on hold. On Feb. 26, 14 families of the Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence (BPCAE) issued a press release and filed a lawsuit against the Boston School Committee and Boston Schools Superintendent Brenda Cassellius. The reason behind this lawsuit, according to the press release, is to solicit an abolishment of the Zip Code Quota Admission Plan and to“seek immediate injunctive relief to protect the constitutional rights of Asian and Caucasian school children seeking admission to the district’s three exam schools: Boston Latin Academy, Boston Latin School, and the John D. O’Bryant School of Science and Math (exam schools).”
The 14 families represent a fraction of the number of Asian families who suffered from the Zip Code Quota Admission because they lived in competitive, Asian populous zip codes. For example, Chinatown is expected to lose 14 of 24 seats based on the Zip Code Quota Plan – a total loss of 58% of seats. Beacon Hill/West End is expected to lose 6 of 19 Boston Exam School seats based on the Zip Code Quota Plan – a total loss of 31% of seats.
One of the plaintiffs, Bentao Cui, president of BPCAE, said, “as a parent, I want to request that my child receive a fair and equitable opportunity to apply for these three exam schools.” He then added, “We do not take lightly the decision to file this lawsuit, but we felt we had no other alternative to protect our children’s rights to be free from racial and ethnic discrimination at the hands of the government.”
According to the press release, “The use of the Zip Code Quota admission plan for the fall 2021 admission cycle was recommended by Superintendent Cassellius, and it was approved by Boston’s appointed School Committee at a public meeting on Oct. 21, 2020.” It was the infamous Zoom meeting where Chairman Michael Loconto made hurtful racial remarks about Asian and African-American names when he thought his mic was turned off. Although Loconto resigned the day after his comments, Boston School Committe’s institutional prejudice toward Asian communities still remains visible.
As a possible solution, the BPACE “requests that the Court enjoin the School Committee from implementing the Zip Code Quota admission plan, and in its place order the School Committee to utilize a citywide, merit-based admission process, which has been in place for the exam schools for at least the past twenty years.”
Despite the support for the lawsuit, some are opposed to it. Boston Globe writer, Marcela García, wrote an op-ed titled “At Boston’s public exam schools, it’s equity vs. privilege” where she expressed her opinions. “What these 14 families ignore is that “merit” does not always equal fairness or objectivity. They aren’t fighting for equity, just to preserve the disadvantageous status quo. It took a pandemic to usher in an overdue era for Boston’s exam schools, one that would finally begin to correct an indefensible reality: Black and Hispanic students have been “substantially less likely to be invited to exam schools” regardless of their academic performance. That’s according to Harvard researchers in 2018 who analyzed the schools’ lack of diversity. They found that “MCAS scores in 5th-grade identify a substantial number of high-skilled Black and Hispanic students who currently do not enroll in exam schools.”
A youth coordinator at VietAid in Boston named Thang Diep also claimed in the article that “As long as Asian Americans are pitted against Black and Brown communities, we won’t be able to increase access to education.”
What people seem to forget is that Asian and Asian American students have long faced discrimination during their college and high school admission process. One striking example is the lawsuit regarding affirmative action, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard, a case filed in U.S. federal district court in 2014. The lawsuit alleged that Havard discriminated against Asian American applicants in its undergraduate admissions process. Although the SFFA lost the case, the case brought exposure to other systematic ways in which Asians have been mistreated and pitted against other marginalized communities in both universities and secondary schools.
