Here's Why The Entrance Test For Boston's Exam Schools Is So Controversial

Arun Rath hosts the local broadcast of GBH’s All Things Considered.

Bianca Vázquez Toness is the Managing Editor and Correspondent for K-12 Education at WGBH Radio. She has covered everything from technology to immigration to presidential elections, but keeps coming back to stories about kids and schools. She's worked for Minnesota Public Radio, WBUR and Bloomberg News. She was a 2016-2017 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.

Molly Boigon is a former associate producer and reporter for Learning Curve, WGBH’s K-12 education desk. She has also worked for Boston Public Radio and WGBH’s higher education desk, On Campus. Her interests include jazz, yoga and public records requests. Before joining WGBH, she worked at SiriusXM, WZBC and WAAF. She has a degree in Applied Psychology and Human Development from Boston College’s Lynch School of Education.

July 12, 2019

Updated July 31, 2023

School's out for summer, but Boston is still talking about one big test — the ISEE, or independent school entrance exam, which serves as the admission test for elite exam schools like Boston Latin. Boston's new superintendent Brenda Cassellius told WGBH News this week that she's open to changing the entrance test, which costs $140 per student.

Bianca Vázquez Toness and Molly Boigon, from WGBH News’ Learning Curve team, spoke with Arun Rath about why the test has been so controversial. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Arun Rath: So first off, Bianca, can you talk us through how the admissions process works for these schools?

Bianca Vázquez Toness: Well, first you have to be a resident of Boston. You don't have to be in Boston Public Schools, but you have to be a resident. Kids in 6th grade take the exam. Before now, the exam was always given on a Saturday, but now they're giving the exam also on school property during the school day so that more kids can take it. Admission [for these schools] is based on grade point average and the score on these exams, and that's it.

Rath: What's the concern right now? Why do people care about how this is being administered?

Vázquez Toness: The concern is that Boston Latin School is considered to be the best school in Boston. That's its reputation. And the school does not look like the rest of the district.

Rath: Talking in terms of their ethnic composition and diversity?

Vázquez Toness: Exactly. For the citywide and the other schools across BPS, 73 percent of kids are black and Latino. Inside Boston Latin, it's 20 percent. They've done a lot of different things to try to increase those numbers, but that hasn't changed. They're limited in what they can do, because a federal judge banned them from using race in admissions processes. So right now it doesn't look like the rest of the city.

Rath: So is there a thought that the test is somehow culturally biased?

Molly Boigon: Well, yes, actually. So the district has been using the test since the 1990s. It's used by a bunch of other independent schools in the area including Beaver Country Day, BC High, Milton Academy and a bunch of other places. And the district has a provision in its specs for bidding for tests that they're going to use in the district, that tests have to be appropriate for a diverse student population and have to provide evidence that that's true. And it turns out, when the test maker was testing its own exam to see if it predicted high school performance, they did not have sufficient sample sizes for children of color. So you can't actually tell if the test is suitable for that diverse student population, which is obviously controversial.

Vázquez Toness: But I think the bigger problem in some ways with the test is that it tests things that are not part of the standard curriculum in Boston. It tests algebra, for instance, and many kids have not learned algebra in 6th grade. So it's expected to be this very high bar, and kids aren't being prepared for it inside regular Boston public schools.

Boigon: And that ends up benefiting a lot of white children in the city, because a lot of black and brown children who don't have the financial resources, aren't able to pay for test prep.

Rath: Well, Molly, obviously children in Massachusetts get a lot of standardized tests. Why is the district using this test at all?

Boigon: It's sort of just a legacy. Like I said, they started using the tests in the 1990s, and the various mayoral administrations have been resistant to change. It's come up more and more during the Walsh administration. We asked the mayor if he would be open to changing the test. And he basically said that he had concerns that changing the test would lower the standard of the schools. Here's what he said:

“By changing the standard of the school I don't know if that's the proper way of going about it. And Latin school and Latin Academy and John D O'Brien is not for every kid.”

Boigon: So despite cries from different stakeholders in the district, [Walsh] seems to be holding on to this idea that changing the test to one that's been proven to be equitable for kids of color would lower the standards of the schools.

Rath: So what are they doing to try to keep the test, but fix the problem?

Boigon: They've tried a couple of different things. One of them was a few years ago, they started this thing called the “Exam School Initiative” which was meant to provide test prep provided by the district for more black and brown kids. And despite that, actually, the pool of students accepted at the exam schools has gotten whiter over the last three years. There were 41 fewer black students invited for next school year compared with 2018/19 which is a school year that just finished. The number of Hispanic invitees has basically stayed stagnant, it's only gone up by five over the last three years, so jury's out on whether or not the “Exam School Initiative” is working. And then also, as Bianca mentioned, they are now administering the test in schools across the district in an effort to get more kids of color to take the test, and we'll just have to wait and see if that ends up making the exam schools more representative of the district on the whole.