Boston School Committee to Consider Changing Admissions Policies for its Exam Schools

Boston Latin School. Courtesy of Boston Schools Registration.

The Boston School Committee is considering new proposals to adjust the admissions process for its three prestigious exam schools: Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science. These selective public schools offer rigorous middle and high school education for Boston resident students who meet a set of criteria that is currently under heavy scrutiny.

The Boston Public Schools are one of the largest school districts in the United States, with over 50,000 students registered in the system. The district consists of 125 individual schools, with just three being these prestigious exam schools. 

The admissions test required for a student's application to any of the exam schools is called the MAP Growth Exam School Admissions Test. Similar to the SAT used in college admissions, the MAP exam consists of a reading section and a math section. Also similar to the SAT, the MAP exam has been criticized as not being a good measurement of a student's intellectual capabilities and potential. 

Until 2020, students' admission to the exam schools was heavily based on their composite score, a combination of their GPA and exam results. The ranking of students was city-wide, meaning the students with the highest composite scores were offered admission, regardless of their neighborhood or socioeconomic status. 

After removing the MAP exam for the 2021-2023 admission cycles due to COVID-19 complications, the admissions system for these three schools was reworked based on socioeconomic tiers organized by geographical location in the city, still including a student’s GPA and MAP score. Minor adjustments to the system have been made each year since.

In the tier system, the geographic location of a student's home in Boston is used to assign them to a tier based on socioeconomic characteristics from the US Census Tracts data. The data includes the number of people living below the poverty line, the number of households occupied by the owner, the number of families headed by a single parent, the number of households where a language other than English is spoken, and the highest average level of education. 

Students who attend “high-poverty schools”, are experiencing homelessness, are in foster care, or are working with the Department of Children and Families to ensure their safety, well-being, and housing security, can be awarded bonus points on their application, boosting their chances of admission. 

The original tier system was based on 8 socioeconomic tiers, each with a specific share of seats, to ensure representation from across the city at the schools. In 2024, 7th-grade students from the lowest income tier, tier 1, had a 100% acceptance rate for its 115 applicants. Conversely, 7th-grade students in the highest-income tier, Tier 8, had an approximately 45% acceptance rate for their 270 applicants. 

Criticism of the tier system rose in the last few years, culminating in a lawsuit. Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp. v. The School Committee For the City of Boston, originally filed in 2021, challenged the zip-code admissions system. After the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2024, the tier system was upheld. The Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence filed a new complaint against the new tier system in 2025, which is currently pending review. 

“Boston Public Schools cannot launder racial quotas through socioeconomic labels”, said senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, Chris Kieser, representing the Boston Parent Coalition in the 2025 case. So far, the School Committee has approved a minor adjustment to reduce the number of socioeconomic tiers used in the admissions process from 8 to 4 for the 2025-2026 admissions cycle, aiming  to simplify the policies and mitigate admissions disparities among the city’s geographic regions This represents a first move, with more dramatic changes to come.   

Currently, Boston Public Schools are running three separate simulations of changes to the admissions system to see the implications of each adjustment. All three simulations would eliminate the school-based points system, removing the geographic bonuses assigned to students living in low-income areas. 

The first simulation would adjust the tier sizes to be based on the number of applicants, rather than the population of children. The second simulation would adjust admissions invitations per school to be split, with 20% citywide and 80% allocated via tiers. And the third simulation would adjust admissions invitations overall to be 20% citywide and 80% via tiers. 

Critics of the lawsuit and new proposals arguethat it will reverse gains made in diversifying the applicant pool for the exam schools. “Each simulation we’re looking at gets away [from] generating a student body that better reflects the demographics of the city”, said Dr. Stephen Alkins, a member of the Boston Public School Committee, in an article for the Boston Globe about the 3 proposals being looked at.

All of this comes at a politically tense moment in the world of education. Specifically, just last May in Fairfax County, Virginia, the Trump administration initiated a Title VI investigation into the use of race as a factor in admissions at the elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. While there are ongoing opportunities for Boston residents to learn more about the proposals and their potential impacts on the admissions process for the exam schools, none of these proposals has been accepted or implemented yet, except for the adjustment of the number of tiers from 8 to 4 for the 2025-2026 admissions cycle.

These potential changes would dramatically alter the admissions process, and subsequently the student bodies, of the exam schools in the Boston Public School system. There have been criticisms both ways: that the old system was not inclusive enough of underprivileged areas of Boston, excluding students living in those areas, and that the current system is too inclusive of underprivileged areas, making it disproportionately difficult for high-socioeconomic students to be accepted. The admissions process for these schools have been criticized for years and will continue to be heavily scrutinized, because of how prestigious they are and how many people want to send their children to these schools.