Report: BPS looking at plan to limit exam-school applications from private, parochial students

The parents will have Tommy's head if he really tries to implement that. The city cannot hold out a Latin carrot to draw people back for a year or two.

No more of this type of nonsense:
http://boston.cbslocal.com/2016/03/30/i-team-foreign-students-paying-to-...

He thinks the only way they can get into Latin is to disqualify the competition.

Yep, this was well thought out.

I can think of three reasons that such a plan would likely be illegal:

1) Any plan that would penalize a student for attending a Catholic or other parochial school rather than a public school is almost certainly unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment, full stop.

2) Any plan that would penalize a newcomer to Boston is almost certainly unconstitutional as violation of the constitutional right to travel. (Long story short on the right to travel: In the 1960s and 1970s the Supreme Court struck down various laws that imposed lengthy prior residency requirements on the exercise of certain rights, e.g., you have to live somewhere a year or more to receive welfare benefits or vote in state elections.)

3) In view of 1) or 2), any plan that would effectively penalize a student for attending non-religious private schools would arguably be unconstitutional as a violation of due process and equal protection.

A law can't favor one group at the expense of another on a purely arbitrary basis: for example, Massachusetts couldn't raise income taxes on people whose last names started with "A" so that it could lower them on everyone else. Any plan to accomplish greater enrollment of certain minority students will obviously have an adverse impact on all other students' chances for enrollment, but BPS would likely need an actual, not-made-up reason to focus that impact only on some limited subgroup of those students.

As it happens, BPS doesn't have seats for all students in the city, and so the families who send students to non-religious private schools are substantially lightening the load on the BPS budget. That's not the end of the discussion, of course, but that fact would make it difficult for BPS to argue that students in non-religious public schools who seek to move back to BPS for high school can appropriately be penalized.

[Update: Thinking a bit more about this, if #1 above is correct that might resolve the issue for all private schools. If BPS were to allow applicants from parochial schools and BPS schools on the same basis, it might be obliged to accept applicants from non-religious private schools on the ground that a government can't favor religion over non-religion.]

.@kadzis This is completely false. My strategic implementation plan is here: https://t.co/F8gEdFUnmj. #StrategicPlanBPS cc: @BostonSchools

— Tommy Chang (@SuptChang) July 20, 2016

I am homeschooling my (minority!) son to meet his academic needs. He is entering third grade but scores within the 99% on standardized tests two grades above. I'm an 11 year resident of Roslindale, 20 in Boston, and a former city employee. Homeschool to Latin was our plan. If BPS doesn't want my high-scoring little overachiever just because he was homeschooled for grades K-6, I'd have to say the feeling is mutual.

if students who come from a less affluent background and fall behind on the learning curve at a young age, it is very hard to catch up to the point they need to be at to do well on the ISEE unless they get outside help. You can't just say "open ISEE prep for free" to everyone in 6th grade and think that will solve the problem. It won't. It's more than that. My daughter is a straight A student, not a great test taker, didn't get in to an Exam school but I'm not worried. She'll do better when she takes it in 8th grade. She's a tortoise, not a hare.

The issue of minority students is that those who may not have the support, for whatever reason, to take advantage of tutoring services, etc., is one that is much harder to tackle. Even if learning challenges are identified at a young age, the support within BPS can only do so much. This leaves the rest up to the family.

All this being said, I read Meghan Irons's in-depth piece on the slow action at BLS and feel that the Headmaster clearly didn't see the urgency in addressing the problems some minority students encountered. It's like the Dean at Philips Exeter (I believe) telling a teen boy who sexually assaulted a teen girl at school that his punishment was to make the victim monkey bread every week for a month. Some people, especially if they are not directly affected by things like racism, just don't get the problem.

Peter Kadzis:

in the draft language of the proposal – a copy of which has been obtained by WGBH News – it would:

“Restrict exam school enrollment to students who were enrolled in at least the fifth and sixth grades in BPS elementary schools.”

The draft report is titled “BPS Strategic Implementation Plan 2016/Opportunity and Achievement Gaps Task Force‏”.

Tommy Chang:

BPS does not have a report, in draft or final form, entitled: “BPS Strategic Implementation Plan 2016/Opportunity and Achievement Gaps Task Force.” There are no proposals to prevent any students from enrolling into the district’s three exam schools.

Someone is lying. Either the document exists or it doesn't. I think it calls for a federal investigation.

Peter Kadzis has updated his original article, still says the document exists, despite denials from the Superintendent and now the Mayor. The article headline is revised, and he now ends:

...if Mayor Walsh's statement is any indication, the recommendations from the supposedly non-existent document I wrote about will never come to pass.

Link to updated GBH article:

http://news.wgbh.org/2016/07/20/local-news/boston-public-schools-weighin...

on Court Street.