Jim Stergios

Tackling equity at Boston’s exam schools

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By Jim Stergios August 2, 2019
This spring, The New York Times reported that of the 4,800 students admitted to New York’s nine exam schools, a mere 190, or 4 percent, were African-American. At Manhattan’s acclaimed Stuyvesant High School, just seven black students were among the 895 admitted. Less than 1 percent of the school’s total enrollees are black.

Boston earns no bragging rights by beating the thoroughly broken New York City school system at equity of access to elite exam schools. But neither do the Boston Public Schools deserve the recent drubbing they are getting from the NAACP and Lawyers for Civil Rights, who wrote a stern letter to the city condemning the “discriminatory impact” of the schools’ admissions policies and have held out the prospect of a lawsuit.

This op-ed was published in The Boston Globe “Ideas” section – read it in its entirety here.

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