Is Merit-Based Admissions Coming Back?

Boston backs off of one of its worst decisions from the “Great Awokening.”

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Courtesy KF/Wikimedia Commons

Is merit cool again? At Boston Public Schools (BPS), it just might be. On November 5, the district approved the city’s “exam schools” adopting the most merit-forward admissions policy in over five years. A fifth of seats will now be awarded in a citywide competition, and certain adversity-related factors—such as whether students attend a “high poverty” middle school —will no longer be considered in the admissions process.

This about-face represents a stark departure from the system’s monomaniacal emphasis on “equity” in recent years. It’s a welcome relief—and possibly the fruit of the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign against progressive racism in institutions. But it’s worth explaining how Boston got here, so as to avoid making the same mistakes in future.

The City of Boston is home to three exam schools for students in grades 7-12. All are ranked among the nation’s best public schools by U.S. News and World Report. For many parents in the district, particularly those who are immigrants or working-class, admission to one of these schools represents the first step toward a spot in the middle or upper-middle class.

Before the Fall of 2020, admission to Boston’s exam schools was strictly merit-based. Administrators at BPS would average each applicant’s grades in English Language Arts and Math and assign a numerical value to that average. This value was then added to an applicant’s score on an entrance exam, resulting in a “composite score” by which applicants were ranked.

Starting with the student who had the highest composite score, each applicant received an invitation to his or her first choice of the exam schools. If all the seats in an applicant’s first-choice school were taken, then the applicant was placed in his or her next choice, and so on.

The admissions process changed five years ago amidst the “Great Awokening.” The Boston School Committee (BSC), the governing body of BPS, voted to eliminate the entrance exam, rank applicants solely according to their GPA, and have only the first 20 percent of seats at each school be filled through citywide competition.

Once these seats were filled, applicants who didn’t receive an offer were thrown into a second round of admissions. In that round, a fraction of the remaining 80 percent of seats at the exam schools was allocated to each of Boston’s zip codes based on the proportion of school-age children who lived there. Competition for these seats then took place within each individual zip code, and applicants were assigned seats on a ranked-choice basis according to GPA.

As a result of this new policy, the entering classes at the city’s exam schools for the 2021-2022 academic year contained significantly fewer Asian American and white students compared to years past. Applicants from these demographic groups received less than half of all available offers, down from 61 percent the year before.

Because GPAs in predominantly Asian American and white neighborhoods were higher than those in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods, black and Latino children were able to secure an exam-school seat more easily. Out of the 292 students who were accepted to an exam school with an average GPA below 10 (out of 12), 210 of them came from a predominantly black and Latino zip code.

As in Alexandria, New York City, San Francisco, and elsewhere, BPS’s goal in the overhaul was “equity.” Officials were troubled by the fact that, while more than 75 percent of BPS students were black or Latino, these students made up only 40 percent of exam-school enrollees.

Two members of the working group that recommended the admissions policy be changed revealed these motives. Samuel Acevedo, at the time a co-chair of the district’s Opportunity and Achievement Gap Task Force, noted that one of the working group’s goals was “rectifying historic racial inequities afflicting exam school admissions for generations.” Tanisha Sullivan, the president of the NAACP’s Boston branch, disclosed that racial gaps in academic achievement between Asian American and white students, on the one hand, and black and Latino students, on the other, “played a significant role in what we will ultimately recommend.”

Since then, the Boston School Committee has revised the exam-school admissions policy annually—much to families’ frustrations. The most significant of these changes has been the replacement of the district’s “zip code quota” with a socioeconomic tier system. Similar to the quota, competition for a seat at the three schools occurs exclusively within each socioeconomic tier.

BPS also moved to rank students using a composite score, weighted 70 percent for grades and 30 percent for an entrance exam. Additional points are added to students’ composite scores if they attend a school where 40 percent or more of the population is economically disadvantaged (i.e., a “high poverty” school), or if they live in public housing, are in the care of the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families, or are homeless.

A recent BPS report found that by eliminating merit-based admissions, BSC achieved its goal of making the city’s exam schools less white and Asian. Indeed, “since 2020, the proportion of Asian students has decreased modestly, the proportion of black and Latinx students has increased, and the proportion of white students has decreased,” the district noted.

Courtesy Boston Public Schools

What, then, prompted BSC to vote last week to adopt the most merit-based system that has been in place for exam school admissions since 2020? The answer, I think, is twofold.

First, the admissions policy changes over the last five years may have simply worked too well. The sharp increase in black and Latino enrollment, and the corresponding decline in Asian American and white enrollment, has been so drastic that BPS likely feared the prospect of a lawsuit or an investigation by the Trump administration.

BPS’s socioeconomic tier system drove that risk. For example, during the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 academic years, almost every applicant in the most disadvantaged tiers received an invitation to an exam school. This was in stark contrast to the most advantaged tier where the offer rate was only 45-47 percent. At one point, it became mathematically impossible for certain students in certain tiers to win a seat at Boston Latin School, the most prestigious of the city’s three exam schools.

Since 2021, BSC has been open about the fact that the district’s tiers function as racial proxies. This, in combination with the way tier allocation was disadvantaging certain students, was a legal bomb waiting to go off.

I also think BSC’s decision to reinstate citywide competition for 20 percent of seats and eliminate bonus points reflects its fears over declining district enrollment. Many high-performing students who are, in effect, shut out from Boston’s exam schools respond by withdrawing from BPS altogether.

Whatever the underlying reason, the BSC and BPS deserve credit for moving toward a more merit-based admissions policy—a decision that will surely be popular with immigrant parents in particular, who have become a political force over the last five years nationwide. This decision should give other districts and local officials pause, such as New York City’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who has been a fierce critic of Gotham’s exam schools, despite having attended one himself. The reality that East Asian enclaves voted overwhelmingly for former Governor Andrew Cuomo in last week’s mayoral election offers an indication of the potential political costs associated with anti-meritocratic policies.