User:Avinguyen36/sandbox/Boston Latin School

Boston Latin School’s admission exam caused continued controversy due to lack of diversity in later years. In 2017, Lawyers for Civil Rights, a nonprofit legal group located in Boston, published the demographics of the incoming class, highlighting that Black students are invited at a rate that is more than two and a half times lower than their enrollment rates in Boston Public Schools.

The following year of 2018, Harvard Kennedy School released a brief stating possible reasons for the racial gap in Boston Latin School’s admission. Among the reasons are lower rates of participation in the ISEE for Black and Hispanic students, lower ISEE scores due to inequitable curriculum, reported GPA differences, and less of a likelihood for Black and Hispanic students to

list Boston Latin School as their top choice.

In 2019, Lawyers for Civil Rights, alongside the Boston charter of the NAACP, sent a letter to Mayor Marty Walsh, the Boston School Committee, and the superintendent to completely redo the school admission policies for Boston Latin School. The civil rights organizations cited the disproportionate admission rate between Black and Hispanic students and white students as a failure of the exam system, asking for a process which would aim to diversify the school and take into account a student's personal achievements.

The Educational Records Bureau (ERB), the organization responsible for creating and updating the ISEE, decided to end their yearly contract with Boston Public Schools in April of 2019. In an email sent to the school district and other clients, ERB claimed that the test’s scoring metric had been incorrectly applied, resulting in “underrepresented” race groups failing to be admitted. BPS, however, denied that ERB cut business ties with them; instead BPS claimed that they had ended the contract in search of a test with “more equitable access” to the exam schools.

In October of 2020, the Boston School Committee voted to cancel entrance exams for the three exam schools in 2021 due to COVID-19. They opted for an admissions procedure which would accept 20% of the incoming class based on top grades in the district and the other 80% on grades as well as zip codes. Students coming from zip codes with lower-income communities would receive preferential treatment. Boston Latin School has received backlash from

some parents because of this decision. Opponents of the proposed admissions system created a Change.org petition, garnering almost 6,000 signatures. The petition, directed to Boston City Council, argued that cancelling the test would increase disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A protest was held prior to the vote on the steps of Boston Latin School. One common concern surrounded Chinatown students potentially being excluded based on Chinatown’s surrounding area being rapidly gentrified, thus increasing the median income.