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The Boston Parent Coalition argues in a new appeal that zip codes and tiers “both operate as a proxy for race” in school admissions.
Boston Latin School exterior. Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe
A group of white and Asian families is still fighting the city’s tiered admissions process for Boston’s three exam schools, filing an appeal Monday of a federal judge’s dismissal of the case in March.
The Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence filed a brief in the First Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the socioeconomic “tiers” used in admission to Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the John D. O’Bryant School of Science and Mathematics racially discriminate against white and Asian students.
In March, a federal judge dismissed the claims, writing that the courts had already decided that the predecessor to the new socioeconomic-based tier system, a zip code-based admissions process, did not violate the student’s equal protection guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment.
“The Tier System and Zip Code Plan — while different — possess the same factual pillars that the First Circuit rejected as insufficient to demonstrate an equal protection violation in its 2023 consideration of substantially the same issue,” Judge William G. Young wrote.
New appeal filed arguing that tiers ‘operate as a proxy for race’
The Boston Parent Coalition, backed by the Pacific Legal Foundation, argues in its new appeal filed in federal court that zip codes and tiers “both operate as a proxy for race.”
The parents argued the number of white students fell below their proportion of students who applied to exam schools, meaning they are now underrepresented. The court dismissed the case, saying the benchmark to determine “disparate impact” is not the applicant pool, but all of Boston’s school-age children.
“This Court’s precedent does not embrace the school-age population benchmark, a measure that would make it all but impossible to show that facially race-neutral admissions criteria were enacted with discriminatory intent,” the appeal said. “The Tier Plan intentionally makes it more difficult for individual students to get into their desired Exam School because of race. That is racial discrimination, regardless of how well it ‘works’ in the aggregate.”
When the lawsuit was dismissed in March, a spokesperson for Boston Public Schools told The Boston Globe the district was pleased with the ruling.
“BPS’s policy is lawful and fully consistent with legal precedent,” the spokesperson said, per the Globe. “BPS is committed to continuing to provide high-achieving students with strong learning opportunities at all of our schools and to partnering with families and school communities to ensure that young people from every neighborhood have equitable access to a high-quality, rigorous education.”
Years of controversy surrounding Boston exam school admission
The plan to limit exam seats by zip code, developed in 2020 and used until 2022, was replaced by a similar policy to divide seats by socioeconomic profile. The first 20 percent of seats were reserved for applicants based solely on their grade point averages, and the remaining 80 percent would be divided among Boston’s 29 zip codes.
The proportion of Black students at exam schools increased from 14 percent to 23 percent and Latino students from 21 percent to 23 percent, while white students decreased from 40 percent to 31 percent, and Asian students decreased from 21 percent to 18 percent, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote about the case.
A federal judge upheld the zip code plan, dismissing the Boston Parent Coalition’s 2021 lawsuit and subsequent appeal in 2023. When the census-based socioeconomic tier system plan was implemented in 2022, the same group filed the lawsuit that was dismissed in March.
The Boston School Committee has repeatedly tweaked the plan, including reducing the number of tiers from eight to four last year and reintroducing a standardized test for 2023 admissions, according to the judge’s decision.
Supreme Court justice weighs in
Alito dissented from his court’s decision to decline to review the case in 2024. He criticized the First Circuit’s reasoning that white and Asian students still remained “starkly over-represented” in the new policy compared to their population levels and that there was no “disparate impact.”
“This reasoning is indefensible twice over,” Alito wrote. “We have now twice refused to correct a glaring constitutional error that threatens to perpetuate racebased affirmative action in defiance of Students for Fair Admissions. I would reject root and branch this dangerously distorted view of disparate impact.”
Boston Public Schools did not return a request for comment.
Molly Farrar is a general assignment reporter for Boston.com, focusing on education, politics, crime, and more.
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